A break in the drought
A quick break in the posting drought…
I’ve fallen woefully behind in my reporting on the materials that I’ve received by being a delegate to the upcoming LCMS national convention. I apologize to any/all who have missed my commentary.
Frankly, I’ve gotten a bit beaten down & discouraged by the barrage of materials, particularly those coming from the left (i.e., TBNJFPAC). I can sort of accept their blatant politicking when it’s issues-based. I don’t agree with their take on the issues, or with their recommendations for voting, but good on them for being organized enough to get their message out in such an organized way to take advantage of our synodical polity. What I don’t like is the ugly turn that several TBNJFPAC newsletters have taken in specifically running down good, faithful men & organizations by name. Talk up your own side. Let the reader read between the lines (without telling them to do so!). But there’s no need to go negative & explicit against the other side..
Rev. Paul Beisel has written two good postings dealing with his thoughts & feelings on being a delegate. His words & thoughts echo my own, and he expresses them better than I might. So I’ll just direct you to post#1 & post#2…
I’m still watching realitytv. So You Think You Can Dance is, I think, both my favorite AND the best realitytv show out there. American Idol’s younger sibling has better contestants, better judges, a better host, and a much better format than does the 800lb AI behemoth. It is, for me, clearly superior on every level. Last Comic Standing is ok, and it looks to be better than last summer’s installment. America’s Got Talent is a train wreck that I just cannot turn my eyes from, despite the fact that it’s a chore to watch, and that I feel vaguely ashamed after I’ve watched it.
After some time to process it, I think that the final episode of The Sopranos was actually pretty good, and did the job that it was supposed to do. As long as Tony is dead, that is. If there ends up being a movie at some point, and that Tony is alive… well, then, I will have to go on record as stating that the finale sucked, and that David Chase was/is/will be a sell-out hack.
The MacBook Pro is running great, and is just a treat to use, and the family is adjusting nicely to the iMac. Apple is cool. Read FSJ.
I’m still fully in the throes of blog software angst. Wordpress just released another upgrade made mandatory by a security flaw bust. I’m bored with Wordpress even as I’m seduced by all of the things that it can easily do (either stock or via it’s easy to use plugins & theme designs). Plus, I’ve been using it for almost 4 years, so I pretty much “get” how it works. But it just doesn’t “grab” me anymore. That it’s a largely subjective thing (with some objective stuff like security & “under-the-hood” design thrown in), I’m more than willing to admit. Even so, I’m still feeling compelled to seek out an alternative. I just don’t yet know what it could/should/might be…
Plus, there’s also work/resume stuff going on, and I’m just not going to get into that in any type of detail. Suffice it to say that it’s adding to the volatile mix that’s swirling in my mind.
Enough.
That’s the current status.
If you have any questions that you care to ask, please do so. I’ll most likely answer them…
-ghp
It’s that time of year
Yes, it’s that time of year already — Summer — time for me to not feel like blogging as much, and for me to have my annual state of angst wrt my blogging platform. It was almost exactly a year ago that I began the last excursion into exploration & evaluation…
For some reason, once again this year, I’m feeling ambivalent towards Wordpress. Version 2.2 was released about a month ago, and I still haven’t upgraded. I’m feeling like my current installation (including my template/design) is overly bloated & top-heavy with cruft, in the form of too many plugins & too much stuff/junk installed. Junk that just doesn’t serve any real, functional purpose.
One thing that’s also different this year is that I’m not feeling overly attached to the 850+ posts that I currently have in the archives. Being tied to having those posts available severely restricts my options & flexibility, and I’m very much leaning towards making a clean break & starting over. Or, if I decide to stay with Wordpress, at the very least going through & deleting some of the more superfluous entries, so that I’m left with a more solid & useful archive.
