Back again! (And about time too!)
Finally I got my blog up and running again. Big changes in the house.
First and foremost I use Wordpress instead of Expression Engine as a CMS. Expression Engine is great for blogging but the power of open source, the huge community behind Wordpress and the ease of use allowing for hackability and plugin development of WP made the decision easy.
Spam bots and comment abusers where of great help too. I didn’t realize that my blog was so popular (if I’m to judge by amount of spam I was getting lately) but truth is that I couldn’t cope with that much junk. Let’s hope that the combination of WP and Akismet spam filter plugin beat the spammers this time.
Semantic markup, SEO and simple CSS were also an issue. I was looking for a blog design that was optimized for search engines (SEO), easy to manage and where graphic design didn’t take precedence over contents. Derek Punsalan did a great job and all the design credit goes to him. It’s a great template that leaves room to content customization and semantic markup. A few WP plugins, some programming and some tweaking and hacking did the rest.
Another must have for any blog web nowadays is information tagging, not just for the beauty of tagclouds but for its SEO aspects. The Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for WP by Christine Davis is an application in itself and I woudn’t be surprised if it were integrated in the next WP release. Possibilites are endless. If you navigate my tags you’ll see that you’re allowed to do advanced tag selection by means of logical “and” / “or” of tags.
RSS feeds are cool with its nice rounded orange icons. But they’re useful too. I hardly visit some webs that I’m subscribed to and I read in Netvibes. I created feeds for all the entries, individual categories, tags and logical operations between tags.
And last but not least there’s the Photoblog. It integrates with my Flickr photoblog where I post the pictures I take on the go with my mobile phone. I can be a Moblogger too! Sweet.
It took me a while to put everything together. A few design trials that will never see the light and a quite a few cycles of coding and debugging are to blame. Ah and some real work too.
If you have opinions, suggestions or find any bug please let me know.
Enjoy!
Ei,
M’agrada molt la nova versió del blog.
És un macro-integrador de tot el teu know-how i a més a més maco!
No cal dir que ja m’he subscrit al teu RSS,
(ja ho estava al teu del.icio.us i al teu flickr)
així que continuaré alimentant el cervell amb el que surti del meu preferit gurú!
felicitats!
Fas tot un goig, si senyor.
Ja estava una mica cansat d’anar-te visitant i veure sempre les reformes per fer.
Ja tens un lector al Bay Area!….keep it up!
Ignacio
Ei Ignacio gràcies pel comentari.
Com has anat a parar aquí?
Salut i records a la Bay Area especialment al Mission de SF.
Felicitats per el redisseny, esta molt be. Que sapigues que t’escolto pel RSS. Bon nadal.
Toni.
Després d’una mica de rodatge, les protestes:
- css: els links en els comentaris no es veuen
- resulta útil veure quins elements d’html s’accepten en els comentaris
- hi ha manera fàcil de permetre que es mirin les entrades velles per data?
Ei Xavi ja he arreglat el css dels comentaris. De fet me’n vaig adonar amb el teu comentari al video dels OK GO.
Miraré el tema de tags d’html permès en els comentaris. No se ni quins són ara mateix.
També em pensaré la manera de posar un arxiu de posts per data. Quan vaig muntar el blog no ho vaig posar pq entenia que la data és un criteri poc rellevant. Potser una pàtina d’Archives amb anys / mesos tipus el browser by category que hi ha al footer.
Pensem.
[…] As per a Xavi Vergés request in my post about the redesign of this blog, I introduced a whole new Archives section in the blog so all posts can be accessed by chronological order. I also tossed in a calendar that can be found at the bottom sidebar. All this for free! […]