Territorial Bloggings

One of the bad things about what I do for a living is that I have to carry a cell phone. One of the good things about that bad thing is that, for various & sundry reasons, it gets to be a Blackberry “smartphone” device. That’s good because, if I’m going to have to carry the electronic tether around with me, at least it gets to be one that is a cool toy & has lots of nifty, geeky stuff that I can do with it.

As a side note, it seems that the friendly IRS has decided that companies providing cell phones to their employees is an untaxed benefit, as those employees have been using those phones for some non-work-related purposes. Imagine that! And we can’t have a non-taxed benefit out there, now can we?

This is causing many employers, mine included, to examine their current policies, and craft new ones that close this loophole. The most common way of doing so will be to provide a stipend (taxable, natch…) which the employee can then use to purchase the necessary/required cell phone service/package. My current employer hasn’t done this yet, but the writing is on the wall, and it’s going to happen sometime in the next few months. So, I was able to get a new device request pushed through, so that one last new Blackberry got bought for me without having to go through the hassle of a stipend purchase and/or reimbursement.

So, I was able to snag the nifty-keen Blackberry Curve 8330 from Verizon. And it’s pretty darned cool. I’ve even gone over to the dark (dork?) side and gotten a Bluetooth headset (a Jabra 8040, which I highly recommend, as it’s been very good) to pair with it. As I’ve gotten over a bit of self-consciousness re: using the headset, I’ve found it to be immensely useful & convenient, particularly when I take/make a phone call in the car.

If you already have a Blackberry and you want to learn more about it and/or want to trick it out a bit, a great place to start on that quest is CrackBerry.com – a great clearinghouse of reviews, information, downloads, shopping, and generally all things Blackberry related.

Newer Blackberries also afford you the luxury of customizing the visual interface via theming. After a while, the stock themes get a bit boring, and the free offerings out there are a bit thin & uneven. There are, however, some good, high quality, and reasonably priced themes available. And some of the theme designers will even customize their offerings for you, if you ask nicely enough! ;^) Once such top-notch designer is Corey Visto, creator of the amazingly good Visto Premium BlackBerry Themes. Corey’s Chrono & BB OSX themes are particularly amazing, and he even did a custom job for me that combined elements of those two themes into a theme that was just what I was looking for in a theme. Corey’s a top-notch designer, a pleasure to do business with, and gets my highest recommendation!

In a perfect world, I would’ve liked to have held out for an iPhone, but that just wasn’t in the cards — boo! The 8330 Curve is a pretty darned good consolation prize, especially given how well it integrates with the Google Apps that I use for my domain (gmail, gdocs, gcal), its integration with Remember The Milk for keeping on task & organized, and a bunch of other stuff like web browsing & the like.

-ghp

It seems that bigsis didn’t like the more austere look that I’ve had, theme-wise, for the past week or so.

Of course, you know, that means that I had to make a change (love ya, bigsis! ;^) ).

I think that I’ve got something that looks pretty cool, and is reasonably functional to boot. I particularly like the “featured article/posting” function, along with the general look-&-feel design work that the theme author put into it.

Theme design is something that is a bit of a bugaboo for me, as I know what I want on a certain level, and I know when I don’t have it, but I’m nowhere near patient enough to design the silly stuff myself. That’s generally why I get some wanderlust every so often & feel compelled to move the virtual furniture around a bit.

And each time I hope/think that I’ve finally gotten it “right”…

Hopefully, this time I have! ;^)

-ghp

Some various junk & stuff…

• Archive pruning – the pruning of the Territorial Archive is done. I winnowed things down from about 950 posts to 515, and from about 600 comments down to 275. The comments were deleted as a function of the posts that I deleted. The posts were more purposeful, as I got rid of some that just didn’t make sense anymore, some that pointed to blogs that are no longer available, and others that I just didn’t think warranted keeping around for “historical” reasons. Plus, it helped make my database quite a bit smaller & more manageable…
• Tagging – all of the remaining posts are now fully tagged. It might not provide all that much actual value, but it makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something. And it can give a potentially interesting view of just what I’ve been writing about over the past three years.
• Blogging software – despite how much I seem to want to stop using WordPress, I just can’t seem to ever make it happen. I was even to the point where I was willing to write-off all of my old posts & not worry about trying to get them imported into a/the new blogging system. There’s a part of me that’s just tired of WordPress, and wants to try something new. That part, however, is quickly overwhelmed by the part of me that just likes to keep things simple, understandable, and useful. WordPress, for all it’s faults, is an amazing combination of easy & robust. Plus, I know it & how it works, and there’s something to be said for the comfort that comes from the inertia of the installed base. I’ve even gone ahead and installed the latest version of WordPress – 2.3. I can’t say that I won’t feel the wanderlust again anytime soon, ’cause I know that I will. I’ll check out what’s going on out there with all the other blogging/cms apps. And someday there might even be one that gets me to switch.

I was going to write more, but I think that I’ll stop there. For now.

-ghp

The major renovation continues…

The Good:

• WordPress 2.2.1 is installed
• I’ve got a new cruft-free database running, as all the old postings imported nicely
• The plugin purge is largely done and was relatively pain-free
• Mint (my main stat tracking tool) has been successfully reinstalled, and this time pointed to its own database so that I don’t keep losing archival stats data
• I’ve been largely successful in keeping things plain/simple enough on the back-end, such that I don’t have to do much tweaking of the themes that I’m testing out
• Some nifty AJAX-y stuff (comment previews & ability to edit comments up to 15 minutes after you submit them) is in place & working nicely for y’all who want to stop by & leave comments

The Bad:

• I still need to weed through & prune down my archival postings
• I will need to re-tag every posting that I end up keeping
• I need to settle on a final template design, although I do kind of like the Mac/Aqua-ish one that is in place at the moment that I write this (Wed, 6/27 @ 7:55pm CDT)
• Most likely a bunch of other little stuff that I’m just not thinking of right at this moment

Any & all comments, recommendations, or other stuff like that are welcomed.

