Alex Pooley's Blog

My old blog design was looking a little untidy both on screen and under the hood. I recently undertook the arguably pointless task of overhauling my blog design, and upgrading to the latest Wordpress. The emphasis of this new design is on the content. I was able to crunch the side bar in to a tiny area by using a dynamic multi-level menu that fades in/out.

Updating the design was an interesting exercise and I came across a few impressive tools to help with the design and performance of the page. Here they are in no particular order:

Wordpress Theme Generator

I’ve always wanted to use Yahoo’s User Interface components with my blog design. YUI provides an excellent library of css and javascript to build rich interactive sites, while still maintaining cross browser compatibility. The navigation menu with the fade in/out to the left of the blog is an example of the YUI menu component.

The Wordpress Theme Generator allows you to modify the design in real time. I found the interface a little quirky and resorted to downloading the convenient Zip of my partial design and then hacking it to bits with vi.

All in all it’s a nice tool to get you up and going with a YUI compatible Wordpress theme.

YSlow

YSlow is an excellent FireFox plugin to determine how well your pages load, and where exactly performance improvements can be had. You will need FireBug installed to run YSlow. I managed to shave seconds in loading time by concatenating my javascript and css assets, and then deflating (mod_deflate) them via my .htaccess. The page went from about 330Kb to 80Kb.

YSlow grades your page based on several criteria, and these criteria combined result in an overall page grade. One of the criteria I believe most small time sites can safely ignore and that is the content delivery network (CDN) criteria.

Another great aspect of YSlow is that you can click on each of the criteria to learn more about the criteria. It’s a very efficient way to learn.

My site loses the majority of it’s grade because of widgets I have incorporated from third parties. For instance, MyBlogLog attaches ETags for the image files which YSlow believes are pointless. This highlights how important it is to be selective of the widgets you add to your pages (anyone been reading TechCrunch lately? ouch).

Online Stripe Generator

Wow, you know you’re around web 2.0 when the only purpose of a site is to create a tilable, striped image for web backgrounds. The interface of this tool is slick. I’ve always wanted to create striped tiles as they seem like a subtle way to brighten up a page, without distracting from the content.

WP-Cache

This Wordpress plugin is an absolute must for anyone who cares about their site visitors. WP-Cache lazy caches pages so that after the first load, the page is fetched from disk. By installing this plugin I improved my blog performance by 20% by going from a 5 second page load, to a 4 second page load. I don’t think you can really lose with this plugin, and in most cases you just need to turn it on.

Conclusion
The primary goal of this new design has been to focus on the content of the site without obtrusive distractions. The design is not fancy, but I think it’s achieved it’s goal. The tools I’ve mentioned above were a great help and I highly recommend them.

A new product is about to launch called SpeedPPC. Their site struck me as being professional and marketing savvy. I’ve briefly dissected their attempt.

They address the supposed four most important marketing fundamentals:

• Ultra specific
• Urgent
• Unique
• Useful

Overall, the page tells you all about what the tool can achieve for you, without giving away any hints as to how it’s done. They don’t even tell you what is required of you to get these results - probably because this would imply you actually have to do something, right?

The page is create purely to generate leads. It’s kind of like how the grocery stores stick the BBQ chicken near the entrance to enhance your appetite and entice you to load your cart. Only in this case, SpeedPPC just want your email so they can continue to sell you. MmMmm BBQ chicken…

Come to think of it, even magicians use this tactic to sell the shortest of tricks. Common sense would suggest the shorter the trick, the longer the sell required.

To me at least, SpeedPPC’s type of presentation always wreaks of “late night infomercial” which I only watch for a good laugh (and feel great pity for the old people buying the Agatha Christie DVD Box Set). That said, I’m not ignorant that infomercials continue to run, and undoubtly because they keep making money. Likewise, I think SpeedPPC are going to do pretty well, with or without a quality product.

One final and important point of interest is that the page gives away no hint as to who is behind the project. According to the article, “[They’re] only a small online marketing company“. Whether you respect this type of presentation or not, the absence of a name should issue caution. According to the “5 Star Affiliate Marketing Blog”, “Allan Gardyne from Associate Programs is behind it”. This would make sense as I was notified of this product by (one of?) Allan’s email lists.

I’ve joined the SpeedPPC list to watch a quality marketing campaign in action.

Here’s a theory. On average, is the quality of the marketing inversely proportional to the quality of the product?

If you’re after something with a bit of substance then check out Augie March.

I have been doing a lot of reading and thinking - sorry for not posting in a while! The good news (?) is that I have much more to write about.

Imagine if the Internet is a song, and everyone participating is part of the music - literally!

Note: There is probably 0 (zero) practical value in reading the rest of this blog post. However, if seeing life from another perspective interests you, read on …

Say I got you to hit a few keys on a piano - clang clang. The key you hit would determine the pitch (frequency) of the sound, and the characteristic of the noise would be the sound of a “piano” (as opposed to a trumpet). To record what you played we would take sub-second samples of the sound’s amplitude and store the samples sequentially on a computer. We could then take these samples and play them through a speaker to convert the numbers back in to a very good audible approximation of the sound you made with the piano.

Instead of a piano, let’s say I gave you a blog which you would post too regularly and often - clang clang. Suppose we “somehow” crunch each post to a single number and stored these numbers sequentially on a computer. Collectively, these samples would code for the blog’s character with a particular frequency. What would happen if you took those sequential numbers and ran them through a speaker just like we did with the piano samples?

Well, you would probably just hear lots of noise - “asdlihqwt7u32ijwfajhasdfsdf”. But, surely there’s hope in turning a blog in to an instrument … ?

A few ponderings …

If the sampling of a blog was a function of it’s themes, would it be possible to construct a harmony from thematically harmonious blogs?

What would make a blog sound like a drum and not a string?

If we assume an instrument consists of an attack, decay, sustain, and release phase, then blog samplings would have to implicitly define these.