I’ve mentioned a few times already that I became a big fan of P2 theme for WordPress. I currently maintain multiple installations of it, just…
After the news of Google Reader demise broke out, I, like many others, started looking for an alternative. There are many RSS readers out there,…
As most of you know, I spent most of the yesterday in Nicosia, attending the second ever TEDxNicosia event. I know quite a few people who wanted t…
This website is very old. It’s been with me for many years. There are plenty of articles which are useful both for myself and the rest of the world. Bit by bit, word by word, link by link, image by image, this site was filled and filled over the years. Technologies changed. Some new techniques and concepts came up. Some old ones faded away. Spending as much time as I possible can (after everything else) on this site, sometimes I manage to introduce big changes – like a new bit of functionality or a totally different look. Not to confuse and scare everyone, I try to be open about the changes that were made. When something big is changed I post a description of what it was and why I felt the change was needed. These updates are published in this category.
Today I finally did something that I have been planning for a really long time – applied a new look for Movie Reviews categories. Instead of them showing movie reviews like regular posts, they now show movie poster thumbnail and a star rating that I gave to the movie. Clicking on the thumbnail brings you to the full review page, just like before.
I spent a bit more time yesterday tweaking the site. I love the Carrington theme, but a few things annoyed me. So I changed them. Here is a list:
Last night the server ran out of disk space while doing a backup. That affected most of the sites and some services hosted on this server. I have cleaned up some space since, and made sure that there will be enough of it for the backups to run. I’ll also keep an eye on it to see if there was some other problem hiding behind the disk space issue.
Apologies to everyone who was affected.
I just wanted to let you all know about the latest changes to this site.
Firstly, I removed the Latest Twits widget from the sidebar. Somehow I am not using Twitter all that much lately. I still love the service, but I have two problems with it. Actually, it’s one, but I feel it in two separate ways. Firstly, I still don’t have a good Twitter client application. Not on my mobile, and not on my desktop. I tried a billion of them, and I am yet to find one that suits me. Without a proper client, I tend to forget to tweet, read other tweets, and respond. Too bad. Second problem is that I am annoyed by all the links that are posted in tweets these days. Sometimes I just want to get the statuses only, to see how my friends are doing and what they are up to. Instead I get a billion links, which I need to click, check, and follow. As I said, I wish I could filter them out in my Twitter client, for those times when I have more time and better Internet connection. The blog will still send the “new blog post” tweets to Twitter though, and I am still trying my best to use the service. It’s just that judging by all the updates I do, the sidebar space can be used better.
Secondly, I added Google Reader shared items to the sidebar. Google Reader is the application I use a lot! And I share quite a bit of stuff. Too bad it often goes unnoticed. Sharing those links and articles via sidebar might give an extra bit of attention to those things that I think deserve it. Just in case you are wondering which plugin I used – it’s Google Reader Widget by James Wilson.
Thirdly, I added some social network buttons in the upper-right corner of the website. These are links to some of my other online profiles and also and easy way to bookmark, share, and promote either the whole website or a specific page that you liked. The plugin that I used for this functionality is Fixed Social Buttons by Ioane.
It’s been a while since I changed the theme of the site. Today I felt like I needed it again. I looked around, checked a few options, and decided to go with the Carrington theme from the excellent folks at Crowd Favorite. It looks simple, yet elegant, fresh and modern. And it is not just your average WordPress theme. It is a whole framework. I didn’t have much to play with it yet, but even from the first few looks it’s very interesting. The theme files and logic are organized in such a way that makes modifying it and building on top of it extremely easy. And unlike some other frameworks, it doesn’t force you to start designing your theme from scratch. It provides already a default look with a few administration options that are handy for people like me, who are just starting up with it.
The second big change that was done today – IntenseDebate plugin was disabled. IntenseDebate is a nice system, and I totally dig the concept, and all, but it turned out to be slightly annoying for me personally. Somehow, the moderation never worked the way I wanted it to work. Comments and the comment form didn’t look the way I wanted them to look (and I couldn’t bother with styling them myself). And it was slowing the site quite a bit by loading all those images, styles, and the JavaScript. Gladly though, IntenseDebate works well with WordPress and I didn’t have to do anything to get my comments back – they are all here exactly how you’d expect them.
As always, after major changes like these, there will be a brief period of tweaking and tuning. If you notice any issues with the site, please let me know. Also, I’d appreciate your opinions and feedback regarding these changes. Thank you for the patience during the bumpy ride. Hopefully you can still enjoy this place.
Once I installed the monitoring of goals and gathered some initial data, it was time to start with the changes. One of the obvious problems from the previous step was that I actually didn’t have my targets on the site. The action points were missing – no easy way to read movie reviews and no easy way to know that I want people to hire me. So these were the first things to change.
