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.