Posts filed under "blogging"
There Everyday - This stuck with me as very true. Building your site’s following is down to delivering consistently. In recent years, I’ve not really continued up with my site, but that’s to be expected since it’s not my day job, and I’ve been writing it for over 8 years now. I’ve been working hard on updating things around here a bit, which should start appearing shortly.
Automate posting in Wordpress from Calepin using IFTTT - I have a massive post coming up about my preferred blogging solution, but right now, I’m experimenting with Calepin. I really would like a self hosted version, but this workaround is interesting. The thing is that using this system the site would depend upon my server, Dropbox, Calepin, IFTTT and WordPress all working nicely together. As opposed to Dropbox and my server (along with a self hosted version of Calepin).
http://www.brokenkode.com/automate-posting-in-wordpress-from-calepin-using-ifttt
I know, it’s been a while and by this stage I’m probably talking to myself, which is fair enough to be honest. There have been several things that have prevented me from actually writing and posting, which is really down to both environment and workflow. I was originally going to write a separate post for each topic, but I found that the two topics were closely interrelated.
Environment
The environment to help me publish hasn’t been ideal. The first reason was due to the fact that I don’t have any internet access in my home. It’s been like that for over a month now, and it’s really starting to become disruptive to me. I could post from work, however the firewalls are restrictive and that makes it a colossal pain in the ass.
Apart from the technical aspects of my current situation, silence is reflective of the mood I’m currently in about the internet. Once upon a time I used to love the internet. I used to live it on a daily basis. I was actively involved in trying to bring something different to it on a regular basis. Over the last few months and even years now that has changed. I think the problem is that the internet has changed considerably - and I have not found my place in it.
The barriers are smaller and the noise is much, much larger. Over time I could see less and less people commenting on my website, and my silly Facebook posts would garner more attention and responses. And so you loose a certain amount of interest in keeping things fresh, keeping things moving on the site.
The great thing about this site is that it has a history and it has a distinct style about it. I’ve written some good stuff and some shitty stuff as well. I’ve learnt a great deal, interacted with some great people.
Is it time to retire the site? I don’t think so - after years, I’ve finally got it into a state that I like it (I’ve had this site design for nearly 2 years now). As I write this I wonder if I could take it to part of it’s previous glory. Of course the main issue here is that it’s a completely different place and time, so things will be more difficult and that took a hell of a lot of commitment.
The reason I am still confident in the future of words on this website, is because of my new found love for simple text. I have this appreciation now of words that I have written. I think part of this new found love is down to a few tools, Notational Velocity, my iPhone, Simplenote and the brilliance of Markdown. The seamless integration between these tools, and the fact that all of my thoughts and notes about anything and everything are always with me, (obviously organised in a meticulous fashion) helps me to feel more empowered.
Which happily brings me to my next point. Once my technical barriers that have an affect on my environment, the next barrier which needs to be removed are those to my workflow. I’ve outgrown the current CMS. The current crop of content management systems don’t really provide the level of respect to text files that I would want.
Workflow
So what is the system that I would like to adopt right now? Well after trolling through the internet, I’ve not found something that actually fits my requirements (well nothing that is fully baked).
One solution which I thought had some potential (so much so that I actually coded the next iteration of my site using that system already), was Stacey. This had a couple of problems, mainly the lack of an iOS text editor that could be readily integrated into the workflow (there’s that word again) and secondly there is no archiving system, even though this could be a prime solution if something like this was added, although I have no idea how active the project currently is.
Marco does seem to be working on something that might be exceedingly interesting. He’s not published the source code, because he’s tinkering around with it, which is REALLY annoying. Get on with it and just ship the damn thing Marco. Geeks will huddle around it instantly.
Trolling on Github, I found a bunch of options available that actually do this (clearly I’m not the only one that feels this way). The most promising of the lot was MopBlown, which I’m actually talking with Chris about at the moment, to try and help him move things along, we’ll see how that moves along.
The existing paradigm where you login into an admin panel, wait for shit to load, then click on pages, wait for more shit to load, then you type in things, the wait for shit to get published or built or whatever is not for a small website. There is a better solution for this. Here’s a list of the things that I would like to see in the next generation of website management system with a direct focus on text and markdown.
