So, to recap, you can now subscribe to cdevroe.com in the following ways; RSS feed, @cdevroecom on Twitter, Facebook page, Google+ page, and carrier pigeon (coming soon).

Oh, I’ve got a personal account on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ too.

“In the past week, the daily visitors at AVC have gone from an average of 10k per day to over 20k per day. Where is it coming from? Well the answer to that is pretty obvious – StumbleUpon.”

I too am seeing an increase of traffic to this site from StumbleUpon (though not nearly as much an increase as Fred has). StumbleUpon is obviously growing.

• The RSS feed. – This gives you everything. Notes, links, photos, videos, etc. I suggest Google Reader.
• @cdevroecom on Twitter. A simple link to every single post immediately as it is published.
• CDEVROE.com Facebook page – Syndicates the @cdevroecom tweet stream.

If you follow my personal Twitter account, @cdevroe, you will only get linked to mobile photos and posts that I feel are worthy of tweeting about. Oh, and my smooth wit and charm too.

I also changed the way that ads are displayed a little. Instead of having Google Ads on every single page I now only have them on some of the most traffic’d pages on this site. Most of that traffic to those pages comes from search engines. They are also specifically placed between the title and the content. Since I’ve made this switch my daily take for this site has nearly doubled. It isn’t much – but enough for a coffee now and then and to cover the cost of hosting the blog. Perfect.

Carry on.

Every single post to this site will be immediately linked to from @cdevroecom while only some (mostly just the mobile photos category) will be linked to from @cdevroe.

If the kids want to use Twitter to “subscribe” to Web sites then I figured why not? If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Last weekend I rolled out an updated theme for this site when your browsing it with an iPhone. The main reason for this is my mobile photos. When I post a mobile photo my site automatically Twitter’s a link to it, like this, and a lot of people flood in to view the photos and some of them are on iPhones. I wanted this site to load a lot faster than it did before for these mobile photo pages and this definitely solves that problem.

However, another reason to do this theme came up last weekend. Someone asked me about fishing, particularly this fairly large bass that I caught this summer, and I had trouble, on my own iPhone, on my own site, to find that photo. Turns out I hadn’t posted it yet! It was taking forever to search the site and I got fed up with it. But, now I’ll be able to find stuff quickly given that this new theme works site-wide and has a really great search option right at the top.

Those of you without iPhones may be wondering where your theme for this site is? It is coming. I’ll be working to add all Webkit enabled mobile browsers first (e.g. DROID) this weekend and then will be moving onto other mobile browsers until I squash the majority of them.

Happy mobile browsing.

It is summer and that means its time to reach under the bed, pull out the boxes full of shorts, tee shirts, snorkeling equipment, and frisbees. Time to get away from the TV and computer screens, get outside and enjoy the sun.

That same spirit is what spurred me to give this site a slight refresh. It isn’t all about color and the photo on top either. There are literally hundreds of small edits that I’ve made (which I’m very happy with). Changes to note is the new mobile photos page, the way mobile photos display, and the home page showing the latest photos from both the mobile photos and photos categories.

I’m not going to enumerate all of the changes here. I’m going to eat my own dog food and go fishing instead.

Here is how I’m doing it. I’m posting both mobile photos and notes with the WordPress iPhone application. If I have something to share that I can’t fit into 140-characters, I will be logging those posts into the mobile notes category. Rather than posting my mobile photos to Flickr or Brightkite I’ll be sharing them in the mobile photos category. The WordPress iPhone application automatically resizes the photos to no more than 640-pixels wide. Both the mobile notes and photos will be linked to from Twitter, automatically, using a similar syntax of “Mobile photo: “Title of photo” – LINK”.

The script I’m using for this is the same one I was using for posting photos, links, etc to Pownce. I’ve since updated it and will be sharing that code here once I’ve licked a few bugs, integrated it with Bit.ly instead of TinyURL, and made it a little easier to configure. I’m using Dreamhost’s fairly simple CRON job panel to run this script every 10 minutes. Stay tuned for that code in the near future.

I’ve also made a slight change to the way the Mobile photos category is displayed. Instead of just showing the title of the mobile photo this page now shows a small thumbnail of the image. Since these images can be in both portrait and landscape modes, I had to do some jiggery pokery to only show a portion of the image, without resizing them. Thanks to Jason Santa Maria for helping me with some of the CSS.

Viewing these pages on a mobile phone with a browser that supports text only will still be a bear, I’m sure, but they should load much faster now on iPhones, iPod touches, Android-powered phones, and the upcoming Palm Pre.

For my next trick, I’ll be changing the way the videos category and posts are displayed.

I’m going to be making small adjustments, enhancements, and do some all-out-late-night hacking in order to get this site up to snuff to handle notes, links, mobile photos, mobile notes (or, anything too long to fit on Twitter), and videos. I’ve already put the most recent mobile photos in the sidebar and spruced up the way WordPress shows the mobile photos category. I’ve got a lot more planned although I doubt the overall design of this site will change much.

I plan on sharing some of the code I write here on the blog too. So expect the geek knob on this thing to get turned up a bit. (You’re probably thinking, wasn’t the geek knob already at 11?).

I also plan on sharing a lot more Viddler-development related information through this site. As I look around at how other Evangelists are spreading information about their respective products – I see that I’m lagging behind. I don’t want to give any excuses, but, Viddler has been pretty focused on growing our Business services lately. And we’ll continue to be. But I’m going to take some time to spruce up our developers offerings as well as see if I can create some energy behind development on top of our platform. If you’re developer, stay tuned.

Onward! Upward!

Today it changes again. I’ve decided that my personal blog being ‘named’ my name just wasn’t working. I’ve known this for a long time but I didn’t do anything about it because I wasn’t sure what to do. Finally I got sick and tired of thinking about it and just decided to name it after what it has already become, rather than naming it something I’d like it to become. If that makes any sense.

As of today this blog, which is still going to be my personal Web site in all of the glory that it has come to be, is known as First Initial, Last Name – The official Web site of Colin Devroe.

For several years I have admired the ‘blogs’ that have been branded with their own names yet are run by one or very few people. If you read this blog with any regularity you can probably guess the forthcoming list, but here it is anyway: Daring Fireball run by John Gruber, Waxy.org by Andy Baio, Avalonstar by Bryan Veloso, Waking Ideas by Daniel Nicolas, Monday by Noon by Jon Christopher – and many, many others. I’m listing my friends who are good examples because, well, they are my friends and this is my blog and I can do that sort of thing.

This doesn’t mean that I put my own personal blog in this same line up. I don’t. It isn’t worthy. Also, some of these examples shouldn’t be classified as blogs. Daring Fireball is a business. It is the way John feeds his family. It just so happens that John’s business is “blogging”. This site will never be a Daring Fireball.

So First Initial, Last Name it is. I may grab an appropriate domain name for it, at some point, but I’ve always done more than fine with cdevroe.com so I don’t see that happening any time soon. Who types in domain names more than once or twice anyway, really? You should have subscribed to this site by now.

Side note: I’ve recently added the Share This button to my site (come to this post to see it). If you feel that anything I share on this site is worthy of letting others know about, please consider using this button to make it quick and easy to share the post, photo, or video on your service of choice.

Thanks to all of you that subscribe, read, and participate on my site. I really do appreciate it.

Fortunately I have a complete back up of this entire site and all of it’s data including notes, mobile photos, tags, comments – everything.  So I can go through and restore any data I end up losing by experimenting. Again, I’ve yet to fully solve this problem.

This morning while I was watching Edwin Villanueva‘s March 4th, 2009 MeToday video I was reminded of a post I wrote in September 2006 and I wanted to link to it. After searching my site and, eventually, finding the post I was looking for – the page wouldn’t load. Then because of that error my admin wouldn’t load, then I couldn’t save anything, couldn’t find the post I wanted to edit in the admin, and a host of other problems.  I pulled up my local copy of my Web site and found the post immediately. Very odd.

Turns out I’m not alone. Other people have had this issue with versions of WordPress doing back as far as the 2.x jump. I found this post by onepack on the WordPress forums that helped me (at least it seems to have helped some). While the pages take a long time to load (old ones) it seems like they are not resulting in 500 Errors as often. But the problem still persists.

