If you’ve been around me at all over the past few months you know that I’ve been excited about this day. I’ve been actively working on this project since February. I’ve been talking about it for even longer. Here it is boys and girls: version 4.0. If you’re reading this blog entry in Facebook or in your RSS feed click here and come see what I’m talking about. My website is brand-new and I want to show it off.
I don’t know what to talk about first! There’s just so much to tell you about. I guess the best place to start is with the switch in blog providers. I’m now using Wordpress instead of Xanga. This is a switch that I should have made over a year ago but never got around to putting the effort into the project. I’ve been paying for shared hosting server space without hosting my own blog, which really doesn’t make much sense. Wordpress is so much more than a blog though. It’s what people on the web call a Content Management System. My entire website goes through Wordpress. All of my old blog entries and comments came along for the ride, so if there was something from my old site you liked it’s probably here (or will be soon, in the case of some of my old photos).
For those of you in the Wordpress loop: I realize I’m running version 2.1.3 and not 2.2. I tried to update the day the new version was released but soon discovered that not everything would work with the new version. K2 hasn’t received its update yet and there are a couple of important plugins that haven’t been updated that I don’t want to be without. So until all the pieces will fit in the new version I’m going to stick with the version I have.
I know that most of my readership doesn’t really care about what went into making this site and is really only concerned with the quality of the writing I produce. That’s cool. I usually don’t spend my time talking about my website in my blog. But today I want to give you an idea of the goals I had when designing this site. I’ll let you be the judge as to whether I accomplished them.
Goal #1: Less Is More, So Do More With Less
I already have a number of accounts at various websites that I use every day. Most of my time online is spent between Facebook, Google and YouTube. Because I’m already so entrenched in those sites I wanted to bring as much of the content from there to here so I wouldn’t be spending twice as much time on the web. Also, I wanted all of said content to be local. You’ll remember on my old site that when I wanted my users to look at videos I’d send them to my YouTube profile page. That gets the job done, but it doesn’t keep my users on my site. I wanted as much of the overall experience to take place on my site as possible.
First I’ll focus on Facebook. After all, most of my readers find this blog via Facebook. If you click on the Photos tab you’ll see something very familiar. All the photos there are the same as the photos I have in my Facebook account. But they’re not duplicates. There’s a Wordpress plugin - a small program that adds to the functionality of Wordpress - that automatically takes all the photos from any Facebook photo albums and puts them on my website. Not bad! Next, you’ll see near the top of the sidebar I managed to get my Facebook status to appear using an RSS feed. Third, one plugin that works behind the scenes lets me search for any photo that I’ve uploaded or that I’ve been tagged in and lets me painlessly add it to a blog post (or page, as you’ll see in the About section). Lastly, there’s an additional plugin that takes all the comments left on my Facebook notes and imports them straight to my blog. (This feature might not be here forever. This might qualify as “screen scraping” and might go against the Facebook Terms of Service. I read their TOS but I was a little confused, so I emailed Facebook about it. They never got back to me. If they ask me to turn it off I will.)
Now let’s look at how Google shows up on my site. You’ll see in the sidebar on my homepage a section called Google Reader. Allow me to explain, since I know not everyone is familiar with RSS. Instead of visiting the websites of all the blogs I read I have their content sent to me through syndication. I use Google Reader to receive those syndication feeds. It’s really quite handy. One of Google Reader’s features is I can share any of the posts I read on a special site Google creates for me. All the entries I share will also appear in my sidebar. So when you come to my site, not only can you read my great writing but you can also read other people’s blog entries that I think are great.
Getting my YouTube videos on my site was challenging. I must have gone through five or more different plugins before I finally found two that did everything I wanted them to do. All of my YouTube videos and all the videos I’ve tagged as favorites can be found by clicking the Videos tab of this site. There are also some posts that have YouTube videos embedded right into the posts.
Goal #2: Make The Site “Sticky”
Gross! No, really. That was an actual goal. Get your hands off your screen; that’s not what I’m talking about! “Sticky” refers to whether or not users will come back again after visiting once.
Obviously, the best way to keep people coming back is to produce quality content. But how do you show people what your best content is right away? If you click on the Articles tab you’ll see a collection of posts that I’ve pulled out that I feel are the best I’ve written in the past three years. Additionally, the Search and Archives features on this site are pretty high tech. I especially like the Archives tab because you can search for posts by date, by category, or by tag.
If you’re like me, and most of my readers aren’t or else my posts would have more comments, you can’t help but leave a comment on a blog entry that really stirs you up. But have you ever wished you could be notified automatically when someone else posted on that entry so you didn’t have to keep clicking back to check? Well on my site you can subscribe to an entry’s comments. You’ll be notified by email when someone else comments on a post. You can even subscribe without leaving a comment yourself.
Before I move on I want to point out the little green icon at the bottom of each post that says Share This. This will allow my users to add that post to their favorite social bookmark site (or to share it over Facebook). You can also email the content to whomever. So that feature could make my site sticky for that user and for other users as well.
Goal #3: Show Off
Version 3.0 of this site was great when I first made it. I was a sophomore in college, I needed a quick way to give my site a facelift and I didn’t want to have to fuss with it after I finished making it the first time. This time around I had different motives. Since the creation of version 3.0 we’ve seen MySpace become monstrously popular. All of a sudden everyone and their grandmother (literally) now had a “website” they could direct people to. It made what I do, making a website from scratch, look trivial. So one of my goals this time around was to leave no doubt. I’m good at this game. I know what I’m doing. I put this thing together and I’m proud of it.
That’s about it. One other note that couldn’t seem to fit anywhere else: I’m going to be keeping my Xanga blog operational, mostly because I have a plugin that will automatically take the posts I add to this blog and add them to my old one (it’s a great way to backup my posts in case my server crashes). I’ll probably give it a little facelift in the next few days, but my days on Xanga are essentially over.
So go ahead. Take a look around. Try things out. This site is technically still in its beta version, so I would love some constructive criticism too. I would especially like to hear what you think about the homepage. Is the sidebar too busy? Would you rather have the whole post on the homepage rather than having to click on the “read more” link? Are there things that just don’t work? Oh, and did I do anything you do like? Thanks for reading and enjoy!
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