- The system should be able to parse simple text files that are written in Markdown. I should be able to write something in my text editor, and either directly FTP the file (using something like Textwrangler or BBEdit). Editing would be as simple as opening the file locally and then editing away and saving again. An alternative method is to be able to put it in a Dropbox folder which is synched to a specific account set up for this sort of thing. The real issue here is that it should be able to do either of these things on any iOS enabled text editor with Dropbox synchronisation.
- I should also be able to send an email, also written in Markdown and it will parse this accordingly. Save it onto the server, as per the rest of the files as well should also ‘publish’ a file as well.
- The other part of this puzzle is how you get a bunch of other items into this system. If I see an image I like on a website, I read a quote I thought was good, I want to send a link, maybe on the very very odd occasion I want to have a video (very rare for me to do that), then I should have a way to do this. I should have a backend of some description that would allow me to actually send this information. The backend should then store the post as a text file and an image, saved in a media folder.
- The final part of this system is that it should resolve archiving in a simple way. Depending on the date that the original date from file in Dropbox and then should be able to show an archive of the files depending on when it was originally ‘published’.
As you can tell, I’m in this weird transitional state at the moment. There are so many excellent and mature methods of publishing on the web, but none of them are for me at the moment, they don’t fit into my workflow.
The thing that I naturally permeate towards instinctively are are the things that I basically want, admire or are curious about. These are the things that I basically would like to have. These are the things that put a smile on my face, and which ultimately I like to talk about.
Cognisant: adjective [ predic. ] having knowledge or being aware of
This thinking actually can be attributed in many ways to Objectified which honestly completely changed the way I look and appreciate products and design. I guess that was the point of it all, but it seriously touched me in a profound way that no other documentary has ever done. A year and a half after I watched it I still think about things it said or tried to say. Sure there were several douche bags on there, but the message was there.
Crucially, in an in advert way it’s basically opened my eyes as to what this particular site will be about and has been building towards all these years.
While I’ve always wanted a space for my projects to live, and my art, it’s only a small part of me and there may be months before I am able to show what I’m working on a regular basis, even though I honestly am creating things on a relatively regular basis. It’s not just about what I create, it’s not just my therapy. It needed focus.
Which brings us to the here and now. Over the last couple of years I’ve been honing and observing things as I develop a sense of what I like and what I don’t like. Sometimes I used this site to achieve this. Recently I’ve been thinking that ultimately the site needed a direction, something it’s not had since it began. The focus seemed to be on design in general, then it meandered off to blogging software, which was like this loop of eating it’s own tail.
The thing that I hope to concentrate on in the future is the idea Cognisant Design.
It took a bloody long time to finally come up with this collection of words. I kept floating between ‘Considered’ and ‘Cognisant’. They are close to each other in meaning, but it’s more than thinking about something. It’s about knowing the reasons for those decisions. I’m sure I’m not the first to come up with these words together, but I hope to bring to the fore what this actually means and highlight examples of this design sense in action.
It’s not a question of minimal design. It’s not a question of functional design, it’s a question of design that is thought out completely, where things we done in a very calculated fashion, even if those calculations lead to what might be hyper detail or bright bursts of colour.
Although I’ve tried to describe it in this post, I feel that the best way to show what it is that I am talking about is to actually show rather than tell. I don’t think I can post this sort of thing on a regular basis, so the linkblogging will continue, however in addition to these quick things I will be focusing on Cognisant Design and hopefully we’ll all learn something new together.
Read & Trust - Now see this is interesting. It’s basically a much better 9rules from way back. For those who don’t know what 9rules was, it was one of the original blogging networks. The great thing about Read & Trust is that it appears to be run by someone who appreciates and knows what they’re doing. One of my biggest online failures was Inksmith. I loved the idea and it’s a shame it never came to be as i originally envisioned it, but I guess having something like this is the next best thing.
So I’m off to Greece on Saturday. This is my first time off since I started work in Lebanon and at PDP. I’ve had a couple of days off here and there (Bank holidays, not my own days off mind) and it’s been a pretty long slog. There’s sooo much that has happened over the various months that honestly I don’t know where to start.
Needless to say I feel it’s well deserved. To be fair it’s not all fun and games as I’ll be trying to sort out my suit for the wedding and also trying to finish off the invitation cards (we’ve been designing the hell out of these cards with Yasmine).
Anil Dash - See that’s what I’m talking about, a bit of good old fashioned blogging. Also I miss browsing blogs and getting design ideas or things that they’ve done. In this case, the ‘Read Later’ button which links to Instapaper. That’s pretty damn cool. For the longer posts, definitely a must, need to get onto that.
