Hey all,
I needed to post a claim code on the new blog to register the new site with Technorati. I was just informed that the claim code was found and that they just need to review things.
In any case, I spent some time updating my profile on Technorati to better reflect me. Feel free to check it out (link to follow when claim is complete).
Catch you on the flip side.
I posted the other day about how I was going to make do with what I have, and breathe some life back into my blog. I continued working on the blog to attempt to bring it up to snuff, when I thought to myself I should build it back up from scratch, assuming I can port it over. I found WordPress, got it working, ported over my previous posts (complete with comments) and here we are.
I thought I would take the time to go off and talk about some of the new features that are available through the new implementation of Digital Thoughts with WordPress.
Thank you BlogEngine...you served me well.
I realize that v1 of Digital Thoughts had comments, but there were some definite issues with how the comments were working in the old version. I just wanted to
Yesterday, I went through all of the comments that were ported over from the original posts. Out of the 550 or so comments, just under 500 were spam or at least appeared to be spam. If you do the math, that means that about 90% of the comments were spam. I was unaware that Digital Thoughts was plagued with so many spam posts, but now that I know it is an issue, it has been addressed.
WordPress provides a plugin called Akismet, which is supposed to help catch spam comments. With that in place, I am hoping that I’ll be able to keep the comment sections on the posts and pages to users that are actual people.
I realize that this feature doesn’t exactly apply directly to you, but it definitely does have an effect on your user experience with Digital Thoughts.
WordPress provides a comment administrative console that makes sorting through new comments, responding to people, and filtering out spam easy. Meaning, when you comment on a blog post, it will be much easier for me to find your new comment and respond to you! In conclusion, we now have some working two way comment communication, which is the whole reason why I started this blog in the first place.
I am a big fan of RSS feeds, and subscribe to many. WordPress provides me with an RSS feed for the comments on the blog so that I can be notified about your thoughts on my posts ASAP as soon as Google Reader tells me you have commented.
I know that BlogEngine.NET provided categories as well. The thing is, if the author doesn’t take the time to use them, then what good are they? No good, that’s how good.
With the new blog in place, I spent time sorting the old posts into a series of categories that I think organize things well. I know this isn’t a big step, but I’m hoping that it helps people navigate through the site and find things that they find interesting.
With an updated site comes an updated style that I think better suits me. It’s simple, it’s clean, it works. That isn’t saying the old style didn’t work. People actually told me that the Digital Thoughts style from the BlogEngine version worked well.
The thing is, the style of the old blog never really felt like me. Sure, the ideas were mine and the content felt like me, but the look never did. Since I was updating the blog anyway, why not update something that I wanted to change? And so, here we are basking in the new style of Digital Thoughts.
For record, I enjoyed working with BlogEngine.NET and it served me well. Sure, it didn’t have all the bells and whistles that WordPress has, but it also didn’t have a huge team of developers constantly working on it, nor has it had the chance to spill over to version 2. The latest build of BlogEngine.NET is v1.5, while WordPress is 2.8.5, on their way to 2.9.
Plus, considering that my development skills have been refined using almost nothing but .NET technologies and tools, it makes sense for me to have a .NET based blog. The problem was that BlogEngine required a bit of extra effort to get things working how I wanted them to work, and I didn’t have the time to put into the code.
WordPress has a much larger following, and ultimately has more options and tools at my disposal. With those tools, I’m able to manage my blog much easier than I could with BlogEngine.NET and so the switch was made.
There you have it. You now have a brief summary of the changes and you can expect with my new blog. Hopefully your future experiences with Digital Thoughts are improved over version one. I am eager to read and respond to your comments.
Catch you on the flip side.
I’ll be honest; this isn’t the big announcement I was intending to release a few weeks ago. The tides have changed with respect to my professional life. I figure I would take some time and explain my new situation.
As of about three weeks ago, ANVIL Digital decided to give me the opportunity to focus my efforts on my real passion in Computer Science: the user experience. The new job is very exciting and has involved a lot of work on my part to get UX data and results for our software in the short term, while defining new development processes that involve more UX input. It’s a lot of work, but I am truly enjoying myself. It’s not everyday that you get assigned solely to the work you love.
On top of that, I have been getting much more involved with the Winnipeg .NET community through the user groups. Not only have I been working with D’Arcy Lussier on the new Silverlight User Group, but I have starting to get involved with the Winnipeg .NET User Group as well. I hope to be taking a role with them in the upcoming months. I will be sure to keep you all posted.
