Category: Website News

Posted on

A new design to johnbollwitt.com

johnbollwitt.com v2.0

I’ve reworked the design to my website to challenge my limits in terms of web design. It’s taken me about a month or so to get the overall concept down, but it was time to do something different in order to push my boundaries with what I know and am comfortable with. The various sixty4media projects that we’ve been working on has made me think about this a lot, and a recent project for my day job saw me take the website for one of the radio stations I work for, The Beat 94.5, to a temporary overhaul into a complete WordPress site.

DSC_0089
Photo credit: stu_dio on Flickr

The basic inspiration for this design was a hot afternoon while drinking a Vitamin Water, something that I’ve become a fan of over the past year. Looking at their label, I found myself admiring the simplicity of the design to market their product. When it comes down to it, it’s just text and colors. No fancy graphic logo or mascots. Text was the only thing selling their product, so I found some inspiration in that.

For the most part, this effort was one of design over function. I’ve asked for opinions of some folks that I really respect and taken their feedback, which should never be overlooked. I tried to incorporate how other people felt when they saw it but then tried to one up the recommendation in order to push the personal challenge ever more.

If you find problems with the site, be sure to let me know. Any good web designer will tell you that any project, especially something to do with your own site, is constantly in development. You’re truly never satisfied.

Posted on

Adjusting and fixing my RSS feeds

There is a good chance that RSS subscribers just got blasted with a back log of posts, so please don’t think that I made about ten posts in a single day. I did some rearranging a couple of months ago when I re-themed my site, restructured my WordPress install, and upgraded to the latest and greatest version of 2.5.

I neglected to make adjustments to FeedBurner, and that has been fixed. Let that be a mental note to the rest of you with similar setups. If you make significant, back end changes to your WordPress site, don’t forget to double check you RSS feed if you are using a third party site like FeedBurner.

Posted on

Update your bookmarks and welcome to johnbollwitt.com

I’ve gone and done it again. Rebecca bought me my very own domain for my last birthday, and I’ve decided to launch it one a bit of whim. More of the details later, but I’ve switched my hosting provider and used that as a good excuse to make the cut with audihertz.net.

It’s kind of a sad day to see the domain that I’ve been working under for so long go away (only somewhat because I own it for a long time to come), but it’s time to opt for something a tad more functional for conveying what my URL is. Audihertz will probably be a long time, online persona, but this site now has a much more personal brand to it now.

Welcome to the era of johnbollwitt.com.

Old links should still work through the magic of Duane Storey wizardry. Thanks to him for helping me through the process.

Posted on

RSS feed management

Some time ago, I had a request to supply a separate feed to my blog for those who would be interested in subscribing to a “posts only version” of my site. I finally got around to getting this done, so here is how it breaks down.

  • Posts + Flickr + Del.icio.us Feed: This is currently how the feed has been operating for a while now. If you put this RSS feed into your aggregator, you would see not only my latest blog posts, but you would also get the various pictures I would post to Flickr as well as bookmarks that I would save on Del.icio.us. This is the true, social gambit of stuff that I like to loft into the blogosphere.
  • Posts Only Feed: This should speak for itself, but allow me to clarify. If you would prefer to not get all the pictures and bookmarks or whatever I decide to put in that “life feed”, then subscribe to this one. You’ll only get the posts from my blog in this feed, so it’s really a matter of preference because you’ll never miss anything that I am posting to my blog.
  • Comments Feed: Curious to see what people are posting for comments on my posts? Then this is the feed for you. You’ll see how horrible I am at replying to comments as well as getting the latest and greatest spam bombs that happen from time to time. Crucial if you are keeping tabs on the viagra and cialis markets on the internet.

Pick and choose what you want to follow. You have the power. And if you are not using RSS feed reader, try Google Reader. It’s my tool of preference.

Posted on

This is winter time in Vancouver

Kat Kam - Dec 20, 2007 @ 16:45

I noticed this from work today. The mountains look so incredible this time of year. Rebecca said it best. When it’s summer and everything is green to the point where you can see every single tree on the sides of the mountains, the mountains seem so close. Then when it’s cold and snow capped, they seem so far away.

As long as the snow stays up there, where it’s far away, I’m cool with that.

Thanks to the KatKam for the picture.

Posted on

WP-Cache plugin to help boost page loading time

I’ve installed the WP-Cache NoSymLink plugin to my site for a little experimentation. The goal of this is to cut down on the amount of time it takes to load the various pages and posts within my site, and this plugin is a tweaked version of the original WP-Cache plugin.