So, the first part of this experiment is complete. I’ve basically spent the last 3 weeks blogging solidly on the ‘Kode. It’s been a mixture of links and opinion columns and random thoughts. in that time I’ve not tweeted at all, in fact it’s all been on here. So the next step is to see which of the two platforms garners more attention in general. Obviously on Twitter it’s just going to be that, a whole bunch of links with very little commentary, but lets see if that platform is any good at generating traffic towards this site.
I’m just curious how powerful twitter is and if it has effectively killed blogging as I know it (I believe it has, but I’d like to make sure). So it might be a little quiet over here. If you are looking for the same type of content, then I’d suggest you head on over to @khaledaboualfa for a little bit of the same, although I’m sure I’ll post things on here as well (just no where as near the level of the past 3 weeks).
That is pretty strange. I just was looking at the traffic logs on the site and I noticed a really really strange trend. At the start of the year I was seriously moving back up in terms of traffic. June was an epic month but I think that’s mainly attributed to the fact that I had a spreadsheet hosted here for the world cup and that generated a ton of traffic from Google.
But after that month there is this unbelievable drop of nearly 1/5 of the visitors. I mean even the months before this epic month were not as low as that. Did I change anything between the two months? Well for a start there was a less posting on the site? The ‘Kode is not like other sites where I basically post 3 or 4 times a day and have a super specific niche. The site is a personal blog that talks about all sorts of random pop culture items.
There is a ton of those on the web nowadays, but the question is finding which ones have got a unique voice, and that’s actually incredibly difficult to do. I neither have the time, nor do I feel like I am part of a community of people any more. Blog comments don’t exist any more, or no one really uses them as much as they used.
I guess it’s all a matter of perspective, and I don’t mind the smaller readership, it’s kind of fun to be honest, because I can go back to being as foul mouthed as I want without having to worry about anyone taking offence (or maybe less so than I would normally), it’s just what the hell happened in July to drive EVERYONE away :).
The plan is, and lets see if I can keep this up, is to give at least 2 posts a day. Sometimes they will be links, other times it will be longer based posts on things that i enjoy or am going through, lets see if I can keep this up.brok
The act of blogging on a daily basis, seriously seems like it was centuries ago, when only a few years ago I would have been doing this nearly every day a couple of times. The amount of words that I typed over the years now that I sit down and consider everything is a lot (others did a hell of a lot more, but then again others made it their business to do this). I’d talk and discuss just about everything that was on my mind, in detail. Reams of consciousness would come out on a daily basis for people to digest, and there were many people at the time digesting it all. Now it’s very quiet over here. Part of me actually likes this quiet, and another part remembers the good old days when blogs reigned supreme. I guess now it’s all about the 140 characters or the facebook updates or the plethora of other ways that people communicate online. Also I don’t spend enough time tweaking the site, but that’s only because I’m actually happy with the overall look. The pages are clear (it’s taken me this long to get to this stage) and I finally have a mini portfolio section that I can point people towards. It’s not innovative in any way. Hell it’s not even particular exciting, but it’s clean and it’s minimal and it does it’s job to convey the information well. I would argue that it needs three more sets of colours to signify the changing of the seasons (which I very well might actually do). The thing is that a site is only relevant if you actually continually update with current issues. From a promotional point of view I don’t do that any more. I hardly go online to other blogs, I don’t reply to many tweets. I don’t find things I’m interested in and go for it. The main reason? I guess it’s because I did that for years…not months, years. And now, I don’t really care about that stuff. I finally have what I want in terms of an online presence, one that I am happy with. I’ve tried over the years to give something back to people that gave me something and gave a great deal of my time and sleep to this. Now it’s about my day job and the free time that I have I want to concentrate on my comic book. I’m slowly starting to creep my way back into getting my second draft completed. Obviously life always seems to get in the way, which I’m going to have to learn to either balance or deal with, but that’s a post for another time.
My god, it’s been a good long while since I’ve posted here, and honestly there is sooo much good stuff to talk about. The main issue I guess is that now my thoughts are distributed across the net. From Flickr, to Facebook, from Twitter to Instagram, to Google Reader. It’s no longer concentrated in one spot.
