This Site – Nicolas Demers

The New Look

Well, that took a lot longer than I expected. But then these things usually do, right?

The design really only came together in the last couple of months. I remember at Northern Voice I was still struggling with placing a daily photo on the front page, with all the headaches that would entail. I still think it’s a cool idea, but I just couldn’t make it work. On the other hand, I’ve still got Sunset Beach and the West End in my header image. Right now it’s a static photo, but with a bit of thought I’m sure I could make it dynamic…

The other thing that pulled everything together was playing with Twenty Ten. As soon as 3.0 came out I dove right in and started building a new child theme. In hindsight Twenty Ten might not have been the best place to start, since a lot of my layout ideas came from a beautiful theme called Erudite.Though the documentation for Erudite mentions specifically that it’s for writers, I’ve found that it does pretty well for any content. (Hell, my inspiration, the lovely Life For Beginners, is very photo-heavy, and it works quite well.) I was attracted to Erudite’s clean and open layout, with minimal content in the sidebar, and had decided then that blogrolls, category archives, or what have you, could either go in the footer or just disappear.

Mind you, Twenty Ten is a great learning tool, so it certainly wasn’t wasted time. At WordCamp one of the speakers said you should try to develop your themes from scratch, because when adapting existing themes you may wind up with unknown design issues or unnecessary features. True enough (for example, I’m not using half of its widget areas): but I’d never gotten so deep into a theme before, and at least now I have first-hand experience of all these features I may or may not need.

What else? A lot of little things: threaded comments, gravatars, an honest-to-gosh contact form, courtesy of the excellent Contact Form 7 plugin. A redone blog archive page, inspired by that of Equivocality, and using the same plugin, Smart Archives.

Also, I decided to drop categories and go with tags. For a while I thought about using both, but every category scheme I came up with was either (a) so broad it became useless, or (b) so fine-grained it might as well be a tag cloud.

And finally, a portfolio! I’ve been talking about my volunteer web design projects for a while now, so why not show them off?

Accentuate the Visual

I’ve been working on a redesign of this blog for a while now, on and off, and it’s finally close to done. At the same time I’m updating a lot of my posts to add more inline photos.

I’ve been working on a redesign of this blog for a while now, on and off, and it’s finally close to done. At the same time I’m updating a lot of my posts to add more inline photos. It hit me, looking at other more photo-intensive blogs (like the lovely Life for Beginners), that my posts are mostly unbroken walls of text. Even those that aren’t, just have a few modest thumbnails linking to their respective Flickr pages.

Well, that just won’t do. Not only will more photos make my brilliant words easier to read, but visitors won’t have to click to another page to get the story. It’s win-win!

I’ll be adding other elements, too, like gravatars and pull quotes. Maybe an abstract for the very long ones. And drop caps, too? We’ll see. Thinking visually is still new to me, but I’m getting the hang of it!

Geography

A little while back I wrote that, in the blog’s new version, I’d be proudly displaying my daily pictures of Sunset Beach in the sidebar. This is still the plan. And with a much wider layout it’s absolutely feasible. But in the last few days of figuring out widgetizing sidebars (two of them), installing a few more plugins, deciding on all the right navigation aids and so on, I hadn’t really visualised how big a 240 x 180 image was. Stuck on top of the sidebar, I feel it’s becoming a focus point of the whole page.

I didn’t really see this coming, though I probably should have.

Which… is not a bad thing, actually. I’ve been thinking for a while that my blog would become less focused on posts, and more on my current projects and photography. But I hadn’t fully grasped how the layout would have to change with the content. And frankly, I still don’t. This is very new to me, and I’m still feeling my way across the weird, wonderful landscape of Web design.

Tagging

I’ve been reading this very excellent blog full of tips and info about Wordpress. Right now I’m pondering tags and categories.

I’ve been reading this excellent blog full of tips and info about WordPress. Right now I’m pondering tags and categories.

Since I switched to WordPress for the current version, I’ve been using categories and not tags. For a while I tried to get a hierarchy of categories, but I just couldn’t decide on the right one. And the end result is a very unbalanced list. “Comics” and “Life” have quite a few posts, while “Music” has two. That never felt right to me. On one hand, it was a constant nudge that maybe I could blog a bit more and flesh out these sparse topics, but I never really got around to it. So the nudge became more “annoyance” than “inspiration.”