Thanks to this small .htaccess patch and to using WP-Cache to cache the pages here – the 500 errors are not appearing as often.  Has anyone else experienced this problem with WordPress? I’ve Googled and Googled and been unable to find anything that truly solves the issue.

Note to readers: If you’re looking back into my archives and run into this problem, I’m sorry. I hope to get it fixed soon.

Update 11:09am: I’ve turned off all plugins to see if this solves the issue temporarily.  I’m going to be turning them all back on slowly to see if the issue props up again. Sorry for any site slowness in the meantime as my site does not have caching on for the time being.

Update 11:31am: I’ve turned WP-Cache back on, deleted the entire old cache, and will let it run for a little while before turning anything else on. So far, so good – and the site seems to be very fast. If you find a page that errors, please report it here.

Update 11:47am: Now that I’ve had WP-Cache on for 15 minutes and the site has had hundreds of page views with no problem – I’m turning on Akismet so that we’re safe from any comment spam coming through during our testing. I’ll let this run for a few minutes though I think it only runs when new comments come in.

Update 12:06pm: Wow – in the amount of time I had Akismet off I received more than 30 spam comments. 30 in an hour. I wonder if that attributes to the problem?  Well, Akismet is back on. Going to let it run for a little while longer before pulling the trigger on another plugin.

As a side note: I think this is a good exercise to be doing regardless of the problems I’ve experienced. Going through each plugin to measure the effect it has on your site is one that, while a little tedius, might end up cutting some of the fat in the end.

Update 12:17pm: I’ve now activated the WordPress Related Posts plugin. We’ll see how this one does.

Update 3:00pm: I went back to work since playing with this. Seems the 500 errors returned. I am not sure if this is related to the Related Posts plugin or not. I have it disabled and have also switched to WP Super Cache since WP-Cache was giving me trouble.

Because my Web site doesn’t have a huge subscriber base – some of the best discussions are struck only after the posts get indexed by search engines are are shared through various social networking sites.

I thought I’d point to a few interesting discussions that are still going on, or have been updated, within the last few weeks here on cdevroe.com. Oh, and as an aside, you can subscribe to all of the comments on my site to keep up-to-date, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.

• How to: Delete all photos off an iPhone. – Several good comments on that page. It is, btw, my most popular post on this site and I have an ad spot for sale for $2,500. (Completely shameless plug.)
• Epson: “We waste ink.” – It appears I’m not the only one that doesn’t agree with this.
• Leopard’s Spotlight window isn’t as good as Tiger’s was – This is also a huge post here. I still can’t believe how horrible the new Spotlight window is when compared to Tiger’s.

These are the top three. There are several others.  I think I’m going to redesign my front page to include recent comments, or perhaps – popular posts.  If anyone has any suggestions on how to properly promote older posts with good discussions, I’m all ears.

And as always… thanks to everyone that comments here. I always enjoy feedback and other’s points of view. I try to reward those that comment here by turning off ads for you. Maybe I can reward commentary in another way. Stay tuned.

Which is a great thing to see!

So, I’m both sick of waiting and terribly excited to take advantage of the offerings that WordPress 2.7 brings to the table – so much so that I’ve now upgraded my site to the latest version – which is 2.7 RC1.

RC stands for Release Candidate. This means that the software I’m running is, in the minds of the developers, ready to be used by the masses. It is – more than likely – the exact code that will be released as an official update to the WordPress software.  The only reason the code will be updated from RC1 is if anything rather high-priority is found (like a bug or security issue).

Upgrading to RC1 was painless (I came from version 2.6.3 I believe). I’m looking forward to fully kicking the tires on this new release and writing up a general review of my thoughts on this latest release. First impressions are incredibly positive.

When I switched to this theme in April of this year I had created two header images that would display at random on each page refresh. I had aspirations “to some day find the time to have as many as ten random header images”. Later that month I had 10 total header images. As of today I have created about 40 header images for this site, 24 of which are active.

In August of this year, after visiting a Peter Lik gallery in Las Vegas, I had decided to spruce up the random header images on this site by also changing the color of the background, or frame, of the site based on the image being displayed. This added a lot of fun to creating the images for me and I hope that as people found this site they too enjoyed the display of them.

As of today, however, we’re kicking it up a notch.

The first update that I made is that now the link color also changes when the header image and background color do. This small adjustment makes it feel just a little bit more refined then just changing the background color. Some of the background colors I had originally chosen were a little too light to read on white. So I had to make a few small adjustments to the color choices I made. This has two interesting side effects the first being that I now have 4 or 5 brand new “looks” for this site. Just by making a new color choice for each. The other side effect is that I now have to choose colors that are readable on white. For better or worse, I’m not sure yet.

The second update is one I’m really excited to talk about because I have yet to see how it will effect the site overall. The headers are no longer totally random. The way it worked prior to today was that when the page loaded I allowed PHP ((The programming language this site is written in.)) to choose a random number between 1 and 24 – and I’d use that number to determine the header image to show. It was incredibly simple, worked well, and made for each refresh to be a surprise!

In an effort to make the selection of which header image to show a smarter process I’ve added two layers of complexity to how a header image is chosen in addition to the random selection. This might get confusing, if it does, sorry.

If you visit the home page of the site, or any sub-page like the about page, it will figure out what time of day it is ((Here in the eastern United States.)) and display one of many images I’ve designated for that time of day. I have images categorized as morning, day, evening, and night. I’ve split up the hours using the 24-hour clock this way; 6am-12pm = morning, 12pm-5pm = day, 5pm-9pm = evening, 9pm-6am = night.  I may adjust those time slots but that is where they are now. I have several images for each time of day. So on these pages you will still be getting a randomly selected header, but it will be randomly selected based on the current time of day, rather than from the entire pool.

If you visit a note, photo, mobile photo, etc. on this site you will be shown an image contextually. What I mean is that for each header image I have associated a tag to it. The tag may describe what is in the image, where the image was taken, or something the image has to do with. I then compare the tags that are associated to the post you’re currently reading and create a list of matching headers.  If there are one or more matches the site randomly displays one of those matches.  If there are no matches the site reverts to the time of day method.

So what does this all mean? Well, I’m not sure yet as the system still has some randomness to it. But generally speaking, if you are reading a post about my trip to Hawai’i, like this one, or this one, you should see a header related to Hawai’i. If you are reading a post about animals, you’ll see a header that probably has animals in it. If you are watching a video about food, then a header relating to food will most likely be displayed. And, again, if you are reading about New York City or Philadelphia - those headers will show up.

I’m still fine tuning the way that the site decides which header best fits the current post being shown but so far in my testing it has done a pretty good job.

But, such as it is you are here, reading something on my site, and so I should – at the very least – show you a site that you can read. I didn’t say that I’d cater to you. No no, none of that here. But I will try my best to have my site display just well enough that you can read this – and perhaps switch to another browser.

While at Podcamp Hawai’i I pulled my site up on a screen in front of an entire theatre full of people. There was only one computer available to me that was already hooked up to the projector. I thought “How bad could it be?”. Well, it was pretty bad. My site looked like this. Yeah, that bad.

So today I pulled out a ton of negative margins, a few class specifications that, for reasons I will probably never know, Internet Explorer does not support – and now you can see that the site looks relatively normal in IE.

I could probably do better with my site’s document code and styling to set myself up for multi-browser success. I know this. But, seriously. You could do much better if you’re using Internet Explorer as your browser-of-choice. So there.

As I was going through my photos from Las Vegas, which I’m still not done publishing yet, I thought of framing them the way Peter Lik does.  Peter Lik’s framing work is what makes his work so great.  If he has a photo of bamboo from South East Asia, he actually uses bamboo to frame the over-sized photo. If you’ve never been to a Peter Lik gallery, and you’re a photo nut, please do yourself a favor and drop in.

Then I had a thought. If I’m going to turn some of these photos into header images for my site, why not “frame” them the way Peter Lik would.  I can’t, without a lot of work, wrap my site in bamboo shoots. But I can, at the very least, change the background color of my site to “frame” the header.