Also, I don’t update with personnal stuff, which really is what this blog was originally meant to be about. It’s a long form of expression, something that none of the above are.
So here’s the first bit of news, I’m officially engaged. Yeah, pretty sudden, even for me, but I guess, when you know, you know. And I knew very very quickly with Yasmine, from the first date I knew there was something up. Hopefully I might get her to start blogging on here as well.
Now all I need is a Habari app for my iphone and I’m good - yeah I got myself a brand spanking new iphone, which I love of course.
OhLife - If you start seeing more blogging action here on the ‘Kode in the coming months, it’ll be thanks to this site. Over the years I’ve used different methods to actually communicate online. First it was a newsletter to my friends as a long bastard email. Then it was this blog. Then it was Facebook for a while and a bit of twitter. Now, now it’s nothing really. But I love writing, and I love maintaining this site. Writing an email to myself every day, with my most banal things is a good way of getting back to blogging again. At least that’s the thought process.
One thing I love about the OhLife site is just how beautifully put together it actually is. It’s a single column design (just the way I like it) with subtle backgrounds and little details everywhere. The colour scheme is calm and the little bit of red brings out everything as well.
The guys have been smart enough to make sure to allow you to export your entries as well incase you wanna do something with them, and setting up an account is exactly as it should be, completely painless.
You probably haven’t noticed but now the ‘Kode comes with a completely responsive shiney design, and by responsive design I mean it responds to the size of your screen, well by responds to the size of your screen, I mean if it’s less than 480px (size of your iphone/ipod/blackberry?) then you’ll still be able to read very clearly (without scrolling horizontally) my AMAZING writing, and the brilliant commentary that I provide to you on an extremely sporadic nature - what can I say I’m feeling in a sarcastic mood today.
So if you’re reading it on your feed reader, I guess you could visit the site properly to have a look. The main area i’m pretty happy with is the fact that even the images resize to accommodate (like in the illustration section).
The truth of the matter is, the current version of the ‘Kode is soo simple that doing this was pretty painless, and took an a few hours to read up on how to actually do it. The best resource as you would expect is found at these two A List Apart articles:
Then of course there are the prime examples to look at how this is achieved. Jonathan Hick’s for example has gone ALL out, with stylesheets for the iphone, ipad, 600px resolution, smaller, bigger whatever, it’s crazy - who the hell’s got the time? The general plan for the site is to keep doing general maintenance on the site and adding little things like this and generally bringing the design tighter together, trying to stay abreast with what’s going on the web (rather than being ahead of the curve).
Obviously, I could give a shit if it works in Internet Explorer.
So I’m there minding my own business, just checking my feeds and I see a familiar sight. Manji was mentioned on Devlounge as one of the single column themes of choice.
That’s pretty cool actually, seeing as it was designed over 4 years ago and hasn’t really been modified since. What’s interesting to me really is that there does seem a severe lack of super simple themes out there. Super simple is fucking hard to do and make stick - but that’s a topic for another time, which I fully intend on exploring.
Oh and btw, this is officially Broken Kode’s 1500th post.
Inspired by Coudal, I’ve decided to have a Page 2. It’s basically everything that doesn’t fit into my minimalist design. I’ll have to go into this design a bit more to be honest, because it’s basically longest running design. Every time I try and make it ‘better’ I always end up coming back to the same thing, only with a minor tweak here or there. I’ve not really talked about it, because it never seems all that interesting. What is interesting is that I’ve got over 15 iterations of the current design as I experimented with layout always coming back. I’ll have to post them in a gallery at some point.
It’s been 6 months since I started my sabbatical on 23rd of October 2009. Without a doubt this single best decision I’ve ever taken in my life was to press pause, take a step back and review where I was and where I wanted to be.
The plan for the sabbatical was actually very fluid. When I was asked what I wanted to do with the time off, my general response was that I wanted to take some time to calm down, work on my graphic novel and see the family. That was actually all true. Most of my family questioned my decision to start work on my graphic novel in Saida, Lebanon. I’ve lived all my life in a major city, Athens & London. Saida is anything but a major city. It’s a village. Made of concrete. With little in the way of excitement. What the hell was I doing?
I was taking the time to sit at my desk, do some drawing, live in my own apartment, look at the Mediterranean every morning, run on the beach, avoid public transport, see the family, eat some good food, discover a whole new city. I was changing my routine. How long was I going to last? I wasn’t sure. What was interesting to me is that every month I kept extending my stay, against all odd. What can I say, the place has an irresistible charm. Other elements in my life also started happening (but I’m not ready to share those just yet, but needless to say I’m very happy with the way things are going on that front).