Although the winds of change have swept the lands of Wesstyware, I am still the same Wessty that you all know and love. The difference is that I will be reprioritizing my personal projects a bit and probably be discussing UX a little more often on my blog.
With that in mind, my plan is to breathe some life back into this blog and update the content. As opposed to publishing a substandard web site, I figure I will coast along with what I have until I have the proper time to develop what I have in mind. Although, just because I’m making do with what I have doesn’t mean that things aren’t going to get better.
Over the next few weeks, I will be making some organizational changes to the blog. To be more specific, I am going to be cleaning up the categories for the posts, adding some pages, and limiting the comments on my posts to about 30 days. I am continuing to get great comments from people and I appreciate them, but I am finding it difficult keeping up with responding to people, especially on the older posts.
Realize that enjoy the comments and all the feedback and I hope that people keep them up with the new date cap on how long people can comment on my posts. Still, keep commenting on upcoming posts. If you want to comment on older posts drop me a line through the contact page or add me to Twitter (@Wessty) and send me a message. I’m pretty active in the “Twitterverse”, and would be happy to hear from everyone.
As I grow more comfortable in my new shoes at ANVIL, I hope to find the time to continue my work and discuss here soon. In the meantime though…
Catch you on the flip side.
I am happy to announce that I have succeeded in getting Digital Thoughts @ Wesstyware claimed at Technorati. Since I am using BlogEngine.NET to host there have been some issues getting things working the way, but after finally finding a solution, it appears that Technorati has changed their process a bit and the solution wasn’t necessary.
If you feel like checking out the blog you can find it here.
This also means that I have taken the first step in getting Wesstyware.com out there in the world, and with the release of Silverlight 3 and Microsoft Expression 3 Suite almost upon us, you will be seeing more posts about the development of my site using these new tools.
Catch you on the flip side.
That’s right! Now that I have completed the project with The Designer for the Mozilla Summer Design Challenge 2009, I have the need to start up a new project. What better than one I have started countless times over the years and now have the knowledge and experience to properly implement: my very own web page. I figure I will discuss it here and maybe get some feedback on what my plans are and hopefully getting some feedback.
I registered Wesstyware.com with the following intent:
Throughout my academic career, I always held an interest in web technology. I never really got to work on web specific work in school, which is where the idea for Wesstyware.com came about. Why not build myself a website while I’m learning about web development.
Since the inception of the idea, I have started the project from scratch about four times now for a number of reasons but mainly because school and “actual” work always took priority, thus I take breaks from development for months at a time. When I would finally get time to go back to the code I had worked on, I would just restart because I had new ideas for where I wanted to go with the site.
As you can guess, constantly restarting a project is never really the best way of getting something done. This time around though, I have experience under my belt, along with a new toolkit of technology and practices to make the project work.
For now, I’m only going to discuss the requirements I have listed for v1.0 for the project. They are light enough that I think they are quite doable, but concrete enough to leave little to no grey area for me to start drifting the project focus elsewhere.
There are other features that I plan to implemented throughout while under the v1.x version number, but I’ll wait to mention those until I actually finish v1.0.
One of the biggest problems I had whenever I would take a stab and creating Wesstyware.com was not having clearly defined sprints or phases. This time around, I have a plan with multiple phases, and I am going to list them below. Please note that the phases listed include what has already been completed for the project and what needs to be done before I actually continue work on the website itself.
I could go further, but I think this is a big enough chunk for me to chew for the next while, considering that I do work full-time, have something of a life outside of software development to maintain. The key part of my site that I want to make sure is done properly is the architecture, which I have down. Just like with any project, you want to be able to exchange components for others, without having to disturb everything else. This is where I failed in the past, but this time it’s different…this time, it’s personal.
Okay, so it’s not really personal, I just thought that sounded kind of intense. Getting back to my point though, being a UI/UX developer, I like playing with all sorts of presentation frameworks and technologies, which is why I require proper architecture to be completed.
My final comment will be to ask for some feedback about personal/professional websites that you browse for your own interests. Leave comments on this post about my site, or any site that you think works well or poorly. I want to get this right, and although I don’t expect v1.0 to be perfect, the more usable the better. Here are a couple of questions that could help get you started:
Any feedback or suggestions would be great. Until then world…
Catch you on the flip side.