So that is what I’ve now done.  Refresh this or any page of my site to see some of the color / photo combinations I have so far.  As of this writing there are 15 combinations ((As soon as I can I will create a page for you to be able to view them all without the need of refreshing so often.)).

Oh, as an aside: By removing that old paper bag background I also slimmed my page load time quite a lot. So there is a double-benefit!  I think the paper bag background was around 214Kb.

These changes are really, really small.  Unless you come to this site on a daily basis (you do, don’t you?) you may not notice any of them.  A pixel here, a color adjustment there, an array sorting issue here, a speed improvement there. But these changes were mounting up.  Even browsing my site myself, looking for old entries, I became annoyed with some of the existing bugs because I knew I had already fixed them on my local install.

So today, while I’m running out to spend the weekend in The Finger Lakes region of New York for a wine festival, I published these “little things” to the live site.  I wish there was a way I could calculate the changes (perhaps I should be using Subversion or something), but my guess would be somewhere in the hundreds.  I still have some things that I’d love to get around to adjusting, but they’ll have to wait for the next update.

So, if you’re feeling adventurous, go ahead and poke around.

You’ll notice that after each link on my site, I have the following text:

“Have a recommendation? Do you have a link, product, service, book, or something you think I’d be interested in linking to? You can write me an email and let me know about it.”

If you find something interesting, please let me know about it!  If I find it interesting, I’ll post about it here on my site and give you credit for the find.  Oh, and I don’t want this to be limited to virtual things, quite the contrary.  If you let me know about a physical “thing” that I might be interested in, I might just beg you to send me one so I can try it out for myself and then write about it.

Buy! Buy! Buy my photos!  I am not sure why I haven’t done this sooner but you can now ask to purchase any of my photos.  You can request the original digital file or a print!  Here is the text that appears below each photo here on the site.

“Please note: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. If you would like to buy an original copy of this, or any of my photos, please contact me.”

I’m mainly doing this for anyone that would like to use my photos commercially, obviously.  The license that I’ve decided to use, for any content on my site, pretty much states that you are free to use my “stuff” non-commercially so long as you give me proper attribution.  If you want to use it commercially, you’ll have to throw a few dollars into the tip jar.

So please, use the suggestion and money boxes.  I’m excited to learn about interesting things that you come across in your lives.  So get started!

I’d be remiss not to mention my goal of Bringing it all together and how I’m getting pretty close to my personal online publishing Utopia.

Jeremy Keith wrote about his personal efforts, and the efforts of a few others, and how the strategies all differ. It seems that there are few different ways to go about “bringing it all together”, you just have to choose which one you like the best.  Here is a short list:

• Publish only on your own site.
• Publish everywhere but aggregate back to your site.
• Publish everywhere but link from your site.

Source: Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : The vanishing personal site

I’m not sure how long I’ll keep this set, but I do have some goals in mind with the random header images.  Eventually I want at least one for each of my interests: basketball, wine, food, family, technology, star wars?, and anything else I’m interested in at the time.  I also have a few favorites from my photo collection, which will also find their way into the rotation.

Refresh a few times and let me know which one is your favorite, I hope you like them.

My experiment was to only show ads to people that came from search engines, and those that have not commented on my site in a while, or ever (shame on you).  In fact, if you came from a search engine, the site would show you two sets of ads; one on the top of the post and one on the bottom.  This method of displaying ads very selectively, I think, has improved the overall statistics regarding my ads.  Which I’ll share with you now – in perhaps too great of detail for some of you.

My click through rate is at 0.33% and my average eCPM is $0.94 (though today it is inexplicably at nearly $3.50).  If I’m able to keep the click through rate fairly high, and continue to increase the traffic on my site, I’d stand to do pretty well for a personal blog within about a year.

Above is a graph showing my sites overall page views over a 1-year period, not counting my own hits to this site.  Obviously I wasn’t interested in these numbers until I began this experiment on January 3rd of this year, which I’ve marked with a 1. Since then the trend has noticeably angled in the desirable direction, which I’ve marked with a 2.  The number 3 on this chart is the current month, which is not fully calculated until the month is over, which is why it appears to have such a steep drop.

The only thing I’ve done differently on my blog since January is attempt to be fairly regular with writing, and as you may know I’ve been bringing all of my content to my site rather than spreading it all over, and I’ve tried to maintain a certain level of quality with everything I’ve published here.  Combining those three things is what I believe made my site’s traffic increase as it has.  My actual numbers are nothing to brag about, to be sure, but so long as the trend continues in the right direction you could say that the experiment was a resounding success.

But, was I able to accomplish my goals?  Yes.  Here is what I said my goal was in January:

“I don’t have any hard number goals that I’d like to achieve, but I wouldn’t mind being able to buy myself one lunch per month off of this site’s ads. Seems like a low goal? Remember, this is a personal Web site with a very small number of subscribers, less then five-hundred posts, and I only manage to write on here when I find the time. So how much does a good lunch cost nowadays?”

In the very first month of my running this experiment I made enough to buy a lunch.  In fact, based on the amount I paid today for lunch at Panera Bread, I’d be able to afford two lunches for the month of January’s earnings.  Success!

But wait, in February I would have only been able to buy a little more than one lunch.  Still a success, but odd that the amount I made in February wasn’t more than it was in January, since my overall page views were higher.  Here’s why; the number of clicks on ads that I had in February was only half that of January.  The main reason, I believe, this occurred was because of search referrals.  The main way I make money from ads on this site would be through search referrals, especially since I show two sets of ads on those page views (which probably brings down my CTR in retrospect).  If the traffic I get from search engines decreases over the course of the month so will my earnings.

Thrilling I know, but there’s more.

What about March?  March was, statistically, the best month this site has had in at least a year.  March was much better than February but still not quite as good as January.  While traffic from search engines did indeed increase, it didn’t increase enough to make up for the losses incurred in February, or even to match that of what was made in January.

Now we’re onto April.  You’ve probably painted a camel-like graph for yourself in your head with January and March being the humps and February being the valley in the middle.  So, where will April end up? With the month already half over, this site has made more than all of February, and almost as much as all of March.  I believe the month of April’s earnings will end up being slightly more than that of January.

What I’ve actually learned

Ads don’t have to be obtrusive to make money. The most important thing when serving ads is that you serve them to people that are most likely to click on them.  If you show an ad to 1,000 people that won’t click on it, you’ve just decreased your CPM average.  Context is also very important, but Google takes care of that for me.  However, if you’re reading this and in the middle of building your own ad system, know that properly serving an ad contextually is just as important as serving an ad to the right person.

I know what you’re thinking; this is advertising 101.  Not exactly.  I’m speaking of actually turning advertisements off if you think the person viewing the web site is not going to click the ads.  Do not even bother showing an ad to a person that will not click it.

And I’m not talking about demographics here.  I’m talking about scope.  If the person you are serving an ad to is there to see a very specific “thing”, and the ad is not well suited for that “thing”, you won’t get a click.  Plain and simple.  However, if the person you are serving an ad to is looking for something related to the ad, or is highly vested in something related to the ad, or even better yet is incredibly interested in something related to the ad – that’s when you’re going to get a click.

Here is the best example I can come up with on the fly.  If I’m reading an article on CNN.com, I don’t even notice the advertisements because I’m there to read the article.  However, if I’m looking for information, products, services, etc. that the article just happens to be about, and the ads are relevant, then the ads become part of the content.  The ads become valuable.

The second thing I learned is that having a lot of traffic doesn’t equate to more click-thrus.  February’s earnings dip is a perfect example.  Having a friend, or just about any other web site, link to you will not help the number of clicks you get on your ads.  If I was earning money based purely on CPM, or cost per thousand impressions, then it would, but not if I’m earning money solely on the CPC, or cost per click, model. (There are probably arguments to this, and I’d love to hear them.  The first thing that comes to mind is that the Long Tail will improve with Page Rank.)