So I decided to look at the option for staying here would be. Could I find a job here? The truth is I did the interview rounds in March and April of this year. It was an amazing period for me, only because I’ve NEVER done a real interview apart from the one I took when I was trying to get into Arup. The difference of course is that i was in a unique position. I wasn’t looking to leave Arup because I didn’t like the place. The places i was going to interview had to basically CONVINCE me that I wanted to join them. I wasn’t looking for a way out of Arup. I was looking for a way into Lebanon. The thing was I wasn’t willing to compromise.
Finally after several interviews and even spending an entire week in the office, I’ve decided to take a position at Pierre Dammous and Partners. It’s a small practice and feels more like a family than anything else. The great thing about it all is of course that I have a great opportunity to actually start building something around me. It’s interesting in contrast I suppose to Arup where things take a bit of time and have to go through a greater hierarchy (the nature of a large organisation no doubt - although it does it much better than others).
So in a nutshell, I’m moving to Lebanon, having never spent more than a month, I’m now poised to stay here for the next few years at least. It’s a massive transition for me which bring a great deal of opportunity for me.
So what did I actually achieve during this period off? I gained a great deal, no doubt, but what did I actually CREATE? Well most of these are documented in a fashion on this site. For my own benefit I’ll list them here.
Aitus Moralis - This was my focus until the end of March. I would work on it for at least 6-8 hours a day. It wasn’t as intense as I would have liked it to be, but I was learning how to do this. The final outcome is the first draft of the entire graphic novel, character descriptions and environment descriptions. I’ve also begun design many of the characters (of which there are over 50 in this the first of the series.
Logos - I finished off a couple of logos in the time off. These were mainly side projects that I wanted to do. I did a Habari logo (which obviously wasn’t adopted, but was fun to make). I did a ViaSound logo for my friend Yanni (not sure if he’s using it). I finished a Vivid Creations logo for my cousin Yahya (who I know is using it, and has used it in a great way).
POP4 - I completed several pages of this little idea of a comic. It’s still on the cards to continue, however the truth is I need to get into a rythm, with work and life in general, which I don’t have. The concept is simple, split an A4 piece of paper into 4 vertical panels. Spend 1hour a day on each panel. Don’t think about it before hand, don’t think about it after it’s done. The whole point is to get some art done, in an hour. I stopped the routine as I was working on Aitus Moralis, but I will be getting into this hopefully once i get back to Lebanon and start work again.
Broken Kode - I completed this design that you are looking at right now. The thing about this design is that it’s actually pretty solid (in my mind at least). So much so that every time I go to mess about with it, i end up going back to this single column, completely minimalist design. One of the great parts of this design is that I have been concentrating on the content itself and created a framework for myself to actually bring the content to the front. The illustrations page is one i am very fond of.
Family Portrait - This was a really fun side project. With the house being renovated in Lebanon, there was an empty door which we decided to try and do something about. The solution was to have a stained glass portrait of the family. It took me something like 3 months to finally get the drawing done (after many failed attempts) but the final outcome is unique.
Artwork - I did a decent amount of artwork at the start of the sabbatical, which ultimately I won’t be able to use (maybe in the making of companion book to Aitus Moralis). However one of the greatest aspects of this sabbatical is that I FINALLY achieved my own style. No more am I a bad copy of such and such artist. You can see influences sure, but I strive for my own path now, which has been a long time coming. My main weakness at the moment is facial expressions so I’ll be doing a lot of drills in the coming year to sort this out, because it’s a terrible weakness which I have to resolve.
There is soo much to talk about, and even more to show. The coming year I will be beaming the ‘Kode from it’s second spiritual home. It will no longer be out of London as it has been since it’s start, but rather from Beirut.
So it seems I might have come across as being negative and I guess some have seen my last few posts as diatribes.
Just to be clear on something I’m genuinely not trying to be rude, I’m trying to build awareness because I can see a problem that I think will ultimately have an effect on the software and the developers themselves; which obviously I don’t want, because I enjoying using this software immensely and I want it to succeed. I don’t gain anything personally from doing this, except the satisfaction of giving something back.