If you have a look at the site now, you’ll notice that the main menu is re-organized. Most notably it features Movies and Hire me! items. Movies will take you directly to the list of my movie reviews, which I also improved by filtering out generic movie-related posts. Hire me! link will lead you to a page which briefly describes what I can do and suggests where to find more information and how to get in contact with me. Neither one of these action points are in their final stage yet – more changes are coming. I just needed to start somewhere, so here they are. I have, of course, updated my goal tracking to use the reviews page and added the new “hire me” goal.
While I was at it, I decided to fix a few other minor things that annoyed me. Here is what I have done so far:
I’ve also experimented quite a bit with split testing and Google Website Optimizer, but realized that it is too difficult to use for the changes that I am working on now and decided against it. Later on, when I will test smaller changes, it will come handy though.
After a rather lengthy discussion and several beers with my friends yesterday, I got convinced. This whole blogging thing is just a waste of time. It will not make me any money. I am not learning anything out of it. And nobody cares about it. The only good reason to do it is sharing of information, but I can share using a number of social networks and email, where all my friends are anyway. After thinking carefully about how much time, effort, and money I am pouring into this site, I decided that enough is enough.
This is my last post and I won’t write any more. I’ll keep my social networking profiles, email, and instant messaging. I will keep this site online for a couple of more month, until the web hosting expires, and then it will go offline. I suggest you do the same.
See you on the social web. Good bye and thanks for all the fish.
Update (April 2nd, 2010) : This, of course, was my attempt at April’s Fool joke.
The best practices of web design and development suggest that I need to set up some goals and monitoring before I make any changes to the web site. This way, I will be able to track how the changes affect the performance of the web site.
The problem is that right now my web site is not set very well for goals that I want it to achieve. But insufficient monitoring is better than none, so I logged into my Google Analytics account and configured the following goals.
According to my own goals for this web site, as described yesterday, I want to get hired more. The only way to track it now is to see how many people used the Contact me page. I will eventually improve my contact details and contact form to be able to track more details. Once that is done, I’ll reconfigure this goal.
One other thing I want people to do is read more of my movie reviews. Again, there is no easy way of monitoring it now, so I just setup a goal for the Movies category. This will probably get reconfigured later.
And just to have some generic goals for an overall picture, I added tracking for those who visit more than 2 pages and for those who spend more than 2 minutes on the site. That should be enough for starters.
It’s that time of the year again, when I am looking for more inspiration, when ideas are brewing, and when I feel this uncontrollable urge to change the appearance of this blog. However, this time I want to do more than that. I don’t just want to get another theme. I want much more than that. In fact, I want so much that this time I am sure I won’t be able to do it in one big step over a weekend. I want a re-make. Re-birth. A complete makeover.
I decided I will take it slowly. Because otherwise I’ll lose passion soon and the initiative will die. I won’t work on it somewhere else in hopes of finishing and releasing it one day. Because then it will drag forever. I’ll do it step-by-step, I’ll do it publicly, and I’ll document the path. Just so that I get a better understanding of what is involved and why I decided to make certain things a certain way, and for someone else to hopefully learn of this experience. And there is another, hidden, you wish, hope. That someone will watch me suffer and will step up and help. Not begging yet, though.
So, step 1. Ideas. Here is what I want with the new site.
Now that I look at these ideas, written, in front of me, I already have a better understanding of all the changes that have to be done. There is no magic theme or plugin that will just do all that for me. And there probably isn’t even a combination of those. It will take a number of trials and errors, some hand coding, some content fixing, some A/B testing, and some of something else to get there.
What have I done so far? I got some new ideas yesterday by installing a number of themes and playing around with them. All of them was online and in real-time, so some of you were probably confused. You’ll see more of that in the near future. I’ve also slightly rearranged the categories – moved technology categories under a parent of Technology, removed Blogging category (which fits under Web Work anyway), and a few other minor changes. I’ve installed some more plugins and added a few more rules to the ever-growing .htaccess file. I won’t go into details now, since that’s something I’ll have to re-work soon anyway.
What’s next? My mind is busy working on the visual concept. It doesn’t share thoughts with me yet, but I can feel the buzz. I’ll give it some time. In the meantime, I’ll fix and tune a few things around. There is a lot of mess to clean and it will take a long time to clean it. There is no reason to wait. Also, to monitor the progress, I’ll need to tune my Google Analytics setup. Goals, conversions, funnels, landing pages, blah, blah, blah. I’ll share the details with you, once I have an idea what I am doing.
Stay tuned for more news from the fronts. Here I come…
It’s been some time now since I wanted to play around with IntenseDebate. Something triggered an action today and now this blog’s comments are powered by IntenseDebate. All previous comments are imported and fully synchronized, and the new comments should be working now (tweaking ahead though). I’d appreciate if you could leave a test comment to this post just so that I could see if it is really working. You could also tell me what you think of IntenseDebate – and that would make your comment so much better…