Right now, I’ve worked my way into a (all too common) bit of a frenzy, having installed instances of the following so that I can play around with & evaluate them:
- Wordpress 2.2 - clean install
- b2evolution
- Nucleus
- Serendipity
- Movable Type 4 (beta)
- Textpattern
There are pluses & minuses to all of them, and I’m still working through in my head exactly what I want out of a blogging engine this go-around. Much of what I wrote last year will still apply (but I’ve got to go and re-read it, so that I can get an idea about what, if anything, has changed…).
[Note to TK: Don't worry, this won't have any real effect on Katie's Beer --- as long as you want to keep it like it currently is, you've got it. You won't need to worry about changing unless/until you decide you want to...]
-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
What I have wrought, Part 1: Investigation & Evaluation
Ok, I guess it’s safe to finally expound a bit on what I’ve done in this (latest) redesign of Territorial Bloggings. In order to keep things reasonably readable, I’ll be breaking my account up into a few posts.
In Part 1: Investigation & Evaluation, I’ll describe the process by which I arrived at staying with Wordpress (WP).
First off, this was a baseline redesign — everything was on the table, including (especially!) the blogging software (i.e., WP itself). Why? Well, I was seriously considering the move to a more CMS-ish (Content Management System) app, so that I could provide a wider range of information in a rational way. I was also interested in providing a blog-hosting type of service to select folks, and I wanted to have an app that allowed me to do so in an easier-to-manage way than by installing individual WP blogs for each person (which is what I did for TK’s Katie’s Beer). In order to meet these goals, then, I needed to investigate any & all options for powering my site.
I was still somewhat disenchanted with WP - not for any objective reason, but mainly because of a sense of techno-wanderlust and a bit of tech-snobbery. For as good as it is, and it’s plenty good, WP certainly has some less-than-ideal structural/design/semantic flaws. Besides, I’ve been using WP for coming up on 2 years now… 
So, I set out on an obsessively thorough investigation of a whole bunch of blogging & CMS “engines,” including: Movable Type, Joomla, ExpressionEngine, NucleusCMS, Drupal, XOOPS, b2evolution, and, most intriguingly, Textpattern (TXP). What I found was that a true CMS app is overkill for what I want, need, and am able to do at this point. Most all of these apps enable you to do some incredible things wrt running an informational & well-designed website. But they pretty much demand an incredible amount of time to traverse the learning curve that leads to mastery & ease-of-use. And I don’t really have the time (or inclination) to give over to that type of project. There was, however, a non-WP ray-of-hope — TXP!
At this point, I also realized that my visions (delusions?) of grandeur wrt creating a confessional lutheran clearinghouse were probably not in the cards. While I might still provide some hosting services for a few select folks (or not), it won’t ever be as structured or comprehensive as I envisioned, at least not for the foreseeable future. So, while I wanted to keep this functionality in my thought process, it wasn’t going to be the primary factor that it had been when I looked at the full-blown CMS apps. This, then, really opened the door to TXP, as I was more open than ever to the compromises inherent in its “lightweight CMS” feature set.
So, TXP stormed to the fore, having all sorts of really cool features, and even more going for it in terms of being both cool and “pure.” It has a great developer & support community, it’s very easy to install, and reasonably easy to tweak out & enhance. I had actually made up my mind to change from WP to TXP, figuring out how to migrate my database/archives from WP to TXP, and getting an instance of TXP up & running so that I could play around with getting it designed & tweaked out to my liking well in advance of making an official cutover. Unfortunately, I ran into a few issues, largely dealing with functionality that WP provides via plugins, that I couldn’t figure out quickly or easily enough.
WP & TXP are based on some significantly differing design assumptions, particularly in terms of how to handle design & content elements in order to create a stable, robust, and easily sustainable website. I really liked TXP, and found its philosophical underpinnings to be quite understandable & attractive. That, however, could not overcome the learning curve factor for me.
So, the aforementioned failures forced me into a thorough re-examination of WP. And, that process let me to realize that WP was not deserving of my willing desire to toss it aside! w00t! 
Coming up:
Part 2 - (Re)Design Philosophy
Part 3 - Rebuilding the Foundation & Superstructure
-ghp
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Analytics & Hosting