Advertising will always be the most obtrusive when they are based only on number of impressions.  If I was earning money on CPM, I’d be showing an ad at every opportunity.  In fact, I’d probably put them right in the middle of my post.  This is why advertisements based on only on CPM should be replaced by poignant sponsorship campaigns that make sense.  More on this at another time.

New goals and some changes

I think I’m going to make some changes to the way I handle search engine referral page views.  As of right now I show an ad both at the top and the bottom of the post.  I think I might adjust it so that I only show an ad on the top of the post and not at the bottom.  This way I’m not showing two ads, which “fluffs” the impressions statistic, and lowers my CTR average.  I am not sure if this will help or hurt me, but I’m open to suggestions here if any of you have experience.

My new goal is that my earnings per month increases at a rate of at least 10% per month.  So if I make $1.00 this month, I want to make $1.10 next month.  I don’t even know if this is possible or plausible.  But it is a goal nonetheless, and a measure at which to weigh this experiment when I revisit it in the future.

If you have any comments, suggestions, tips, or tricks – please share them in the comments.  Hey, by commenting you don’t have to see the ads at all, so why not?

If you have anything you’d like to gripe about, please do so in the comments. Oh, and watch this post for massive amounts of updates as I tweak things over the coming few days. I’m looking forward to fleshing out this redesign to the extent I did my last one.

Thoughts?

6:03pm: Fixed some oddities with the Twitter thingy on the front page.
6:09pm: Adjusted a few of the links/images.
6:15pm To show off how the mobile photos work, I added one. Take a look at the front page now.
11:25pm Fixed the archive.
11:35pm Added a link to the videos section to the header and increased the font size of the front page.
April 8th, 4:00pm Got the cron job for Mobile photos working again, thanks to Lee Adkins for his help via Twitter / Email. Also now the Photos show up on the front page like Mobile photos.
April 15th, 10:10pm: I’ve made some small changes to the about page and fixed the photos and mobile photos pages for now until I can give them some real attention.
April 29th, 10:10am: I created 2 new header images, in addition to the one from the Philadelphia Museum of Art steps, and set them to randomly change as you bounce around the site.  I hope to some day find the time to have as many as ten random header images. 

Some other notes

No, this isn’t a Tumblr theme. This is Kubrick, originally developed by my friend Michael Heilemann for WordPress, with a few tweaks. I like the simplicity that many Tumblr themes offer and so I decided to go more in that direction than in the direction I was going.

More soon.

Let me preface these screenshots by saying I am not a designer. You have been warned.

From past to present

Here are some of the designs that I created for this site, some of them made it, some of them didn’t, over the last few years. If, for some reason you are crazy, you want the Photoshop document for any of these you may have them free of charge.

Circa March 2006

This one never made it, at least in the way we see it here, to the public site. But a version of it did end up making it to the live site and ran here for at least a few months.

Circa April 2006

Nothing of this design ended up here on the site. The thing I notice the most about this was that it wasn’t a particularly wide design, so I was obviously still on my iBook. It is funny how, unless you are a professional designer, you tend to design for yourself before others. Professional designers are put to the task of doing just the opposite.

Circa May 2006

Thank heavens this never made it live! Oh, and I’m beginning to notice how the diet had an affect on each of these designs. This design was from only one month after I started my diet, so I was still using photos of myself from when I was 35-40 pounds overweight.

The only redeeming quality, I think, about the direction I started to go with this design was that I starting to get away from the solid white background. But, alas, I never published this version.

Circa June 2006

I can’t believe I was pumping out crappy unfinished designs every single month in 2006. This was obviously a variation of April’s attempt, and included both the Rebel Alliance logo and the numbers from LOST. Nice.

Circa July 2006

This design was the beginning of a design that I ended up using in October 2006, which you’ll see below. This was when I began to really think about how blogs, by their very nature, didn’t do a very good job at “advertising” older content. It seemed like older blog posts became stale, Google bait, and so were a lot less valuable long term. So I created this quick and simple way, by using some photography, to link to older posts.

Circa September 2006

This is where I began to combine my ideas for featuring content and also using “natural language navigation” in addition to the normal navigation menus in the header. The next version of this site will actually incorporate the navigation ideals from this design, in some form, and I’m looking forward to finally bringing this out.

Something else I’m noticing is that in September 2006 I was still using my middle initial on the Internet. I’ll have to do some serious digging to see when it was that I finally realized I wanted to drop the D. and just use my first and last name online.

Circa October 2006

As we saw back in April 2006 I had created the foundation for what became this theme. This was actually a pretty good version of the site, in my opinion, as it had many of the things I really wanted to pull off. It may not be as aesthetically pleasing as I would like, but I’m not very talented in that area. But this version definitely made it easy to publish content the way that I wanted to. Something I’m slowly working my way back to now.

Circa October 2006

I have no idea what I was trying to accomplish with this design. Though looking back I do like the direction I was going with the footer here using natural language navigation. Everything else is pretty horrible, which is probably why I never even completed the mock up, let alone put it live on the site.

Circa May 2007

Pushing out in the the simple and artistic side of myself, I began to try to put together a header that would better show that I wasn’t tied to only a two-color, boring design. This mock up only shows the simple header but, where this layout began to excel was how it handled navigation. I think I ended up scrapping it because completing all of the JavaScript needed to pull it off became pretty daunting at the time.

Circa November 2007

In November of last year I began to scramble. I was desperate to get something different up here on my site and so I began to experiment in Photoshop a lot. This was one version where I just went crazy and tried to do something completely different than what I have ever tried here.

Here is another one.

Circa November 2007

This mock up, which took me about 5 minutes to throw together, needs no other explanation than to say: I probably drank a lot that night. I had began to think that maybe I should come out with something totally “weird” and in that way it’d be original and thought provoking. Well, the only thought this design provokes is of crap.

Circa November 2007

And now we get to what is now the current design of the site. It has had a few iterations since I installed this theme in October/November of 2007, but for the most part this theme has served me really well.

I really should have kept a gallery of screenshots of this site up-to-date every time I made a little change. Oh well, I think I will from now on.

Circa December 2007

Another reach, here I decided to return to something close to October 2006′s design, one that I thought that worked pretty well – while changing around the colors and adding a few new elements into the mix. This “remix” never sat well and so I didn’t complete the mock up.

Are you still here? Wow. We’re almost done, I promise.

Circa December 2007

This was another “few minutes in Photoshop” wasted. Sometimes I feel inspired and so I quickly open Photoshop to see if I can mock up the thought in my head. I remember, pretty clearly, having a great idea on this day on how best to pull off something – and then I completely lost it when I was getting everything setup in Photoshop – and so out came something completely horrible.

Circa March 2008

So here is my first redesign attempt last month that I ended up scrapping. After mocking this up, I decided to go a completely different direction rather suddenly and so I simple dropped this design. This design is actually pretty “ok”. It is simple, does that it needs to, and not much that it doesn’t. But I decided that it was a little “too much” for what I want to accomplish with the next version of my site.

That was fun, wasn’t it? A look back in time to hopefully learn from and do better in the future. I think the idea of “it isn’t always what we do, but what we choose not to do, that makes us great” definitely applies here. Although my site’s design hasn’t always been very nice, I can say that I’m happy that I never put up some of these designs.

So what’s next?

Well, you’ll just have to wait and see, but I will say that I’m going to be going much more simple with the next design. Sort of like a Tumblr type design, with some added flare for the various portions of this site that are highly customized.

Essentially over the last few months I’ve been building a personal content publishing platform with WordPress, now at version 2.5, as the foundation. I’m really excited to see what the future of this site looks like, and hope that everyone enjoys it.

Note: Skitch, which is one of my most favorite applications/services of all time, made this post not only possible but really easy and affordable to pull off. Thanks to the plasq team for such a great product.

Upgrading

As with all WordPress upgrades, it is as easy as advertised. I was able to click Upgrade and in a matter of milliseconds my database was updated. Since I hadn’t upgraded since prior to 2.2 I had a few plugins that were now rendered obsolete, so I deactivated them, edited only a few template tags, and deleted a few template files – and I was done.

Quick tips for upgrading, that may save your life one day, are as follows:

• Back up your blog’s database
• Deactivate all plugins

Doing these two, rather simple, things will save you tons of time and the need to debug thousands of lines of code once you’ve upgraded and you see some errors from your plugins.