The other problem was, a lot of my posts fit into more than one category. What was the point, if a post didn’t fit into a clear hierarchy?

Now I’ve gotten (back) on Flickr, and discovered the joy of tags. And I realize that I don’t actually need categories. If readers want to browse through my blogs, tags will work just as well—along with my Google custom search engine, of course, and all the other Web 2.0 doodads I’ve just started tinkering with.

Back to basics

Redesigning my site is always a special time. It’s a time to start fresh, re-examine all my assumptions and past decisions, ask the hard questions. It starts with the content. What should I keep? What should I add? What should I drop? Before I even get to work on the design, I need to know what I should be designing for.

My Queer History Project? Oh, it stays. Even if I didn’t have any incoming links to it, I’d keep it just because even after 10(!) years I’m still enormously proud of it. It’ll share the stage with the other Web design projects I’ve got going on: VGVA and Team Vancouver

Quotes? For years I used to have lots of quotes, several pages’ worth, including a ginormous one dedicated to the great Terry Pratchett. I decided to drop them in the current version, but I keep going back and forth on it. Thing is, I’m just not sure how to incorporate them in the design. Should I have a random quote in the sidebar? Or a whole, separate page? I still don’t know. Very few of the blogs I’ve seen have have them, so… well, we’ll see. I don’t have to decide today.

Photo thumbnails in the sidebar? Sure thing. I’ll have to find new WordPress plugins to handle Flickr. So far I haven’t seen any that’ll do exactly what I want it to (display a block of square thumbnails just like the Gallery plugin does), but I’m sure it’s out there. Or I’ll do it myself.

In addition to those thumbnails, I plan to show my daily shot of Sunset Beach. Yes, I’ve been keeping that up, though there are a few gaps. Good news for me, Flickr can create slideshows from sets, so I don’t need to futz around in iMovie. Showing off my daily photo will keep me motivated, and provide a bit of regular fresh content.

Twitter and junk? Well, I don’t twitter. Maybe I should? If nothing else, Twitter and Lifestreams and such would be another good way to add content on a regular basis. Why not? My site started out with “essays,” long pieces that took weeks or months to write. Then I moved on to blogging: smaller, more frequent updates. Maybe micro-blogging is the next logical step.

Speaking of which, part of me is still deciding if I want to keep the stuff I wrote “pre-blog,” dating back to 1997. They’re WordPress pages instead of posts, since I don’t have exact publication dates for most of them, and I don’t want to just invent some. Picky, maybe, but that’s just my thing. Part of me is considering dropping the large archive page listing every single post/essay, and doing with category/tag pages (more on tags in a later post). Or maybe monthly archives, but a master list is feeling more and more unwieldy to me. In that case, I’d have to come up with a special page for older writing (like I briefly did, while designing the present version), or drop it entirely.

Decisions, decisions…

To Flickr or not to Flickr

Way back when, as I started to work on my site’s present design, I made a conscious decision not to use Flickr. The disadvantages, as I saw them, were: (a) I couldn’t style it, (b) current incoming links would be broken, and (c) I wouldn’t have access stats. Turns out (c) is not true, (b) doesn’t really apply since I don’t think I have any incoming links to my photos, and (a) is actually not that big a deal. Hey, I had fun styling my galleries (and fighting with Smarty templates, and learning my way around Gallery’s user interface, which isn’t all that friendly), but I don’t need to do it anymore. Flickr offers much more flexibility in organising my photos, a snazzy interface, rich tagging and metadata, and—more importantly—tons of exposure.

I’m in the process of republishing my galleries on Flickr. All new photos will go directly there.

Oh, and I’ve started another site redesign. It was about time, don’t you think? No details yet, except I am planning to expand the width from 800 to 1000 px. Hah, and what will I do with all that extra space?

Curtain Up!

Well, hey, that was pretty painless. I was worried about having to move my Wordpress installation from one directory to another, but it went off very smoothly. Of course, then I had to do a bit of cleaning up, re-upload my images, and so on.

So here we are. 6+ months of work, on and off at times, have finally paid off.

Well, hey, that was pretty painless. I was worried about having to move my WordPress installation from one directory to another, but it went very smoothly. Of course, then I had to do a bit of cleaning up, re-upload my images, and so on.

So here we are. 6+ months of work, on and off at times, have finally paid off. I have harnessed the powers of WordPress and Gallery (and the synergistic power of WPG2) and come up with… well, something that’s pretty darn good, if I do say so myself. I mean, I could go the humble route and be all, “Oh, I still have a lot to learn”, which was actually my first reflex. And which goes without saying. But, comments! And a rich blogging interface! And Lightbox overlays!

