Some of the Highlights

I can’t recommend Sitewire highly enough for their people. Everyone there is absolutely great and I’ve endured many great friendships during my time at the company. The most enjoyable projects I got to work on for the company were our internal marketing efforts. Assisting Lacey in the video shoot and designing a slick flash application to showcase them; randomly improvising a photo shoot and working alongside Mike Campbell
to redesign the Sitewire website last summer.

A New Direction

However, time has taken it’s toll and things have changed. I’ve found a more exciting opportunity with the super cool folks at Integrum Technologies. I’m leaving the ad agency life to work in the realm of web applications and joining a team that practices an agile development process. I’m very excited with this move and look forward to sharing some of the cool stuff Integrum puts out in the future.

Designing a blog is different from other sites. The general readership subscribes to your feed and from that point onward typically falls into one of these scenarios:

• They never return to the site again – they only read the content of the site via some sort of feed aggregator.
• They follow the feed and visit the permalinks to the individual post to read or review the whole article on the site.

So whether or not your avid reader returns to your site or not, they most certainly are not going back to the homepage in order to get the latest content from your site. So who goes there? I’d assume only new visitors will enter your blog at it’s homepage. But even that is unlikely because most visitors will either come through a search engine result pointing to a direct article page or a reference someone else made on another web-site that cites one of your articles.

There has to be a better way.

So it’s safe to say that the homepage can in many cases provide little or no value to most of your users. But that’s only true if the homepage of your blog only supplies your readership with the exact same information that your feed can provide them with. What I mean is that everything on the front page of a blog is automated and I think that’s the problem. Your feed does a good enough job, actually, a better job at automating the delivery of your latest content.

There has to be some value that you can provide that the feed can’t. That’s where you come in – what better way to solve this problem than to introduce a human element into the mix. You. What I’m suggesting is what I’ve decided to do for the new version of this site: edited content on the homepage versus automated. I believe my latest article is not always going to be my most relevant or appealing for most of my readership. Imagine if every periodical news magazine’s cover story was the last story approved by the editor before going to press. That is practically how a typical blog is set up.

How would you do it?

So now I’m asking you: What are some better strategies to add value to your blog’s homepage? What type of content would you choose to hand select for your blog’s homepage? How often would you do it? How much of it would you feature? These are all things to consider. I hope someone reading this has some good ideas. I just might use them on this site!

Aside from covering an enormous amount of highly relevant and current information in four days; there were some memorable moments. After the first night of the conference I got to meet up with some folks from the IXDA Boston and grab a beer with Andy Budd, and Luke Wroblewski. The next day Jared Spool gave a keynote lecture on magic as an analogy that UI designers are working to create illusions to enhance the user experience just as magicians are working to create illusions to amaze their audiences. Somehow I found myself on stage during the keynote to have my head shrunk after being randomly selected by Jared. I didn’t volunteer for that one.

Overall, I can’t recommend the conference highly enough. It was a great experience. Unlike SXSW, which is basically a huge party for geeks nowadays, I learned a lot about my profession and the industry I work in. Over the course of the upcoming week I plan on posting some takeaways from the different sessions I attended. Stay tuned!

Why am I selling?

It’s time for me to move on. This car is great fun but it’s not really practical. I’ve been having to drive more and more now and I just need something a little bigger with more space for passengers. It’s hard for me to part with this car. I’ve spent a lot of time with it!

What does it have?

It’s a 1984 with Black paint and Black Leather interior. It has the highly desirable and rear black Fuchs rims which Porsche produced in the 1980’s. The interior has the optional wrap around leather sport seats which if I recall were made by recaro for Porsche. The windows, mirrors, and sunroof are power. It’s a 5 speed manual transmission. There are only 40,000 miles on the current clutch. All in all it’s a lot of car for under $3,000. The car has 206,000 miles on it now.

I’m asking $2995.

As I said I’m ready to part with it. Here’s a clean, working Porsche for the same cost as a MacBook Pro. For more info see the add on Craigslist.

Considering I’ve been sort of in a slump the last three weeks when it comes to work this really hits me because it’s what I’ve been saying to myself all along. Procrastination is killing my personality. My new goal for 2006 is to manage my time and money better than in 2005. Oh and no more motorcycle accidents. Let’s see how long I can keep this one going.

h3. AJAX in the Admin

The new administrative interfaces breaks the nicely styles Tiger Style Interface plugin developed by “Steve Smith”:http://www.orderedlist.com . However the AJAX widgets and new stylesheet for the default worpress admin are a welcome addition.

h3. File uploading given some detailed attention.

You can now upload files directly in the post:

A nice AJAX file upload block beneath the content window allows you to manage and upload images for your post. You can even drag the image into the content window.

The image management is actually incredibly robust automatically generating a thumbnail and then allowing you to delete, or browse any photos uploaded in the system during the editing process. Even cooler, clicking on a selected image brings up the option to insert it as a thumbnail that is linked or not linked to the image or the content page automatically generated for the given file. It’s something you’ll just have to try out for yourself but I’m very impressed with the techniques used in the administrative area of wordpress 2.0.

h3. Squible doesn’t break on WP 2.0

It looks like the install of Squible 2.5 is running without any modifications needed after upgrading to Wordpress 2.0. So there is certainly no harm in installing Wordpress 2.0, especially considering they have written documentation for upgrading your customized themes.

h3. Wordpress the benchmark for CMS?

I think Wordpress is definitely the benchmark for how all other CSM apps will be judged. The community and features supporting the system are astounding. It should be very interesting to see how Typo developers in the Rails community as it already has an AJAX derived interface but lacks some essential file management that Wordpress 2.0 has just launched. Also the plug-ins and community for Typo still is much smaller so it’s doubtful you’ll find a Google-Analytics plugin for Typo the day after google announces it. Never the less slowly but surely it’s getting there as well.