A few oddities

There are a few things I’ve noticed that seem sorta odd – but I think I have to do a little more investigating to be sure. The first is that I can no longer reorganize the “write panel” in the WordPress admin? Maybe there is a plugin or option somewhere to let me do this, but I’d much rather be able to reorder this page how I’d like it. Like, why is Slug all the way at the bottom?

The second thing is that, in my opinion, WordPress should have told me that I no longer need the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, and that I could just go to Manage > Import and quickly convert my tags into WordPress tags and be done. The process was really simple and I was able to disable a huge plugin, which I like, but even knowing that it was available wasn’t apparent enough.

I used to have two mobile categories here on my site, one for mobile photos and one for mobile notes. Each of them resided under a parent Mobile category. The URLs for these were /mobile/notes/ and /mobile/photos/. I can no longer structure my categories like this because WordPress 2.5, automatically, decided to rename my category slugs to photos-2 and notes-2. Very annoying. Is this a bug?

I don’t have “Add media”

The WordPress Admin needed a change and, while I’m not in love with the new design quite yet, any change was a good change and I’m sure that future version (and time) will go a long way.

Oh. I don’t have a “media panel” for uploading multiple photos/video, etc. Where is that?

Conclusion

Solid update and I recommend it for everyone that uses WordPress for no other reason than the inline plugin updating – which is something that WordPress should use to upgrade its own code base too!

Now I really need to get the new theme of my site completed so that I can take advantage of all of these new things I’ve been plugging in.

My site is setup to post links to Twitter, every 15 minutes, if there was a new post here on my site. I try to add a little context by adding the category before the Twitter status (e.g. “Link:”) and I also include the title of the note so that people can choose whether or not to click the link from Twitter back to my site.

But I could see this getting pretty annoying for some.

Someone whose opinion I value, Justin Blanton, had said in October 2007, on Twitter no less, that he didn’t like the whole “use Twitter to link to your blog” method of letting people know when you update your site. In some ways I agree with him but in others I find it fairly useful when I am not near Twitter to automate the process. I’m torn.

This process all started when I started to post mobile photos with my iPhone. At first they were going to Flickr and so I once Flickr updated the RSS feed for my photos, I had a script that would notify Twitter of the new photo. Once I began to post my mobile photos here on my site, I figured I would do the same thing.

This slowly expanded into, what is now, a script that will post to Twitter every single time I publish something to my site.

So, I ask – should I continue this? Is it annoying? It is useful? Should I only do it for mobile photos and nothing else? Please let me know in the comments.

Here is how things are going down now, how each category will be used, and what the next steps are.

• Notes have been here since the beginning. I struggled with the name of this category ever since I created it, but since I don’t feel I ever write anything worth of the name “articles” or the like – I decided Notes was sufficient.
• Photos is a photo gallery of some of my choice shots. Before I can fully take advantage of this section of my site, I think I need to work on how I process my photos. In other words, I need to make publishing photos a little bit easier than it is now.
• Mobile notes and photos need the most work to be sure. But at least I have the process of writing/publishing them down fairly well where it is very little work for me to do. Mobile notes may need to be published differently as the iPhone mobile admin for WordPress is far too slow to use very often.
• Links is something I am going to a lot more of going forward and I’m still toying with leaving commenting on or off, but I’m really enjoying this new section.
• Videos will probably end up being the last section of the site I work on, since I have a lot of backlogged videos on Viddler, that I would eventually like to have represented, permanently, here on my site.

Now begins the process of redesigning this site to fit these new sections. The highly-customized theme I am using now is simply not cut out for having so many areas of interest, and for displaying them each in their own unique way. Besides, I’m sick of the site’s current layout and so it is time to begin redesigning the site from the ground up with these new sections in mind.

Most of the new sections are not represented, in any way, from the front page of the site. Many of them do not display the way I’d like them to, and the index pages for each section are not customized for each of their purposes. For all of these reasons I’m going to design each and every page to be significantly different than what you see now.

I’ve also ditched Feedburner. They are having a slight outage this morning, which caused me to even remember I was using it, and so I’ve since turned it off. I never looked to see how many people I had subscribed to this site, I never used the built-in ad system, and so having it on has done me very little good. If you could, take a moment to see if you are subscribed to my feed URL. If not, update it, so that you are sure to continue to receive updates.

Now, for the biggest challenge of this process yet – designing the site! Please bear with me as this process may take a little while, and there are a few bugs on my site now since I’ve been cramming all of this junk in.

But that isn’t all, I can now post to this site using my iPhone (which I’ve tested once so far), using the mobile admin plugin. Although a little slow, even on Wifi, the interface works really well on the iPhone to write up quick mobile notes.

I’m really happy with these two solutions so far. Now I just need to get WordPress to recognize the iPhone’s email attachments (photos) and I’ll be well on my way to bringing it all together.

Update March 20, 2008: After using this mobile interface, I’m finding it way too slow even on Wifi on the iPhone. I’ve now begun searching for a simple, mobile interface that is optimized for working on slower bandwidth connections. Any suggestions?

As it stands I post what I’m currently doing to Twitter, I am testing out Pownce with mobile blogging, events, links, and files, I post mobile phone photos to Flickr (as well as the occasional screenshot), videos go on Viddler, bookmarks end up on Ma.gnolia, tasting notes end up on Cork’d, and my thoughts on Apple products find their way to TUG.n.

It is exhausting, and starting to become a little bit of a headache.

There are definitely many pros to using each of these services, as I believe each and every one is built very well for their purpose, and each have their own thriving community of users that make you feel right at home. Services like Viddler and Flickr also make sharing videos and photos extremely cost effective. Even with these benefits I always feel as though I’m spreading myself out too wide, so I think I’m going to start pulling all of these bits together here on my site in some fashion.

As it stands, I use my front page as the main way to show the latest activity on each of these services. This has been fine for a while but I now would like to change from aggregating everything to storing everything here, and perhaps pushing updates to the services, rather than the other way around. This isn’t going to be an easy thing to accomplish at first, but once I get everything setup, I think I’ll be much happier and have much more control of what and how I share.

There are a few other benefits to this change, at least for me. Cutting down on distraction is always a goal of mine and my most recent try at this has been to remove a huge portion of my Twitter and Flickr “friends” so that I cut down on a lot of the noise. I’ve also switched the Twitter notices preference to not include @replies from people I am not following, and this has really cut down on the chatter that I’m not even part of. I believe I went from seeing hundreds of Tweets per day to now only seeing a few an hour. Actually, I’m not even seeing that many since I’ve now decided to keep Twitterrific hidden in the background until I need it. I’ll still see @cdevroe messages, so that will still be a valuable way to communicate, but will also cut down on distractions. A win-win.

I’m going to begin working on one service at a time, slowly bringing it all together, and giving each a home here on my site. I’ll try my best to keep a log of my experiences doing each of these, jotting down why I’m handling it the way that I am, and asking for feedback as I find the best solution for me as I go forward. Of course, I’ll be using WordPress as my backbone for this – as I’ve always found it to be extremely flexible and powerful enough for me to do just about everything I want to do.

I’m looking at this as both a fun project and an experiment. Have you ever thought of doing this, or can you point me to some good examples of those who have?

“The index page is no where near completed but I wanted to have at least a dozen posts published prior to me working on it. It will be a page showing off the title and thumbnail of the photos that have been published. Nothing too fancy but definitely a little nicer than what is currently there.”

Over the last four months I’ve managed to publish more than “a dozen” photos, so perhaps this small update is a little overdue but I wanted to get something out because, let’s face it, the old index page was absolute bleh. Although I have even more plans for what the Photo section should include, I think this version should serve its purpose until I have at least a few hundred photos up and tagged.

Left: Old Photo index. Bleh. Right: New Photo index. Yay!

How it works

For those of you that will no doubt end up asking me how I pulled this off, here is the incredibly boring and simple details. The Photos section is still running a fairly vanilla version of WordPress – it is just that I’ve now added a custom field value to each photo post (namely: thumbnail) and created a thumbnail for each photo (about 45 at the time of this indexes launch) I’ve published.

