Web work

Rebuilding mamchenkov.net – Step 1 – Ideas

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.

Focus. I started this blog a long time ago. It was about everything. Then it spawned a few niche blogs, which lived and died, and folded back in. While there will always be something outside the main topics to blog about it, I want to focus this blog around my primary topics of interest. Which are: technology and movies. Technology as in programming, system administration, Open Source Software, web work, social media, etc. Movies as in movie reviews, trailers, trivia, etc. I’ll also often blog about my personal life, things that happen in Cyprus, this, and that. But that shouldn’t be the primary focus.
Goals. This blog was always my personal place on the web. It didn’t really have any goals. Probably, that’s because I didn’t have any goals on the web myself. And now I do. And I want this blog to reflect it. So, what are my goals on the web now? Earn money. I don’t want to completely lose the personal touch of this blog, but I think it can make way more money than it does now. And there are two ways it can earn me money: by finding me better jobs (either full-time office jobs or once off consulting gigs or anything in between), and by ads.
Presentation. There are more than 4,500 posts on this blog. That’s a tonne of links, images, videos, and code snippets. But all of it buried in the archives with no easy way of finding it. I want to change the presentation so that posts of value swim up to the top. Movie reviews come to mind. They have poster images, and ratings. They are tagged with actors and directors. They have recommendations and comments. But there is no easy way of getting to them. I want to change that.
Social web integration. I spend a lot of time on the Web. I have a number of profiles, accounts, streams, and portfolios all over the place. I want to have better integration of this blog with my other places on the web, such as Flickr, delicious, Twitter, Google Buzz, Google Reader, and whatever else that might be at the time.
Mobile. More and more people are using mobile devices to browse the web. I do more of the mobile browsing myself. It’s a pity that I find browsing my own blog annoying when on the mobile. This must be improved.

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…

On the future of Adobe Flash

There is a lot of rumble going around the Web now on the future of Adobe Flash. Some say that Flash is here to stay. Others believe that when HTML5 will be a norm, Flash will die out. Others believe in some other technology or in the mix or in none of the above. But everyone has something to say.

I just read a lengthy Slashdot discussion of this post by John Dowdell, who is working for Adobe in San Francisco, and who is not worried about Flash future.

There’s really no “HTML vs Flash” war. There are sure people inciting to create such a war, and individual developers may have strong practical reasons to choose one technology over another, but at corporate levels that drive strategy, all delivery channels are important Adobe territory, whether SWF or HTML or video or documents or paper or ebook or e-mag or film or packaging or whatever. Adobe profits by making it easier for creatives to reach their audiences.

On the other hand, a few month ago, back in Karlsruhe, Germany, I was in the audience for the keynote speech by Patrick Lauke of Opera fame. During that speech he presented a few developments – HTML5 and CSS3 among others – that clearly showed that there is a strong alternative coming for at least some of Flash’s functionality. How soon? The time will tell.

And yet there was yet another important announcement on the subject today. Google Chrome releases blog mentioned a new version of the browser, released today, with integrated Adobe Flash plugin. There was a link for more detailed explanations of such a change to Chromium blog. It looks like there is something bigger going on:

[…] we are working with Adobe, Mozilla and the broader community to help define the next generation browser plug-in API. This new API aims to address the shortcomings of the current browser plug-in model.

I think that whatever the upcoming alternatives are, Adobe Flash is here to stay. It won’t necessarily stay as we know it now. After all we now know a better Flash than we knew initially (read some Adobe Flash history). But it surely is not going anywhere any time soon.

And if you need examples of stale technologies on the web, think Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. It’s over 10 years old. Everybody hates. Even Microsoft is advising everyone to upgrade. Better technology exists for years now. And yet we still have MSIE6 hanging around and no apparent way of getting rid of it. And Adobe Flash, with all its limitations and shortcomings, is way better than MSIE6.

Trying out IntenseDebate

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…

Finally, custom post types in WordPress 3.0 !

The rumour has it that WordPress 3.0 will have custom post types built-in. These are excellent news! This means that 90% of all web development companies will be able to drop their own, complex and ugly in-house built systems and switch to WordPress development. And while WordPress code isn’t the prettiest thing you can find, it’s still better than most of that code that will be dropped soon. And it’s small, which is also an improvement.

If you are not familiar with the concept of custom post types, these are basically your average posts + custom fields + theme and plugin support + steroids. In short, these are beautiful. It doesn’t really matter what your blog is about – cooking, political news, movies, or technology – you can always think of a way to make posts better than they are in the default installation. For example, cooking recipes can have a section on ingredients, cooking instructions, and serving instructions. You can have your theme support those sections and display them in a consistent and beautiful way. Now you probably wouldn’t even bother. You’ll do your best with built-in post editor and maybe, if you are half-insane, you’ll play with custom fields. But that’s too technical, complicated, and not even remotely convenient. You can try one of those few plugins available, but chances are you’ll either come across a limitation, or a plugin won’t work for you at all. With WordPress 3.0′ custom post types your chances are better.

And why did I mention web development companies? Because that is exactly what so many of them do – build web applications that work with custom object types (cars in automotive shops and rentals, real estate items, products with online shops, etc). A lot of work is put into defining those object types, building searching functionality, promotion bits, nested categories, integrating image galleries and contact forms, and such. Needless to say, most of this functionality is already available in WordPress, either built-in or via a plugin. Custom data types though weren’t. And now that custom posts will make it into WordPress, most of the average small company’s needs will be so much easier to take care of.

This is a much needed and long awaited bit of functionality and I am very excited for it to finally make it. These will cause a new wave of activity around WordPress, and we’ll see more and more sites built with it. Awesome!

Google Checkout – an example to follow

My Gmail free space has been running out way too often recently. I got bored with cleaning it up all the time and decided to upgrade my account. While the process of buying something online is often trivial, I was pleasantly surprised by Google Checkout. It was even easier than ever. It felt like every little detail has been thought about. Here are the things that I particularly liked:

Simple, straight-forward interface. No bragging about coupons, special offers, promotions, and a trillion redirects.
Sensible defaults. Google knows my name, address, and telephone number. They can use this information to make order form submission easier. And they do. Including the default for the “name on card” field.
Clear information about the amount being charged. Order submission button itself displays the amount that will be charged. This way you can’t be confused by all the sub-totals, taxes, etc. Crystal clear!
Excellent email notification. The email clearly states what I have bought and when I will get it.

While none of the above sounds like rocket science, it actually is. Go and buy something, enjoy the experience.