Major renovation work begun
I’ve just begun a rather significant reworking of this blog. Inertia, coupled with some base technical functionality, has moved me to stay with Wordpress; however, I’ve done a clean (re)install of version 2.2.1, including importing my posts & your comments into a new database instance. I’m hoping that this will help me to more easily rid the archives of a whole bunch of cruft & junk, particularly when I couple it with a revisiting of all my old postings so that I can better winnow out the unnecessary postings and properly tag what’s left. I’m also doing what I plan on being a ruthless evaluation of the plugins that I have installed, along with a graphical redesign that will streamline the look & feel of the blog for you hardy souls who actually visit the site. I’m going for a more minimalist design, which will hopefully yield quicker loading times as well as more pleasant & direct interactions with the site. I plan on getting this done as quickly as I can, but please don’t hold it against me (or stop visiting/reading!) if it takes a longer than a couple of days. Vielen Dank! -ghp
Alert the Purple Palace
Release the hounds!
Take some more pastors out of the pulpit & make them administrative investigators! (and then don’t forget to talk up the resulting “shortage”…)
Find the culprit!
A list of the Top 10 Church website designs, and nary a reference to Ablaze!?
Inconceivable!
Seriously, though, the designs of the websites might be good, but I bet the theology isn’t. I’m particularly taken aback by the 4th one down, where they profess that church should be “religion free”. What, now? 
I wish this was an entry over at Horn+swoggled, rather than something I saw at Digg…
-ghp
What I have wrought, Part 2: (Re)Design Philosophy
Previously covered - Part 1: Investigation & Evaluation
Still to come - Part 3: Rebuilding the Foundation & Superstructure
Now - Part 2: (Re)Design Philosophy
While this is the second phase of describing my grand redesign of Territorial Bloggings, it should be noted that the content of this posting is very much the antecedent of the previously described investigation & evaluation. Put more simply, if it wasn’t for my desire to redesign things, there wouldn’t have been anything to investigate, much less evaluate.
The past two years of blog reading, writing, and provisioning has been an ongoing learning process for me in a great many ways, not the least of which is figuring out how I want to present my thoughts from all the stuff that I read & all the decisions I’ve made. In other words, trial by error. The distillate of this learning process was a design philosophy that could be summed up in four main goals:
- Simplicity in administration
- Necessary complexity
- RSS primacy
- Membership encouraged
1. Simplicity in administration: One thing that my brief dalliance with Textpattern showed me was that it was not only possible to administer a blog through the web interface, it was actually a good thing. Thus, my first goal was to construct my redesigned blog such that I could run the whole thing via the “built-in” web interface without having to use any outside applications (like FTP programs, external editors, etc…), including the writing of posts/entries. While Wordpress’s web interface isn’t as “clean” as Textpattern’s, it was/is more than capable of enabling me to meet this goal, even without the addition of plugins. I’ve rediscovered an appreciation of the functionality inherent in WP’s interface design. It works, and it works quite well, even right out of the box. And, with a little tweaking, it works even better!
2. Necessary complexity: Flowing out of the first goal is the second goal, namely to keep things as simple as possible and as complex as necessary, both for the admin tasks (i.e., my stuff) and for the web presentation (i.e., your stuff). While this one might seem both obvious and nebulous, I really think it’s important, especially when it comes to selecting & tweaking out a theme/template. It’s all to easy to bog things down, performance- and usability-wise, by making the presentation of a blog way too complex. I flirted with some very minimalist themes, and really tried to keep myself reeled in as far as the “gadgets” that I built into the new design. This goal, then, speaks to the tension that exists between doing too little vs. doing too much…
3. RSS primacy: I do all of my primary/initial blog reading via blog aggregation software (FeedDemon/Win, NetNewsWire/Mac, NewsGator/Web), as it’s really the only way to efficiently wring useful information out of more than a handful of blogs (e.g., the number that I read, even after having recently pared down the number of entries on my blogroll…). As a result of this realization, I decided that I wanted to make my blog very, very, very easy to follow via syndication (check out the buttons in the ‘Subscribe’ sidebar on the right…). So now, it’s not only easy to subscribe to the feed for the main blog entries, but it’s also easy to subscribe to the feeds for any/all comments! However, in no way do I want to punish/penalize those folks who still come here directly via their web browsers — by all means, come and visit me every day! It’s just that it really makes me happy when I see the number of subscribed readers in the Feedburner button under the ‘Analytics’ sidebar go up, that’s all. Feed subscribers are, from what I’ve been reading, the wave of the future in terms of ensuring readership levels.
4. Membership encouraged: Finally, that leaves the fourth goal, membership. I very strongly toyed with the idea of requiring that folks register/sign-up for an account here before they could post a comment. Not so much as an anti-spam measure (although it could help in that regard, no doubt), but more for the purposes of fostering a sense of community, which is also very important in sustaining a loyal readership. I haven’t done that yet, although I still might, particularly if y’all chime in & say it wouldn’t offend and/or retard participation. This goal, ultimately, is the one that I have the least idea about how to actually meet/pull-off. If you have any ideas, I’d be glad to hear them…
That pretty much sums up the philosophy that went into this latest redesign project. I know it’s not that deep, complex, or involved, but it’s actually been quite a pleasant surprise for me to see, in hindsight, just how helpful it has been to have even this limited outline of goals and/or purpose.
In Part 3 I’ll move from these more strategic considerations to the more tactical tasks of how I’ve actually used WP & various plugins to achieve my design goals.
-ghp
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Analytics & Hosting
