Blog Update

Today I had some free time, a lot of free time actually, and I decided to do some work on my blog. I usually get bored with things on the web quicker than most and if it is a project that I made or that I’m working on, I will usually spend a lot of time tinkering and changing small things. 

I did a couple of those small changes but I also started working on some bigger ones. I figured that besides my Facebook profile, this was the only real place on the internet about me and I wanted to make it into more of a website than just a blog. 

Some of the features I added:

  • UPDATE: New Buttons I just added another new feature! Buttons! Aren’t they exciting. Now I’m just getting obsessive but I’m having fun tinkering. 
  • New Look. I changed some of the look of the links and content. I modified some of the colors to be more appealing and the biggest visual change is the new header. I’m not sure if it will stay exactly as it is now, but it’s getting closer to what I wanted. One of the features of the new header if you can no longer click it to get back to the main page of the blog if you’re reading a post. This has to do with the CSS and the way the image is loaded on the page but I ended up finding an alternative to that. 
  • New Navigation Bar. I created a little navigation bar that I put some links in. I might add some more in the future, but for now it serves it purpose of providing a way to get home from anywhere on the blog and a way to contact me or see my Facebook profile. The last thing it does is takes you directly to the next new feature, Search.
  • Search. This was a big one! It took me about three hours, on and off, to get this feature the way I wanted it. What it does, is it can find any article or post based on what you search for. Instead of taking you to a google search page or something done, it is written with AJAX and CSS so that you can just click the post you want and even see a little preview. I’m pretty happy with how it came out and as I add more posts, this will become more and more useful.
  • Facebook Status Updates. This one was kind of a cool idea I had. Originally I had put in a system where I would be able to have my Twitter status updates show on my blog but I realized, even with the new iPhone App for Twitter, I really didn’t like it. (Sorry, Eric!). Anyway, I decided to incorporate my Facebook status updates into my blog. I’m almost done with this. I was testing it before but I didn’t put it up yet because I’m still trying to get it to look right. Should be pretty cool when it’s all done.
  • iPhone Optimized. This sounds a lot fancier than it really is. The design I have is a fixed-width design so it works pretty well in the iPhone already but I tweaked some of the settings, the viewport, and some of the fonts so that it will look even better in the iPhone. I contacted Tumblr about the possibility of an iPhone App and I got a pretty nice response, guess if you have an iPhone you’ll have to wait and see. 
  • Comments. I added this a little while back, and it looks like a lot of people have started to catch on to the trend. I’m not a huge fan of the Disqus service, but short of making my own comment feature, it’s all I got. Anyway, I tried to change a couple of settings to make this a little nicer looking, which I think it is. Anyway, comment away!


Also, it looks like people actually DO read my blog! Which is pretty exciting. One of the features that I had added a little while back was a web stat program that shows me how many visitors I have, what they look at, etc. 
Looks like 51 different people viewed pages on my site 92 different times and so far over 431 pages have been looked at. I’m not bragging, but that’s pretty cool!

So that’s about it for now. I had a lot of fun learning and tinkering today, and I realized web design is 20% creativity and 80% trial and error. Oh well. 

  1. johnburke posted this