I think the general consensus in Habariland is split with regards to my logo proposal:
Those who think the current logo is good and we don’t need something new.
and those who like the ‘idea’ of the question mark, just not the current execution of the one I’ve presented.
Honestly, I can live with that; actually this can be considered as progress. Would it be useful to have a look at drawing a couple of other question marks? Would that be a rewarding or ultimately futile effort/exercise? Should i just carry on with the next task I’ve been working on (namely the website)? Would it actually be something to present for a vote by the community? Is there any point?
I ask only because I obviously want things to move in a positive direction to make the software better and to make the experience of using the software better.
So now that we’ve got ourselves a kick ass logo, now would be a good time to make some badges so that everyone can put them on their websites and you know, spread the word.
In this set you’ll also find a few with Habari written in them.
See how that logo gets integrated? The font used is Gill Sans, which is one of my favourite fonts - you can see it in use on this site. The reason I think it works here is because it’s rounded so it retains an element associated with the logo (the playful nature of the logo), and yet bold and modern (like the software). The package contains:
Logo
PNG - Light grey on white background
PNG - Dark grey on light grey background
PNG - White on dark grey background
EPS - Vector for you to customise as you wish
Logo with Habari
These come in two sizes, 460px and 180px widths.
PNG - Dark grey on light grey background
PNG - Light grey on dark grey background
PNG - White on dark grey background
PNG - White on light grey background
These will also find a permenant home at www.brokenkode.com/habari .
You don’t need a designer. You need a marketeer.
That’s what my brother said to Yanni last week sometime when we were discussing his online radio station as he was lamenting that not many people were listening to his station. That got me thinking about Habari. It’s been going on for a while now, and yet I don’t feel like the software has hit a critical mass, which is a shame. I think there are several reasons for this, but I’ll start with the first part in trying to help the guys and gals move forward.
Branding
I’m not actually surprised that a proper branding and logo were not agreed on, past the h-dumbell thing. Yes, you can kind of see the H in there, and if you really really try (after someone points it out to you) you might see a bell in there as well, but what that doesn’t have much if anything to do with the software, what it does or what it is?
To be completely blunt, from an aesthetic POV it’s not terribly elegant and doesn’t really convey anything about the actual software, the community, etc. That eyesore has to be sorted out for the good of the software (I’ll be going into this in more detail in a future post). Rather than just bitch and moan about something, and not actually do anything about it, I thought I’d take up the challenge. The thing is I did attempt to do this 3 years ago, and I came up with this lovely collection:
Yeah, shut up. I can actually see my thought process, but I guess at the time I was more interested in making something that appealed to the people that had originally started the work (the original Cabal). Thankfully, now I’m just out to make a good logo, that people can use in a plethora of applications, is memorable as the Habari software and is nice enough for me to want to include said mark on my website as well.
Obviously the logo should reflect the software itself, which I have repeatedly been calling it elegant, both in code and in design.
The Question
So I sat down at my desk last night, thinking I’ll spend a couple of hours on this tops, and I wrote down:
Habari
What’s the news?
Then I paused. Why the hell didn’t I think of this before? Habari may by definition be a noun, but it’s also a question. What’s the news? Habari is also the answer, a method to provide the news online. The simplest answers are sometimes staring you in the face. The logo should be the question mark. For some reason I instantly knew how that question mark was to look like, at least in my head, but first I thought I’d try seeing what it looks like with some typical typefaces, Helvetica, Gill Sans etc. This is what it looked like:
Convinced that the actual idea had legs and the more I thought about it the more I was convinced that this as an idea is a good one I started sketching. The thing is I didn’t need to sketch for long, because like I said the second I had the idea, the logo was fully formed in my mind. There would be no harsh lines. The reason for this is because that’s not what Habari is about. It’s about elegance, not sharpness. It does things slightly differently than other to smooth your general experience (this is evident from the installer through to the admin panel and beyond).
So here’s my proposal for the new Habari logo:
I’ve also included this set of iterations, which show the logo in both dark and in light colours, on white and on dark backgrounds. The logo remains distinct in all these incarnations.
This next set shows the logo at different sizes: 100px, 75px, 50px, 25px and 16px - click here for the full size of the image.
There have been other attempts at looking at this in the past, all of which have failed, so I don’t think that this time is going to be any different, because it’s a very touchy subject (which is why it’s not moved forward in 3 years). I don’t really expect anything from this exercise to be honest, except that I for one want to at least know that I tried to help in this regard and gave a viable (and hopefully useful) alternative.