A side note about creating the thumbnails: I had a ton of fun creating the thumbnails for each photo. Each thumbnail is not just a smaller version of the photo, it is a re-cropping of the original photo. In some cases, I’m actually happier with the way the thumbnail came out than the photo itself. It is like having a second crack at editing the photo – with only your distance from subject changing. Anyway, I’m showing my photo geek side.

There really are no secrets behind the new index page except that I’ve managed to produce some custom HTML output for the Photos category on this blog and am obviously pulling in the thumbnails accordingly and styling them differently.

Known issues

As with this Photo section’s history so far, there are a few things that I want to change over time. Being that this isn’t the final version of the index itself, I’m looking forward to sprucing it up again in four to six months.

There is also the question of beating WordPress into submission regarding the URL for the second page of photos. I’m having trouble not having the word /category/ in the URL (if anyone knows a work around, send it my way). Once I fix that, I’ll be much happier with the index pages.

The second main thing I hope to fix in the coming days/weeks is the fact that the thumbnails on each page show up a little oddly due to the fact that I’ve chosen to show the most recently published photo a little larger than the rest. Being that I’ve made that decision, and I’m sticking to it for now, I will have to play with the number of photos show per page in order to pull off the grid properly.

So, that’s all for now. I am hoping now that when people come across my Photos section they aren’t turned off by its appearance quiet so quickly and actually take the time to explore some of the photos. Let me know what you think!

Update: So I had to make a few adjustments already. But one thing I want everyone to be sure of – if you are using Safari, be sure to hit refresh once or twice on the Photos section. For whatever reason Safari does not love to show you the latest version of the page without forcing it to do so.

If only Safari’s over-zealous caching would trickle its way onto the iPhone’s mobile Safari.

So here is how the ads work, why I’m doing it, and what my goals are.

How my system of ad placement works

I believe pretty strongly in the fact that subscribers, or frequent visitors, to a Web site do not really click on ads that often. Unless of course the ads are served in a personal way like on The Deck. The Deck has some really great products and services that are advertised across its network. Their motto is: “We won’t take an ad unless we have paid for and/or used the product or service.” so the author of the site the ad is being displayed is essentially saying that they vouch for that product or service.

Unfortunately, I’m not on The Deck, and I don’t get to pick and choose which ads Google decides to display on my site beyond their context. So I’ve come up with the following rules for how I display my ads, maybe they’ll work, may they won’t.

Ads display to the following people:

• … that come from a search engine (i.e. Google, Yahoo)
• … people that have not commented on my site

Pretty simple set of rules really. I have never, ever tried to boost this site’s traffic beyond just my writing so my site doesn’t get an enormous amount of traffic and as such I don’t really expect to make a ton of money off of displaying ads. But I figured by using these two simple rules, I’d be keeping the experience exactly the same for people that either come to my site often or participate in the conversations.

Oh, also of note: If you get to this site via a search engine, I double the number of ads you see and I even bring them up above the fold. Ads displayed above the fold normally do much better than those below, but frankly I think they are ugly, so I limit the number of times I do that to only hits that come directly from a search.

Why I’m doing it

This is an experiment, of sorts. Through the entire months of January and perhaps February I’ll be leaving this ad system on to see what type of return I can muster without being 1-bit obtrusive to the regular “audience”. If you visit this site regularly, you will probably see a single ad below the post. If you comment, you won’t see an ad. So it shouldn’t affect too many of you reading this right now.

My “return on investment” from all of you reading this, to date, has been in the conversations we’ve had and in general those coming from search engines do not take part in the conversation. We’ve talked about the traffic I get from Google Images and I wanted to somehow get some sort of return on that traffic. Again, I have no idea if this will work – but we’ll see.

What my goals are

I don’t have any hard number goals that I’d like to achieve, but I wouldn’t mind being able to buy myself one lunch per month off of this site’s ads. Seems like a low goal? Remember, this is a personal Web site with a very small number of subscribers, less then five-hundred posts, and I only manage to write on here when I find the time. So how much does a good lunch cost nowadays?

I hope you all understand my reasons for doing this experiment and that it works well enough to stay out of your way. I guess the only thing I can say is, if you don’t like the ads, comment!

PS. If you don’t see any ads on this site, that means the ad system is working.

Monday’s stats

Take for example this passed Monday night, when the Green Bay Packer game went into overtime. Though short lived due to a long pass by Brett Favre, during the time this game went into overtime my site received hundreds of referral hits from the major search engines. Why? Because I show up on the first page on Google when you search for NFL overtime rules. These types of things happen all the time – and to nearly ever blogger.

Sometimes these trends can be predicted (which is why blogging about niches is so popular). Other times though, trends just appear out of no where.

Take for instance the most popular post on my site; Tolype Velleda. I know what you’re thinking: “How the heck is that the most popular post on your site?” Because the number of visits to this page is skewed by the fact that my photo of this moth comes up on the first page (and sometimes in the first row) for a Google Images search for the word moth. Combine that with the fact that, when clicked, the photo of the moth is only contained in a small frame above my site loaded in a lower frame. This happens, a lot.

It is funny to see where you get traffic from. Some of the searches I end up seeing a lot of referrals from are funny to me because – once and a while – I know people are looking for something completely different then the content on my site. For instance, doing an image search for ‘pot’ on Google will refer you to my post about a gift Eliza gave me. I’ve gotten emails asking: “Did you know your site comes up when I search for pot? Do you have any weed?”. No joke. And to answer those wondering, no I don’t have any weed. Ask Josue, he has some.

I could go on forever about all of the odd ways people end up seeing my site. What are some of the weird ways you’ve seen on your site?

By the time 2008 rolls around I hope to be sporting a completely new suit. I’ve got a lot of work to do before I get there, which is why I’m setting this goal 60 days out. First, I need to update to WordPress 2.3.1 (or whatever version is out by the time I get around to updating from my current 2.2.1 build). This jump should be fairly painless besides changing some template code to include the way WordPress handles tags now, and since I am going to be building my site’s new template from scratch anyway, it won’t really be any extra work at all.

I’ve been using this “out-of-the-box” yet hacked template for far too long and I think it is beginning to wear on me. Don’t get me wrong, I really like this template and it has definitely served me well for the way I’ve structured things around here. But I’ve been poking around with some new front page features that simply do not work with the current template. That, and I’ve recently been giving the photos section a lot of attention and what I wanted to do there wasn’t working out with this structure so really I don’t have much of a choice.

Onward and upward. I hope for at least the next two months the recent changes (which are very subtle but were nagging me) serves me, and you, well. But I can’t wait until the beginning of a New Year and the beginning of the next iteration of this site – which I hope will serve me for at least a year.

As always if you find something wonky just let me know.

Update November 23, 2007: Ok, so maybe I lied. After playing with new layouts for a few days I’ve decided to stick with this one and just make small cosmetic changes to make the theme more my own, to update the markup, and extend the features. I’ve done 2 small things to this end over the last two days.

The first thing I did was add support for hAtom. I’m still experiencing some oddities with the dates, and I will continue to make adjustments as I learn how to pull off the date requirements for hAtom with WordPress, but for now the main page of this site will syndicate the latest entries via hAtom with no problem.

The second thing I did was reconfigure the navigation. I’ve been wanting to tighten up the vertical use of space for a little while – so even though this isn’t the final version of the navigation it is definitely a step in the right direction.

Next up is a new heading. Having ‘Colin Devroe’ as an H1 worked for a while…. but soon it shall read something entirely different and may even include some graphics! *gasp*. Until then, enjoy.

This is just a quick rant, written on my iPhone which is less conducive to writing more than 140 characters than I’d hoped, but I hope to try a little harder starting tomorrow.

Don’t let the URI fool you, this is nothing more than a fancy way of displaying the photos category for my blog. I took out a wrench, screwdriver, and a filled up a few cups of coffee and sat down with my local WordPress install and went to work. It didn’t take me as long as I thought it might, but I am definitely doing a few hacks that I’m looking forward to undoing once the next version of WordPress is released. I have a few known issues (not necessarily bugs) with the current version of Photos (which is 1.0.3 if you are interested) so I will list them here so that you’re aware.

