site news archive - where do I go from here?
25th May 2005 - 14:53
Well, I'm not quite dead yet, despite the appearence the site may give.
I'm just not sure where this site is going. When I first started I just wanted a "site", and I was fairly adamant that I didn't want a blog. Seems I was wrong, since discovering blogs that are more than the "got up, ate, went to bed" stereotype my opinion has changed hugely.
I like the idea of a blog, I've refrained from posting stuff on here that I don't think is "useful", but I'm beginning to come round to the idea that it's my site, I should just do what the hell I like with it. One thing I've found myself wanting is user comments, one for the feedback, and two, as a pure ego thing to know if anyone actully bothers reading here.
Looking through the todo list I've ended up with I see a lot of blog features, that I never considered to begin with. I'm a huge sufferer from "not invented here" syndrome, I want to do everything myself. I'm coming to terms with it though, why do everything myself when there's plenty of systems out there, written by people dedicated to doing so, with a wide userbase etc. This is all a pretty longwinded way of saying that the next version will likely be textpattern powered rather than a homebrew system.
The other issue I have with the site as it stands is the design, or rather the lack of it. It's the classic "designed by programmer look", which is kinda expected, what with me being a programmer, but I would like to actually have a design. The issue I have, besides having the artistic talent of your average rock, is that I read quite a lot of web design blogs. On the whole have fantastic designs, like joshuaink. While I'm on the pimp, pointing at B. Adam Howell's site would be a good idea. He has a real nice new design with some great ideas in it, I love the variable number of columns on the right and the activity graphs along the top.
So, version 2 is in the works, no idea when it'll launch, but never mind.
In the mean time I'll probably be removing the audioscrobbler tracks from the sidebar, they seem to pretty consistently slow the site down when loading due to the feed being slow/unavailable. It causes the site to pause in the middle of loading until the connection for the feed times out. They'll reappear if the response times of the feed improves any.
I guess I now head back into hibernation.