I’m still going through the posts and pages, and testing internal links. URIs for posts (except the pre-2003 ones) haven’t changed, but those for photos have. Unfortunately, though Gallery does provide some URI rewriting ability it’s not nearly as versatile as I would’ve liked. Grumble, grumble.

Anyway. Enough about me. Enjoy the new site!

The Search For…

So… I’ve got two options here, neither of them totally satisfactory.

1) Use the built-in Wordpress search function. It’s pretty basic, though you can install plugins to make it search pages as well as posts, and nicely highlight search terms on the results page. Pro: it only searches post/page content, and title (this annoyed me before). Which in fact is a bit of a con, because now I may want to search the comments.

So… I’ve got two options here, neither of them totally satisfactory.

1) Use the built-in WordPress search function. It’s pretty basic, though you can install plugins to make it search pages as well as posts, and nicely highlight search terms on the results page. Pro: it only searches post/page content, and title (this annoyed me before). Which in fact is a bit of a con, because now I may want to search the comments. Other con: the search results are displayed in chronological order (timestamp for posts, creation date for pages). No clever algorithms to determine usefulness, even if it’s only giving a higher ranking to search terms in titles.

Other huge con: it won’t search the photo galleries. That runs off a completely different database, and while Gallery does have a search plugin, I think it’d look silly to use two different forms, each searching half my site. Not to mention, I don’t even know where I’d place them.

So it looks like we’re going with (2), a Google-powered search. The same as what I’ve got now? Not quite. I’ve registered a custom search engine which should do pretty well. It’s nothing fancy, but it will allow me to style the results page to a degree. There’ll be ads, but I can live with that. And it’ll make my job a lot easier, since I don’t have to worry about formatting the output of two different search engines.

What don’t I need?

I’m still working on the new site design. It’s slow. And frustrating. I want to do more than just giving my site a face lift, but honestly it’s damn hard to be creative when I’m still learning the tools. So I experiment. And I play. I add stuff. And I subtract.

Subtracting’s important. There comes a point when pretty styles and frills are just too distracting, too showing, too hard to maintain, too much.

Subtracting’s important. There comes a point when pretty styles and frills are just too distracting, too showing, too hard to maintain, too much. It’s not just styles, either. Just recently I decided to scrap the login functions provided by WordPress. There are other ways to control comment spam (such as, hah, nobody reading my blog), and the “login/register” links were just… blocking me. Which I didn’t even realise until I removed them from the sidebar, and then everything fell into place. Visitors will get cookies to remember their info, so they only have to fill it in once.

And then there’s quotes. Do I want quotes in this upcoming version? If so, how? On big long pages, the way they are now? But do I want to put them in separate pages? It feels… untidy, somehow. I was never totally happy with the structure of the “Inspiration” section in the present version, though maybe it’s the asymmetry of it: one page of links vs. 3 pages of quotes. So what’s the solution? Are cool quotes to be nonessentials? Maybe I put a random one in the sidebar or footer, like Slashdot does (and like I’m doing for my blogroll)? Or prune them and keep them around in a separate page? I dunno. I like them, and I like that they bring some search engine traffic in, but I’m not convinced they fit with the rest of the site.

Monsieur Smartypants

Okay, The Tick vs. Reno, Nevada is far from my favourite from Season Two (that would be Grandpa Wore Tights, with its brilliantly hilarious parody of Golden Age heroes), but the title seemed appropriate. After a hiatus of a few weeks I’m back at work on my site redesign, and making good progress. I’ve got a pretty good structure for the blog and assorted pages, though there are still some open questions and many tweaks to be done. And, I’ve started looking at customising my photo galleries. Yes, it can be done. The trick is that Gallery doesn’t use pure PHP scripts like WordPress, but Smarty templates, which I’m not familiar with. URL rewriting, another one of my worries, is also possible–I found a plugin for it–but it’s not working quite like I want it to. I may have to hack the .htaccess myself. That’s all right, though. As I said before, learning new technologies is part of why I’m doing this. The other part–and the real challenge–is to go beyond what I have now, not just give my old styles a new paint job while adding obvious features like comments. Which I already knew. But damn, it’s hard to be creative when I’m still figuring out the tools to be creative with.