• The index page needs work (see below).
• When on the archives page the main menu item does not highlight properly.
• I need to put thumbnails on the home page.
• The Creative Commons license icon does not line up with footer text. (Yes, I’m that picky.)
• I need to improve the way this entire site display on the iPhone.

There are a few things that are not bugs that we might consider. One is that the “previous” and “next” photo navigation, found at both the top and bottom of each photo page, only links to the next and previous photo and not just the next post on this site while the “previous” and “next” links on posts (like this one) link also to the photos. This is completely on purpose though I’m still struggling with it a little.

If you find anything else besides the above that you think might be incorrect or could be done better, don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments of this post.

About the photos

I debuted the Photos section on Wednesday and since then I’ve managed to post three times per day. I’m going to attempt to keep a schedule when posting photos but it will certainly not be every single day. On days that I do post, however, I will be posting three times. Sometimes posts will consist of more than a single photo. I’ll be posting two more photos today, but then my nine-day vacation starts (so I won’t be posting during that time).

The index page is no where near completed but I wanted to have at least a dozen posts published prior to me working on it. It will be a page showing off the title and thumbnail of the photos that have been published. Nothing too fancy but definitely a little nicer than what is currently there.

You may be wondering about the quality of the photos themselves. Let me be the first to say; I am not a good photographer. But then again I’m not good at drawing or painting but I sometimes enjoy doing that too. I enjoy taking photographs and also enjoy sharing some of them.

A note about the image quality of the photos thus far: Eliza and I “went digital” fairly early on. We’ve owned our fair share of crappy digital cameras over the years and we’re paying the price for being early adopters. Every photo that I’ve published so far was taken with a 2.1MegaPixel camera. As time goes on some of the more recent photos, which were taken with slightly better cameras, will show themselves – but please don’t be too put off by the quality. We also have plans to upgrade our current camera lineup as soon as we can – which we’re both looking forward to very much.

I hope those of you that take a look at these photos enjoy them. I’ve not turned on comments yet, and I’m not sure that I will. I think of my blog posts as the beginning of conversations (as we’ve discussed in the past) – but I think I’d like to allow the photos to speak for themselves.

Special thanks to: Jonathan Christopher and Alex Hillman for helping me test and refine the photos section. Your feedback is always spot-on.

Update October 16, 2007: I’ve turned comments on for the photos.

Update October 29, 2007: I’ve just released a new version of the entire site that addresses 22 known issues and adds 3 new ‘features’. All of the “bugs” from this post have been fixed.

My personal weblog is the first way that I “blog”*. I use it to gather together most of the ways that I blog. If you haven’t seen my home page lately, I suggest you check it out. I wish I actually had the time, and the creativity, to write more often on my blog.

I also write on TUG.n (which is about to get a kick in the pants in March), ChanceCube (which is also going to get a kick in the pants), and the Viddler blog (which is bustling like crazy actually and we’re really happy with what we’ve been able to do there in such a short period of time).

My MeToday photos is another way that “blog”. Almost daily photo updates wherein I explain what I am currently doing, or just whatever I feel like. I’m hoping to continue this (though I may migrate it onto my site as a copy or something) for quite awhile. There are many others that do it too and it keeps growing.

My current statuses that I post to Twitter is another form of blogging. Instead of just saying “Away”, or “In the office.” as a status, I try to add a little more to it. I’ve been scalded for my number of updates so I am continually trying to strike a balance.

My videos on Viddler may not be very structured at the moment, but I have some plans in the works. I probably won’t structure it like a typical “video blog” but I plan on adding a ton of fun content to it over the next few months. More on this later.

So how many ways do you produce content? How many ways do you blog? I’m at four and I hope I don’t add any more anytime soon.

* By blog I mean put my thoughts into content. In my opinion there are many various forms of blogging that span the different types of media.

[tags]blogging, twitter, cdevroe.com, flickr, metoday[/tags]
[slug]my-blogging[/slug]

First, I grabbed a modified version of Cutline and made my own little tweaks (which I’m not quite finished with yet). Obviously I changed the way the headers work and brought back my featured headings in order to highlight certain posts randomly. I’ll be adding many more banners over time, since there are ton of posts that should be highlighted. I’ll be doing a little more of this by creating a “random note” area in my right-most sidebar soon.

I also edited the way that the sidebars work. I wanted a 3-column layout to allow me to pull in my flickr photos, some posts from Viddler, ChanceCube, and The uber geeks, as well as a place that I will soon be putting various other collections. However, I wanted to have only 2-columns on my single entry pages because I like having the width for things like photos. Also, some of the pages (like the new diet page), have 3-columns, while some only have 2-columns.

On the frontpage you will notice the latest posts from the other sites that I write on (mentioned above). This section is powered by BDP RSS Aggregator. Obviously I could have built this type of functionality myself but after seeing how well thought out this WordPress plugin was – it made the decision to use it very easy. BDP RSS Aggregator does far more than what I am using it for, and if you are looking to syndicate some feeds on your WordPress powered site, I highly recommend you looking into it.

My most recent Flickr photos, on the frontpage, is powered by FlickrRSS. Since BDP RSS Aggregator has so many options, I could have technically used it and ended up with the same result, but I chose to use something that was specifically built for grabbing my photos from Flickr. Obviously Flickr’s API could have been used for such a task, but all I really wanted was a cached list of my 4 most-recent photos, and using the API would seem like a little overkill. FlickrRSS does an excellent job, is easy to configure, and has just the right number of options. Another plugin that I highly recommend.

For my recent comments I’m using a highly modified version of the recent comments plugin. I’ve added support for Gravatars and a few other options that it didn’t have out of the box. Once I clean up the code I hacked to get it done I may submit the changes, but since it is reliant on someone using the Gravatar WordPress Plugin (site currently under repair as of today) too, I may not. If you want this, just give me a shout.

For my archives I’m using Justin Blanton’s Smart Archives plugin. I like my archives simple, and this plugin allows me to have just that. I see now that its been updated recently, so I may have to get me a fresh copy.

For my keyword tagging I can’t do without the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin – which in my mind is the best keyword tagging plugin for WordPress. It allows me to use MarsEdit to write my posts and put my keywords inline – which has increased the accuracy and ease of searching quite a bit too. There are many benefits to using this plugin.

I’m using Shaun Inman’s Widon’t plugin to help clean up the straggling words on my post titles. This layout doesn’t succumb to these problems as much as the last one did, but this plugin is handy nonetheless. Plugins that work completely behind the scenes and yet make such big differences in your site should really be applauded.

My feed is being delivered through Feedburner via the Feedburner WordPress plugin by my friend Steve Smith. It is all transparent to you on your end, but to me it adds a nice little layer that allows me to pull some nice stats on how many people and who are subscribed to my site’s feed. If you are using Feedburner and WordPress, this plugin is a must have.

Obviously I’m using ChanceCube‘s Slugger plugin to help me never to see WordPress’ administrative area as well as HappyPals to take advantage of my XFN relationships in my links. I also have Mike Stickel‘s Simple Countdown plugin installed and activated, but you’ll have to wait till the weekend to see why. These three plugins have become indispensable for me in how I publish, Slugger the greatest of these. I could never stand using WordPress’ admin (or any administrative area that I’ve seen) to write my blog posts. I’m happy I don’t have to anymore.

I think I covered pretty much everything. Poke around, if you see anything outta whack just let me know. Other slight tweaks will have to wait till the weekend as I have a fairly busy week this week.

Oh! For those of you on the diet that have recently been contacted by me (which most of you have, and if you have not then it probably means you’ve been fairly active in the dieting area over the last few months) – I’ll be updating everyone today or tomorrow but suffice to say that Tuesday begins another 20-week (minimum) run of updates. More soon.

