All Change
Posted by: Rowan in Personal Blog, tags: Design, Facebook, Personal Blog, Posterous, Twitter, Website
Oh dear, I’ve been at it again. It seems I just can’t help myself from playing with the layout and design of this blog, or dreaming up new and better ways to integrate my share streaming and microblogging (get me with my web 2.0 terminonogy!). Hopefully things should now be simpler and easier to understand, and there’s much better control for you the reader as to which bits of my musings and babblings you wish to see.
The headlines are:
- My main blog has moved to blog.depomerai.com
- rowan.depomerai.com is now a sort of launch pad to my content in various places
- My ‘posted items’ don’t appear in my blog any more, they’re separate, at posterous.depomerai.com
- That leaves the blog as just a blog, much simpler
It’s also easier to switch between viewing my personal blog posts, those related to my work at the BBC or everything. - You can now customise what content appears in your feed if you suscribe by RSS. Just visit feeds.depomerai.com
I hope that all makes some sort of sense. The techies amoung you might be interested in some of the detail of how and – more importantly – why I’ve set things up like I have.
One big infrastructure change was that I’m using Posterous for my stuff stream/share stream/posted items. Basically, when I want to share a link, photo, video or other content, I stick it on Posterous, where you can read it directly, or you can view in the sidebar of this website or in my RSS feeds. I spent a lot of time coming to a decision about using Posterous, because I wasn’t happy with my previous solution, which was Facebook’s posted items. The first problem with that was that you had to be friends with me on Facebook to read them, so I set up importing them into my blog a few months back. But the mixing of my blog posts with 3rd party content never felt very satisfactory, and it wasn’t aesthetically very good either. I very nearly went with Tumblr as a solution, but I found some things off-putting like the lack of ability to add titles to some types of content. Tumblr is a bit of a one-way process too; post something there and that’s it. The beauty of Posterous is its ability to post content onwards to services like Facebook and Twitter. So wherever you follow me, you should be able to see the content I post. Another problem with Facebook for posting links was that I always found Twitter easier, so I started just using that instead. But then there’s no easy way to archive, embed or search the content. Posterous is lovely because you can easily post just about any content by email, or use their excellent bookmarklet. It’s clever too – link a YouTube page and it automatically embeds the video itself, select some text on a page before clicking the bookmarklet and that text is used as the summary, and so on.
Then I overhauled my RSS feeds. You’ll now find that feeds.depomerai.com asks you to choose what content to subscribe to, from my personal blog, work blog, Posterous and Twitter. You even get a nice URL which looks like http://feeds.depomerai.com/blog+work for example. At feeds.depomerai.com is a custom script I wrote (with a little help from my friend) that works out what content you’ve requested and aggregates it into one feed. A couple of Wordpress plugins allow me to change the list of feeds presented by your browser when you visit blog.depomerai.com to include some of the most common combinations. Finally, rowan.depomerai.com now utilises this new feeds infrastructure to provide all of my content in one place.
The last big thing was a bit of clever error handling. Since I moved to a new Wordpress install at blog.depomerai.com, I wanted people who click a link to rowan.depomerai.com to be presented with something helpful. If you look for a post (e.g. http://rowan.depomerai.com/2009/07/all-change/) you’ll get a helpful page asking you to head to the new website, whereas if your feed reader requests an RSS feed, it is automatically redirected in a process which ought to be invisible to you the user.
So there we are. A whole lot of technical changes to simplify and yet extend the experience. Let me know what you think!