And if anything, it would make an awesome t-shirt as well:
For those who know me from my professional life (I’m a Chartered Engineer), know what a complete filing freak I am. All graduates that have helped me out, or that I’ve had anything to do with their training have gone through an induction with regards to how to file things properly. It’s a MASSIVE bug bear with me.
When I had that moment of madness and I moved over to WordPress, what struck me was that Habari’s elegance doesn’t extend to just the admin panel. In Habari it extends to the filing structure, which I really want to shine a bit of a spotlight on, only because I think it’s not generally discussed and I think that the developers deserve mad props for building this elegance in.
When you download a copy of Habari and you open your folder, you’re presented with the following files and folders:
Let’s compare some of the other people:
WordPress
Textpattern
Chyrp
There are a couple of things to take from the above. The first is the number of files without folders. In Habari, this is a total of 3, in WordPress it’s 23, in Textpattern it’s 4, while in Chyrp it’s 5.
The second thing to pay close attention to is the names chosen for these folders. I know which I feel is the clearest filing structure of those above.
Lets turn our attention to the main menu in Habari. As I mentioned before there has to be a better way than the current method. The reasoning for the current menu is simple, once you start adding all the menu items (including those provided by the various plugin) the list becoming very long indeed. Without any plugin menus this is what is currently there (including one of the expanded menu version):
And here’s that menu with one of the side menus popping out:
From my personal use, I only need 8 menu items in total:
New Entry
New Page
Manage
Comments
Dashboard
Plugins
Options
Logout
For me everything else is completely superflous, or at least it’s bloody rare for me to even go there, like once a year if that (I don’t think I’ve ever gone to the logs and groups menu for example). As I said that’s only because of the way I choose to use Habari. Other users might feel like they want something a bit different, and this type of functionality would allow
Proposal
The Menu plugin would allow you (in the options page) to hide all the menu items, spare the Dashboard, Options and Logout menu items (for obvious reasons). From then on, it’s open season for you to configure your drop down menu as you wish. This would reduce the need for side menus to pop out. It would also empower the user to customise the menu which would in turn hopefully streamline the workflow, your route from A to B.
The other aspect of this Menu plugin that would also hopefully enhance the experience, would be bringing the shortcut numbers back. In the options menu we would also provide an option to assign the menu option with a keyboard shortcut to a menu item. This way we’d get back to a more streamlined workflow, which is slightly hindered by an additional keyboard stroke (at least in my eyes it is).
Future Details
While talking with Michael on #irc about the above, one of the things that he brought forward is maybe having an option to expand all the menu items by double clicking ‘Q’ or something like that, which I think is an excellent idea. Also in the options menu apart from just a quick tickbox to see whether or not you want the menu item to be shown or not we might also be able to provide the option to rearrange the menu itself, thus providing further customisation, enhancing elegance.
One of my absolute favourite plugins on Habari is the Publish Quote plugin written by Michael. The plugin has done well by me for like over a year, but in my mind there is some room for slight improvement in the way it operates. Habari does a great job of staying out of your way (as I found out the hard way) and I feel that this plugin is really a direct extension of that, which will make it even easier for you to actually publish your thoughts quicker and faster, ultimately making you blog more.
Currently the plugin works by taking you back to main admin panel with all the various fields filled in (according to your option preferences). There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with this approach. As long as you’re logged in, you have no problems (and seeing as I use the persistence of memory plugin my Scott, I’m ok on that front as well).
Proposal
My absolute favourite bookmarklet of all time has got to be the one used by Asaph. I’ve been using that particular software since it came out and it’s done extremely well for me, even thought it’s never been updated since it’s release (save for a minor point release).
The ‘new’ Publish quote plugin would operate in a similar fashion. Clicking the bookmarklet would provide a drop down card which would sit above the page. The card would look like this:
Details
When you click on your bookmarklet, this card slides down to reveal three pertinent fields and the save and publish buttons. The design stylings are taken from the admin panel. The background is slightly transparent (not as much as the message logs in the admin, but enough for you to notice a difference).
The card has rounded corners (to be consistent with the admin panel) and also includes the slightly greyed rounded box in the top left hand corner around the title of the plugin (more on this below).