[tags]cdevroe.com, redesign, shaun inman, wordpress, plugins, chancecube, mike stickel, slugger, happypals, simple countdown, ultimate tag warrior, justin blanton, smart archives, flickrrss, gravatar, recent comments, bdp rss aggregator, viddler, theubergeeks, cutline, theme, steve smith, feedburner, flickr, api[/tags]
[slug]cdevroe-v0207[/slug]

Let’s say you have a day job where you are a mechanic. Obviously your normal business day is filled with fixing someone else’s car, doing routine maintenance, etc. However, if you could take one day and simply think about a better way to do one of those common tasks, what would you correct? Would you take some time to build a tool to help make a common task easier? Would you do something even more simple; such as cleaning up your area to make you more efficient for the week ahead?

I can think of tons of things like this that I could fiddle on. Today, I focused on two. My blog here, and a yet-unreleased service from ChanceCube.

I thought about this blog and what it is lacking, and I started to fiddle with a few things that will allow me to fill those gaps in the near future. Obviously this was done purely for personal reasons, but I am hoping these little adjustments will improve your experience here. No, I am not going to do a complete redesign of my site – but much of the markup is being rewritten to give me some more flexibility and work in some Microformats (oh, and this site has yet to work properly in IE). More on this later, but I was able to take a few hours and focus on a few minute details that really, in the end, give you a lot of satisfaction that you were able to spend some real time thinking about only a few little things.

With the service (called mystreamr) that we have yet to release, I wanted to do some “outside of the box” thinking that I may not normally have the time to do otherwise. How would a mother use this? How would a kid who found this service through digg use it? How could I explain this service to someone that doesn’t speak English? What happens if I use the service in the complete opposite way it was intended? All of these questions I was able to address, in some form, today.

I think that this is a great exercise for anyone to try and do (especially when the temperature dips to below freezing!). Get out your watercolors (which I still might do later), and try a style you’ve never tried before. Waste paper! Go into the kitchen, whip out a recipe book that has 4-layers of dust on it, and just start cooking. Look through the garbage and find the instruction manual for your digital camera and learn to use it better. Go for a jog on a street that you’ve never been on. Knock on that neighbor’s door that you’ve never met because your work schedules conflict. Have you read your Bible lately? Have you taken 30-minutes in the last decade to appreciate the night-sky? I could go on forever! I have tons of things that I would love to find the time to do but so many other things end up getting in the way.

Perhaps the next time your day’s activities get cancelled, you shouldn’t worry about filling those slots with more things to do, just fiddle.

[tags]thoughts, weekend, saturday, schedule, chancecube, mystreamr, fiddle, cdevroe.com[/tags]
[slug]fiddlin[/slug]

For now, you’ll be dealing with the old design while I work and rework the new one. I’m hoping to roll out the new design (that fits this new wave of content) within a week or so. Until then, sorry for all the falling bricks.

Oct. 20th 4:35pm – I’m fairly close to getting a new plugin done what will make posting to this site much more efficient. I shall release it when I get it completely nailed down. But for any of you out there that use WordPress and would like to have better interaction between a desktop application and WP – this plugin will be for you.

Oct. 30th 8:42pm – For those of you wondering where the next version of cdevroe.com is, please be a little patient. Eliza and I were sick as dogs this weekend so I literally got no work done on it. Then we had to prepare to get our tile waxed, even though we were sick.

Hopefully I’ll be able to get a few things accomplished over the next few days, as I’m fairly close to having something that I’d be able to release.

[tags]cdevroe.com, version 3[/tags]

[tags]test, testing, cdevroe.com[/tags]

[post_name]v3-test[/post_name]
[link]http://yahoo.com/[/link]
[thumbnail]photos/testing/test.php[/thumbnail]

Flickr provides me with a great way to share photos with friends and family, and it has some useful tools for me to tag (categorize) as well as geotag (or note where I took the photo), and it lets me connect with different sets of people by using Flickr’s groups. These are all great. However the data that I put into Flickr is not mine and without using the API I will never be able to benefit too greatly from putting in the time it takes to utilize all of Flickr’s tools.

Del.icio.us is a great way to post your favorite URLs, tag (categorize) them, and make some small notes. Obviously there is the entire community aspect too though I’ve never taken full advantage of any of them. Also I do not use del.icio.us (boy is that annoying to type everytime) as my bookmark storage solution.

So I don’t fully utilize the two major web services that I would otherwise really like to — so perhaps something else could be done to openly share data and yet reap the most benefit from the time I put into cataloging it. I think my personal site is the perfect platform for this, and I’m going to start making both dramatic and subtle changes to the site and its architecture in order to do this.

Please “stand by” while I make some adjustments (which will probably take a total of two or three weeks to make, though you should start seeing some of these changes within the next few days).

[tags]cdevroe.com, updates, flickr, delicious, bookmarks, photos, sharing, web services, api[/tags]

For quite awhile now (actually, probably since I moved everything to this domain), I’ve been tagging my posts with keywords that in some way describe the content of the post I had just written. This serves many purposes – the first and most important of which is that each post becomes inherently more searchable. The second is that content indexing services like Google and Technorati will index your content much more efficiently, making it much easier for those looking for it to find it. The benefits are obvious then right? Accessible content and increased exposure. A win-win.

When I first set out to add the ability to tag posts on this site, I had a few specific requirements. The most notable requirement was that I needed to be able to tag my posts quickly and from an external application. The first challenge to do that would be to find an application that works seamlessly with WordPress in this regard. Fat chance. Most weblog posting applications that do “play nice” with WordPress do a fairly poor job of interacting with WordPress above the normal post/edit activities. I think I’ll write more on this subject in the future.

What I ended up using was Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW), a WordPress plugin, that adds the ability to tag your posts in WordPress. It also fit my main requirement of being able to add tags to posts quickly and via an external application. The way UTW handles this by allowing me to add a simple text string to the end of my posts (and it can even extrapolate tags from within the post content itself) when I write them in MarsEdit. Beautiful.

Snag! The snag I’m referring to came when I tried to have UTW use a specific permalink structure. I desired to have /keyword/TAGHERE/ as my permalinks for tag-specific searches. But since my post permalinks are already /category/post-name/ there was an immediate conflict. WordPress would determine /keyword/ as the category and /TAGHERE/ as the post name, which would throw a 404 error every time. There have been attempts to fix this, but to no avail yet. I might add that this is not a bug in UTW nor in WordPress, just a URL compatibility issue – and is only present in the latest versions of WordPress.

Since I was unable to resolve this issue, and I really desired to have nice looking URLs for my keywords, I hid the fact that I was tagging posts for far too long. How did I do this? Well, quite simply really. I still wanted the benefits of having the keywords, but I just didn’t want to show them so I had a DIV and it’s style was simply display: none;. Well, I’ve finally given into the ugly URLs (index.php?tag=TAGHERE), and have made the keywords visible on each post of this site. Most posts are tagged, but not all, so someday I’ll take the time to rip through my archives and update each post.

Also of note is a slightly refreshed home page. So, enjoy the keyword verticals, and have a great Friday.

[tags]cdevroe.com, refresh, tags, keywords, ultimate tag warrior, utw, wordpress, marsedit, taxonomy[/tags]

One of the biggest complaints I’ve had since launching cdevroe.com was that there was no clear navigation between the main areas of the site. I was one of the complainers myself.

On Friday I decided to take a trip to Panera Bread to soak up some free wifi and some grub. I did this to get a slight change of scenery, and to focus on finishing what was the core of this redesign. The changes you see may not seem very extensive, but most of the changes will end up going rather unnoticed until I actually unleash each and every feature of this theme. Its current incarnation is not quite as robust as its final one will be, which will be released incrementally.

Me eating a panini at Panera Bread

Panera’s atmosphere is actually fairly conducive to GTD. So I was able to pump out a fairly good portion of work in the amount of time it took my wife to do some shopping.

Credit for the small, yet fantastic, adjustments to the theme go to James Mathias who sacrificed some of his weekend for me. It is definitely nice to have friend that is willing to give you some of their well earned time off. Thanks a lot James – I owe you one.

Monday, July 3rd, 2006 – My site now validates as valid CSS and XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

[tags]cdevroe.com, james mathias, panera bread, colin devroe, photos, website, updates, wordpress, theme[/tags]