If you have a WordPress site that attracts a lot of traffic, this will help speed up page loading by a few seconds. What it does is takes some of the load off your server in terms of generating pages on the fly. With every, single post that you read on any WordPress site, the server it sits on pulls information from a handful of data sources to present you a web page on your browser.

Instead of dragging down server performance and making you wait for all this information to load from a database, the cache stores this data on a temporary basis to get the page to show up on your browser faster. This is really helpful if you have a site with a lot of traffic or host your WordPress blog on a server with a slow connection to the outside world.

Can’t say that I have the worst server or the number of readers that heeds the need for such a plugin, but I’ve noticed a little bit more speed to the load time on my site.

Posted on

MyBlogLog

I’ve been resisting the MyBlogLog for some time. Rebecca is more about these social networking things than me sometimes, but this is a situation where is makes more sense when it comes to the world of new media and social media. In other words, she was right.

MyBlogLog enables you to take advantage of your existing presence on the Web and ties it into communities of like-minded readers and authors to add context to the conversations in which you take part. [mybloglog]

So there it sits on my sidebar for now. I’m not a huge fan of people seeing that I’ve been snooping around their site, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t log out and clear the cookies from your browser. The added benefits of networking with other bloggers, however, is a very nice element of their service.

Mmmm… this kool-aid tastes great!

Posted on

Don’t mind the mess

It’s been a bit of a process getting this blog update to WordPress 2.1. The hardest part is making sure all your plugins work and figuring out what templet tags have changed or not. I’ve got the CSS of my site cleaned up with some minor tweaks, but I feel like the pages are loading slower now. I don’t know, but there will probably be some minor changes yet to come. Most you probably won’t even notice. Regardless, if you have to make the upgrade, do so very carefully.

Update: I have added a RSS feed for the comments of my blog. I know that I find it pretty handy for other people’s sites, so it was about time to add it to my own. You can find it at the bottom of the sidebar on the main page, or you can take this link and add it to your list of feeds that you pay attention to.

Posted on

WordPress releases and betas

I’m knee deep in the world of WordPress right now. I actually oversee five setups, and when there is a new release of an upgrade, that’s five sites I have to work through. Backup here, backup there, overwrite the old, and in with the new. It’s a few hour process when all is said and done.

The big thing right now is that 2.0.7 was released just a few days ago. In fact, 2.0.6 was released not even two weeks ago, and I’d avoid that version if I were you. There was some security concerns in the PHP, meaning that could allow some hacking to happen to your blog. Not good.

The hugely geeky reason that I know this is that I have recently joined up with the development mailing list. Just a couple of days after the 2.0.6 release, there was an announcement on the list about the issue and a test version sent out to all subscribers for testing. This is why I always hesitate to be on that “bleeding edge” of things. It’s good to let people much smarter than you test things out if you don’t have the resources to do it yourself.

The WordPress Podcast is what really got me into the idea of joining the testers mailing list. WordPress 2.1 is in beta, and I get a kick out of seeing the exchange of knowledge about what’s new, what doesn’t work, and so on. You can get more info about it at WordPress Planet.

I did a local install of it and made a preliminary look through of the next generation of WordPress. There’s some interesting things, but it’s still too early for me to report on it. Regardless, I’m looking forward to the full release, as many folks have for over the past year.

The WP Podcast did just mention that there is talk about a 120-day turnaround between versions 2.1 and 2.2, a vast departure of the development, or lack there of, that we’ve seen from the WordPress folks. This won’t stop me from doing development from here on out in 2.1. Who knows when it will go into full release.

Wrote this post while waiting for the last of the sites to finish updating and listening to the They Might Be Giants podcast. Holy crap. Now back to your regularly scheduled geekiness.

Update: This post about 10 things you should know about WordPress 2.1 is a really great read about the new version that should be coming out soon. In fact, this article sites as January 22, 2007 being the day that this version is to be fully released.

Posted on

Problems with comments

If you’ve been trying to post comments onto my blog, my spam filter got overly hungry and ate up a number of posts. I’m not sure how or why, but there were simply too many spam comments to parse through to find them all. They’re coming in faster than I can page through a single page. Please don’t take it personally, and contact me if you keep having problems. Thanks.

Edit: Speaking of spam, Wired has a post about the hot topic that’s worth reading.