-ghp

I’ve just begun a rather significant reworking of this blog. Inertia, coupled with some base technical functionality, has moved me to stay with WordPress; however, I’ve done a clean (re)install of version 2.2.1, including importing my posts & your comments into a new database instance. I’m hoping that this will help me to more easily rid the archives of a whole bunch of cruft & junk, particularly when I couple it with a revisiting of all my old postings so that I can better winnow out the unnecessary postings and properly tag what’s left. I’m also doing what I plan on being a ruthless evaluation of the plugins that I have installed, along with a graphical redesign that will streamline the look & feel of the blog for you hardy souls who actually visit the site. I’m going for a more minimalist design, which will hopefully yield quicker loading times as well as more pleasant & direct interactions with the site. I plan on getting this done as quickly as I can, but please don’t hold it against me (or stop visiting/reading!) if it takes a longer than a couple of days. Vielen Dank! -ghp[tags]

blogging, upgrades, wordpress

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Release the hounds!

Take some more pastors out of the pulpit & make them administrative investigators! (and then don’t forget to talk up the resulting “shortage”…)

Find the culprit!

A list of the Top 10 Church website designs, and nary a reference to Ablaze!?

Inconceivable!

Seriously, though, the designs of the websites might be good, but I bet the theology isn’t. I’m particularly taken aback by the 4th one down, where they profess that church should be “religion free”. What, now?

I wish this was an entry over at Horn+swoggled, rather than something I saw at Digg…

-ghp

Previously covered – Part 1: Investigation & Evaluation
Still to come – Part 3: Rebuilding the Foundation & Superstructure

Now – Part 2: (Re)Design Philosophy

While this is the second phase of describing my grand redesign of Territorial Bloggings, it should be noted that the content of this posting is very much the antecedent of the previously described investigation & evaluation. Put more simply, if it wasn’t for my desire to redesign things, there wouldn’t have been anything to investigate, much less evaluate.

The past two years of blog reading, writing, and provisioning has been an ongoing learning process for me in a great many ways, not the least of which is figuring out how I want to present my thoughts from all the stuff that I read & all the decisions I’ve made. In other words, trial by error. The distillate of this learning process was a design philosophy that could be summed up in four main goals:

1. Simplicity in administration
2. Necessary complexity
3. RSS primacy
4. Membership encouraged

1. Simplicity in administration: One thing that my brief dalliance with Textpattern showed me was that it was not only possible to administer a blog through the web interface, it was actually a good thing. Thus, my first goal was to construct my redesigned blog such that I could run the whole thing via the “built-in” web interface without having to use any outside applications (like FTP programs, external editors, etc…), including the writing of posts/entries. While WordPress’s web interface isn’t as “clean” as Textpattern’s, it was/is more than capable of enabling me to meet this goal, even without the addition of plugins. I’ve rediscovered an appreciation of the functionality inherent in WP’s interface design. It works, and it works quite well, even right out of the box. And, with a little tweaking, it works even better!

2. Necessary complexity: Flowing out of the first goal is the second goal, namely to keep things as simple as possible and as complex as necessary, both for the admin tasks (i.e., my stuff) and for the web presentation (i.e., your stuff). While this one might seem both obvious and nebulous, I really think it’s important, especially when it comes to selecting & tweaking out a theme/template. It’s all to easy to bog things down, performance- and usability-wise, by making the presentation of a blog way too complex. I flirted with some very minimalist themes, and really tried to keep myself reeled in as far as the “gadgets” that I built into the new design. This goal, then, speaks to the tension that exists between doing too little vs. doing too much…

3. RSS primacy: I do all of my primary/initial blog reading via blog aggregation software (FeedDemon/Win, NetNewsWire/Mac, NewsGator/Web), as it’s really the only way to efficiently wring useful information out of more than a handful of blogs (e.g., the number that I read, even after having recently pared down the number of entries on my blogroll…). As a result of this realization, I decided that I wanted to make my blog very, very, very easy to follow via syndication (check out the buttons in the ‘Subscribe’ sidebar on the right…). So now, it’s not only easy to subscribe to the feed for the main blog entries, but it’s also easy to subscribe to the feeds for any/all comments! However, in no way do I want to punish/penalize those folks who still come here directly via their web browsers — by all means, come and visit me every day! It’s just that it really makes me happy when I see the number of subscribed readers in the Feedburner button under the ‘Analytics’ sidebar go up, that’s all. Feed subscribers are, from what I’ve been reading, the wave of the future in terms of ensuring readership levels.

4. Membership encouraged: Finally, that leaves the fourth goal, membership. I very strongly toyed with the idea of requiring that folks register/sign-up for an account here before they could post a comment. Not so much as an anti-spam measure (although it could help in that regard, no doubt), but more for the purposes of fostering a sense of community, which is also very important in sustaining a loyal readership. I haven’t done that yet, although I still might, particularly if y’all chime in & say it wouldn’t offend and/or retard participation. This goal, ultimately, is the one that I have the least idea about how to actually meet/pull-off. If you have any ideas, I’d be glad to hear them…

That pretty much sums up the philosophy that went into this latest redesign project. I know it’s not that deep, complex, or involved, but it’s actually been quite a pleasant surprise for me to see, in hindsight, just how helpful it has been to have even this limited outline of goals and/or purpose.

In Part 3 I’ll move from these more strategic considerations to the more tactical tasks of how I’ve actually used WP & various plugins to achieve my design goals.

-ghp