Some Things I’d Like This Blog to Do

No mat­ter how many times I redesign this blog or add fea­tures to it, it still never seems to serve the pur­pose that I want it to. Some of the lin­ger­ing prob­lems include:

Short Posts

Despite my best efforts to resist it, there’s a draw to the instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion that ser­vices like Twit­ter and Tum­blr pro­vide. Some­times I do want to say some­thing short and triv­ial, with­out hav­ing to fig­ure out how to tag or cat­e­go­rize or even title the post. I feel a lit­tle more guilty clog­ging up my Word­Press data­base with stuff like this, for fear that these types of posts will far out­num­ber the longer ones. A work­able solu­tion might be to cre­ate a sep­a­rate cat­e­gory for these types of posts, and hid­ing them from the nor­mal “flow” that appears on the front page, in the “Pre­vi­ous” and “Next” links on sin­gle post pages, and in search/date/tag/category archives. This solu­tion seems a lit­tle sloppy and ad hoc, how­ever; no mat­ter how much I try to hide it, the fact remains that these will be posts, strictly speak­ing in Word­Press par­lance. Even if I’m able to inte­grate this solu­tion into the cur­rent design, if I cre­ate enough of these triv­ial posts, I’ll have to con­sider how to present them with every redesign in the future. I sup­pose that only means that these obsta­cles aren’t the­o­ret­i­cal — their solu­tions just require more work than I’d like.

Social­iza­tion

Although my “arbi­trary com­ments” idea was short-lived (and has been pend­ing a res­ur­rec­tion for a while now), I think I was onto some­thing with it. One of the draws of Face­book is that every­thing is right there — its news feed can be a source of con­stant enter­tain­ment; every photo, every com­ment, every sta­tus update, no mat­ter how triv­ial, is in there. This is how peo­ple spend all day on there. In the­ory, this activ­ity doesn’t require a cen­tral hub like Face­book. Thanks to RSS/Atom, any­body can, with enough work, make their privately-hosted site just as social. The prob­lem is that this isn’t cur­rently eas­ily imple­mented; sure, there’s Friend­Feed, which can pro­vide you with a wid­get to embed in your Word­Press theme, but this relies unnec­es­sar­ily on a cen­tral­ized ser­vice. XFN was sup­posed to have solved this prob­lem a long time ago, but lit­tle to no progress is being made with this tech­nol­ogy. The Meet Your Com­menters plu­gin for Word­Press actu­ally offers a glimpse of how things can so eas­ily take advan­tage of XFN; it lists all the known homes of every­one who’s com­mented on your blog with a URL, via the rel=“me” attribute. From there it wouldn’t be dif­fi­cult to scrape every one of each user’s avail­able RSS/Atom feeds, from Blog­ger to Flickr to Twit­ter and every­thing in between — not to men­tion all their friends and their friends’ feeds. I should be able to effort­lessly add a Facebook-esque news feed to my front page, but in order to do this at present, I’d need to hack around with Google Reader, Yahoo! Pipes, and/or Mag­pie RSS. It just shouldn’t be that hard. Yes, any­body can add any num­ber of feeds from this blog into their Google Reader, but I’m not so sure they do. Even if they did, it wouldn’t pro­vide the same user expe­ri­ence that Face­book does; they’d have to log in to Google Reader to see what I’m up to, and log in to Face­book to see what every­one else they know is up to. On top of that, even offer­ing a link to my feeds feels pre­sump­tu­ous, while host­ing my con­tent at Twit­ter, which asks peo­ple to “fol­low me,” doesn’t. In the lat­ter case, it’s Twit­ter who’s sug­gest­ing that my con­tent might be inter­est­ing. Not me. They do the dirty work of pro­mot­ing me. In short, there’s no easy way to be “friends” with a self-hosted Word­Press blog, with all the impli­ca­tions that being “friends” means on social net­works. This should not be the case. This sub­ject really deserves its own post.

Media

The JW FLV Player is really ver­sa­tile and indis­pens­able, and I use it a lot. Still, I’d much pre­fer to just upload raw AVI files and have Word­Press con­vert them to FLV and gen­er­ate thumb­nails and embed code. There’s a solu­tion for Word­Press MU installs called Word­Press Video Solu­tion Frame­work, but (a) I don’t have MU, and (b) it requires a lot of server-side con­fig­u­ra­tion that I’m not sure I can even imple­ment with my shoddy GoDaddy account. Other plu­g­ins exist, but a lot of them rely on Word­Press’ short­code, which I’m just not com­fort­able with in terms of forwards-compatibility. What if devel­op­ment on a given short­code plu­gin halts, or I move to some plat­form other than Word­Press? Sud­denly I have dozens of posts that once con­tained video, but that now just have [flv url:/stuff/asdf.flv] in them or what­ever. Why do these plu­g­ins think we’re so afraid of code? Just gen­er­ate the valid code and put it into the post win­dow for me. I promise it won’t con­fuse me.

I’d also like to get the CSS cleaned up a lot so that the design can be more mod­u­lar, in a way. Change color schemes quickly and eas­ily, for instance. Maybe it could even sup­port widgets.