What I write about on my blog apparently, originally uploaded by reynard.

I generated this from Wordle.net — a tag cloud of what I write about on my blog apparently. As you can see, my vocabulary is impressive and varied, with words such as “things” and “good” appearing prominently.

Look out though, because “possibly, Norman’s took mobile”.

There’s only one up there now, and I’ve already had some ideas on how to improve it. Sometimes, it’s useful to have these things to hand so you can ponder on them during an idle moment!

I think this has made for a rather ungainly and difficult-to-pin-down site, so I’ve decided it’s time for a reboot. Not in terms of visual design as I’m quite happy with that, but rather the UI and IA.

I’m currently working on the new site in a test area and hope to make it available soon. I’ve had fun mocking up the new layout with Balsamiq, which is an amazing wireframing tool for those of you who haven’t heard of it.

My new site will:

• Provide an easily accessible portfolio area, covering my work in UI and Web design and development
• Rope off the blog into its own area, with clear routes in from the home page
• Clearly separate out the content to do with my personal interests

My tumblelog is at: littled.tumbr.com

2/52: 9/1/09 [Ghost], originally uploaded by reynard.

The second of my photos in the 2009:52 series. The evening before this was taken, it was very foggy and there were some great opportunities for photos. Typically I didn’t have my camera with me.

Not to be caught out again, I took my camera with me to work the following day and tried to take a photo of the rather austere and gothic church opposite Birkbeck, just off Gordon Square (whose name escapes me at the moment). I got my shutter speed totally wrong — it just stayed open. I gave up on the photo and turned off my camera, not realising a picture actually had been taken.

I like this — it looks like a ghost, spooky. Whether pressing a button and waving your camera around really counts as taking a photo I’m not quite sure!

I tried setting up a redirect from my main Wordpress feed so it pointed to the Plone-specific feed but I couldn’t get this to work for some reason (maybe to do with the limitations of my through the web redirect editor, maybe something to do with the “virtual” directory structure in Wordpress). However, I came across this Wordpress plugin which seems to have done the job very well: Redirection by Urban Giraffe. This has a good range of functions to support redirecting, including the ability to match on regular expressions.

For now I’ve set my main site feed to point to the Plone category and will work on creating another feed for all other stuff. I’ll keep my eye on Planet Plone — if this post comes through then it’s back to the drawing board. If so, I’m open to other suggestions on how to sort this out!

As an addendum, I’ve just checked the Planet Plone site and my blog’s RSS feed is already listed as pointing to my Plone and Zope categories, so I’m not sure why it’s picking up non-Plone stuff.

The first one is Trevor Davis’ site. I can’t remember how I came across this, I think it was probably something to do with a jQuery question I Googled. Anyway, the content on the site is very good indeed and I like its design. It’s very clean with a three-column layout, has clear navigation and has some nice touches, like the Twitter bubble by the site logo and the small “Who am I?” section in the top right which links off to his “About” section.

The only (small) criticism I would make of it is that the pages are slightly too long, but that’s just my personal view.

The second site which I found whilst searching for a Twitter plugin for Wordpress, is Victoria Chan’s site, Vicissitude. This site takes a different approach from the one above in the sense that the design is more to the fore, whereas I’d say that with Trevor’s site the design is more in the “background” which allows the content to stand out. This is not to say that Victoria’s site is design over substance; far from it. Again, there is a lot of good content on here and I think it is very well-structured in terms of layout and navigation.

Victoria’s navigation is structured according to her main interests, displayed as key words, e.g. “Geek”, “Artist” etc. I like this approach, it’s very informal and it manages to give you an overview of her without you even needing to delve too deep into the content. I also like the way she has positioned the three navigation items at the top: “All posts”, “History” and “Twitter Updater”, the latter a link to her Twitter Wordpress plugin. Again, if I were forced to make one tiny (ridiculously tiny at that) criticism  it would be that “History”, a history of updates to the site need not to be given such prominence.

Anyway, as with Trevor’s site, there are some great little flourishes: the newest story highlighted in its own box at the top of the page, a nice little “About” section in the top right and the “Cyberstalk me” section which links off to her other presences on the web. Ok, not that new in itself, but it’s great wording.

This all makes me think that I should put some time into developing a new design for this site (rather than relying on a third party one) which I will do in time, probably in conjunction with some other upcoming projects, and it’s always good to get some inspiration. I was thinking of instituting a “site of the week” section on my blog, but I know it would soon become “site of the month” or “site of the undisclosed but infrequent time period”, which is not so quite so catchy.

• Making Wordpress my site’s CMS and moving away from “static” PHP pages that had to be edited via Dreamweaver
• Installing an existing Wordpress theme for my site’s design

I’m pleased with the result I have to say. It will make it much easier for me to edit content on the site which means it’s much less likely to get out of date.

I like the theme I’m using: Cutline. It’s nice and clean and the kind of thing I had in mind when I was thinking about a redesign. I haven’t done anything to customise it, save putting in a few of my own images but I’m pretty much happy with it as it is.

I’ve got a few things planned, particularly with the new “Offline” section which I’ll use to highlight my non-web interests. I’m working on producing a nice Flash-based photo gallery to supercede my old PHP Flickr one but it might take a while to get going as it’s not a very high priority for me at the moment.

A few redirects means that old pages should redirect to their newer equivalents. I’m keeping my “new” site in a separate subfolder so I can still have directories outside of Wordpress to play around with various things.

The version of Wordpress I’m using is 2.5.1 and whilst I didn’t find all of it immediately intuitive, I’ve managed to get the site up and running with reasonably little effort. Compare that to the amount of work it takes to get a Plone site working! Well, Wordpress and Plone are two very different beasts, but I think Plone could learn a lesson or two from how much easier it is to theme Wordpress.

Another thing I like about the newer Wordpress is the page editor: bar some minor annoyances, it was pretty good in the older version I was using but the new one has buttons for embedding media which means no more resorting to hacking in the HTML then losing it next time you edit the page. Nice one.