User Experience
In my mind, the nice thing about the way in which this proposed bookmarklet operates, is that your ‘workflow’ is improved. You don’t leave the site that you are appreciating (or not as the case may be) and wanting to write about. Your blogging experience is enhanced by not taking you away from your ‘target’. The software then stays out of your way and because of that hopefully entices you to use the software more, because it’s that easy.
After all the whole point of this is to communicate your thoughts and ideas as easily as possible in an enjoyable fashion.
Future Iterations
Looking to the future, while maintaining what makes this plugin elegant and useful is important. The ‘Quote’ text has the small greyed background (which follows the structure of the drop down menu in the main admin panel). The reason for this is to possibly allow some further functionality into the game. By choosing another option from this additional menu, you could choose to post an image from a website instead of a quote by choosing the image (in a similar way to how Asaph does this). Or simiarly you could choose a video etc. This is just one direction that this plugin could go.
Earlier this month I moved this blog back over to WordPress in an act of madness. I hated it and did little blogging in that time. In considering why I hated the experience at WordPress so much, I came upon an interesting parallel. Habari is to WordPress what Apple is to Microsoft.
One of the things that can be said about Apple when compared to Microsoft is that Apple provides a more elegant computing experience that has been better thought out. In a similar fashion Habari is by far the more elegant product where the details have been sweated out and the experience has been better considered.
As a simple example when you install WP you get a random password in your email box and then the second you log into the panel you get a message asking you to change your password. Why didn’t you let me choose a password during the installation process?
Meanwhile on Habari, the installation is all done on the same page, you insert your preferred password right there.
As another example once you’ve logged into WordPress you’re bomobarded with this clusterfuck of items - TMI (too much information). Yes, i know you can remove most of that stuff (but this is all feeding into my analogy). These items aren’t necessary, they’re added first and you are asked to remove them. It’s like when you buy yourself a Dell PC and get a whole bunch of crapware installed on it, which you can remove (most of the time).
Habari doesn’t have that shit to begin with. These items have not been added from the outset. These things have been considered. And who else do we know that doesn’t like superflous stuff cluttering your view and generally getting in your way? These are just a couple of examples which I might expand upon, because the above is basically the tip of the iceberg.
These are subtle differences but important I think in the final assessment, afterall the devil is in the details.
After a moment of pure madness, I went back to WordPress, only to find that actually the creature comforts that I had become accustomed to in Habari were not present. It had such a detrimental effect on me that I could even post small links. The bookmarklets didn’t work, the thing felt heavy and I couldn’t wrap my head around the various elements of the code that had passed me by.
I’ll be writing more about Habari in the coming months as there definitely is a lot of work being done, but it just needs a bit of, consolidation of sorts.
If you’re reading this in your feed reader, then have a look at the site, which looks a little bit different, as I’ve also updated to version 9.
Although not an immense milestone by most blogs estimation (especially the professional blogs which pay you by the post), I think 1300 posts on ‘Kode is a significant achievement to sit back and take stock of. 1300 posts is roughly 216 posts per year, which is a little over 1 post every two days for the past six years. Truth is, there have been some pretty busy days and some very quiet days (nay months) over the years but overall there has been a consistent output of ideas, thoughts, critism and links over the years.
Changes
Even with the rise of twitter, I’ve still managed to keep this website alive. The truth is using it as an extended bookmarking tool has kept it fresh and alive in my mind and effectively kept the site relevant. See many of my recent posts (in the past year or so) could have easily been covered as tweets. The thing is I love my site. I like using it as a tool to communicate my ideas.
However the biggest change I’ve made here this year is removed comments. Comments were really sporadic in general, and the only thing I could count on was bloody spam. Getting rid of the spam has been great, but of course it’s also meant that if in fact I wanted to have a discussion with anyone then it’d have to come from an email, or on twitter.
Design
On the design aspect of things, I’ve never been more happy with the general look of the website than I am now. It’s like 5 years of experimentation have brought me to this site. In many respects it’s as minimal as the very first iteration of the site. The truth is the site doesn’t have any wow factors, no drawings, no clever javascript, nothing of the sort. What it lacks in those bells and whistles, I feel it makes up in form and function. Refined design.
Future
Obviously no idea what the future will hold, but it’ll involve a lot more art coming onto the site. I’ve been drawing more this year than I have,….well ever. Obviously my biggest concern is finding a solution that actually works for me as well as Asaph and Habari have this year.