First off, this post has taken me about four days to write. Not only am I overloaded with projects right now, but having a newborn son doesn't leave much time left over.
That said, let me begin this entry by explaining what I mean by "relaunch".
I've realized that over the past few years in which I've had this site, it has mainly been used as an outlet for [what I call] noteworthy items — or items that I found entertaining, humorous, informative or ridiculous. Unfortunately (until recently), these noteworthy entries haven't been very consistent or compelling and usually consisted of a clip or quote from another blog, or a link to a website (or link trolling), along with a short quip of my own added to it — nothing that captures attention, compels readers to comment or even attracted readers to return. I've heard this practice referred to as "me too" mode.
Aside from all the geek stuff (standards-compliant code, CSS redesign, content syndication, SEO optimizations), defining what this site "is about" is a major part of this relaunch. My goal for this site is threefold:
- I would like to make this site an outlet for creative and technical articles that readers can learn and benefit from. In my 12 years in the IT industry I have seen and learned enough for two people; I have been involved in a superabundant amount of projects ranging corny banner advertisement design to dynamic multi-user web applications to micro-datacenter deployment. Aside from my industry experience, I also have a great deal of career experience as I have been a business owner for 9 years and self employed for over 5. I like to think that all of what I have gained and experienced in my life so far could help or inspire someone.
- I would like to provide quality content for family and friends who aren't involved in the IT industry; things like entries about how my baby boy is doing, things my wife and I are doing to increase our quality of life, and so on. I feel that family and friends are extremely important, and without these people to lean on during tough times, I wouldn't be where I am today. Sometimes it's hard to keep in touch (can't call everyone every day), so I figure this site could be a good outlet for communication from time to time.
- I would like to post information about projects I'm working on and clients I'm working with. This isn't to promote them — it's simply a way for me to keep friends, family, potential clients and random readers in the loop of what I have going on. Also, putting a post up here and there about my career activities will slowly create an archive that I can look back on later and see how I have progressed (or digressed) along the way; maybe I can even set a few long term goals and see if I achieve them over the long haul.
The design & technical approaches for this relaunch
Why stop at changing my blogging objective and style of writing when I can go the distance! So, I decided to address a ton of design and code aspects that were flawed with the site as well.
First of all, the site interface was using a hacked up version of Hemingway, which other than it's AJAX support and administration features is already a pieced together chunk of crap in the first place (just my opinion, sorry). Following that, the publishing system I use for this site was way out of date and needed to be upgraded (along with all plugins and add-ons being used).
If you're curious about any of the upgrades and changes this site has undergone for this relaunch, here's a summarized list:
- Powered by the latest stable build of WordPress 2.1
- Completely new site interface (theme) constructed for WordPress 2+, written from scratch and inspired by Jeff Croft — I love his whole approach at blogging, both design & content
- Changed character encoding from ISO-8859-1 (a UTF-8 subset) to UTF-8; fixed characters not properly using entity references from displaying erroneous symbols
- New site is 100% XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant, validated by the W3C Markup Validation Service
- Revised (and removed in some cases) all past site entries; pdated all permalinks and entry source code.
- Cleaned up all stale database entries and postmeta.
- Added support for asides (what I call noteworthy entries) on the main page
- Integrated a variety of my favorite, regularly updated syndication feeds on the main page
- Updated the integration of my del.icio.us and Flickr feeds to use SimplePie for RSS parsing
- Added "entry archives" to allow review of all past entries arranged by month+year
- For readers who comment, support for Gravatar 2.0 has been seamlessly integrated
- Implemented a variety of SEO optimizations
- (re)Generate a Google Sitemap on post (or page) creation and update
- Automatically notify Google via Google-Ping when a new Sitemap is generated
- Integrated Google Analytics
- Improved individual page title readability by search engines
Relaunch resolutions — a meme inspired by my friend J. David
(who was inspired by Brian Clark to do the same)
- Post more compelling, focused content much more regularly
- Write entry headlines that actually depict the entry content
- Try to connect with readers by focusing my entries on the reader rather than simply voicing opinions
- Reduce the amount of external links used in entries; pushing readers somewhere else is not my objective
- Provide more downloads and usable material for readers
I know, there's only supposed to be 5 resolutions, but I have one more:
- Update my Flickr album as frequently as possible so as to keep fresh new photos rolling on my site
The final word
So, that's it. Hopefully all of the changes, upgrades and integrations I have made (and resolutions I've set) will make this site what it hasn't been for all these years, if not increase my reader count from two or three (I'm being too generous, aren't I) to ... hmm ... let's shoot high and go for ten?!
Looking forward to all of the great stuff you have in the pipeline!