Anatomy of a Blog Move – Part VI

[UPDATE] Dynamics indeed — after publishing this post, I ran into the same annoyances with Google Docs described here. It appears publishing to blogs, at least WordPress, isn't working.

Dynamics, by definition, are prone to change. I mentioned earlier I like Zoho Writer a lot — and I do. It's unfortunate that I've been finding Zoho takes so long to load compared to the much swifter Google Docs. This speed is crucial to me because I often have ideas ready to go which can't wait, and even a few seconds of idle time is enough to distract me. I've already reported my problem, so let's see what happens.

As it stands, I'm typing this from Google Docs. When evaluating performance of a program, I look from anywhere in my workflow where I'm not the bandwidth limiter, but the machine is: Zoho's add-a-link dialog comes up instantly, compared to the 0.5 seconds for Google's — which feels better than it used to be — but all those fractional seconds add up during the course of processing a document, from draft to publish.

I've gotten familiar with a killer WordPress plugin called aLinks: what it basically does is, you specify keywords and it automatically hyperlinks them. Which saves you the trouble of manually linking oft-cited things; in my case that's "Second Life". See?

Over the weekend, I also hashed through ~3 months of backposts and categorized them just to gain some momentum and greater familiarity with WP's Categories. You may notice some of them sound generic, others are uniquely mine: I'll evolve them organically, fold some into subcategories, and delete others as I go along. It's going to be a ride.

(Whee my first MORE tag on here!)

I highly recommend WP-Cats to categorize posts en masse. The creator, Mike, even helped me to get the list in alphabetical order like how it's actually displayed on my blog. Thankya graciously, Mike!

I also upgraded to WordPress 2.0.5 which came out a couple of days ago. Welcome refinements, and learned about how to do it so next time will be even easier. It wasn't the simplest thing — considerably harder than installing WP — and required doing lots of folder-shuffling, but all's good now.

Other plugins I've installed are Feedburner Feed Replacement to ensure each and everyone subscribing to my RSS feed gets to the right place. I just wish I knew how to show FeedBurner's own page @ http://feeds.feedburner.com/torley and not Firefox 2 or IE or Safari's overlapped "subscribe to this?" versions. Anyone know?

Speaking of Firefox 2, I bit the bullet and upgraded, and found most of my commonly-used extensions on the other side. Tab Mix Plus thankfully has a preemptive release candidate (look under the Developer Comments). I'm going to miss Resizeable Textarea until it's updated; the decisive blow which is wounding me is LACK OF VERTICAL TABS!

If that sounds weird and space-wasting to you, consider this: a horizontal config is decent for a few tabs, but odds are, even on a widescreen, having more than a dozen makes the situation awfully claustrophobic. You might have to resort to dinky little tab scrolling arrows, or the confusing muddle that can be multi-row tabs. Since you're going multi-row, why not opt for using the whole left- or right side of your web browser? What starts off appearing to be squanderish behavior quickly has its gains — especially when you use Tab Mix Plus' option to select a tab when you've hovered over it briefly. No clicking! At least, that's what works for my "big picture view" with a few dozen tabs open. And yes, that is a necessity.

I don't have a widescreen monitor, but since a lot of blogs are fixed-width and confined to 800 or 1024 pixels horizontally (mine's the latter), it really pays to make use of your screen's real estate. There doesn't seem to be a lot of awareness about vertical tabbing, but since even AIM Triton, a leader in the instant messaging market, uses it, I similarly hope Second Life will adopt an option for it in the future.

After all, studies show your reading comprehension is higher with relatively short columns — which is why hardcopy newspapers and other print publications use them. Currently in SL, my IM window is spanned the whole width in order to keep as many IM tabs as possible in view, and it's undesirable. And while Jakob Nielsen may be "the king of usability" and MySpace's arch-nemesis (heh), I'm surprised he hasn't switched to a cleaner Content Management System, nor do his current pages use fixed widths to save someone the trouble of resizing their browser window. At least there's a blog in his honor demonstrating "what if". (But both of these websites use fonts which are uncomfortably too large and too small.)

Ah, things people have always noticed but don't comment about until you bring it up.

Anyway, I'm off on a tangent, but it loops back in —

My blog's readable width is slightly less than my old one's. That's intentional: (1) it makes a little more breathing space for the 2-column layout, which makes it quicker to navigate around; and (2) it increases readability. I won't be able to stuff some of the wider images I have historically, but when I do decide to go big, I'll link to a supersized piccie on its own page anyway. Makes sense.

I'm enthused about putting my new home @ DreamHost (another aLinked keyword, see?) to good use. A few days in and I'm feeling great. I'll track progress.

Also on the visual tip, I want to figure out how to embed YouTube videos. It looks like WordPress is stripping the code out by default (argh!), so something else to work on. I recently got a Director account, and I'll be writing more about this soon.

Tagged as: Blog Improvements, General