This site is going into sleep mode for a while, no idea how long. Need to do some thinking and restructuring before I decide to progress further with it. My archives will still be accessible by month if you care to take a poke around in the dust.
Month: December 2005
Merry Christmas! Cough! Cough!
I’m heading off tomorrow on holidays and I just want to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas, as I doubt I’ll be posting again until after Boxing Day or maybe even New Years Day. Here’s also wishing you a stress-free and sick-free holidays. Yes, that’s right, I’ve gotten sick, as well as my wife, just in time for the holidays (similar to a few other friends we know). It’s almost as though your body knows you’re going to take time off and it begins shutting down to force you to recuperate, whether you like it or not. Oh well, I hope it doesn’t last that long because it would be nice to have at least a couple days off to enjoy the festive season without being sick. 🙂
Three Strikes You’re (Customer Walks) Out
Most businesses think that when something goes wrong with a customer’s order or service you are providing them, that it is only one mishap. Wrong. When something screws up and it is due to your business, then there are actually three separate things that can go wrong.
- The Mistake – Strike one! Something screwed up on your end and the customer is pissed.
- The Coverup – Strike two! You try to cover up the mistake by saying it was due to something else when you know that’s not true.
- The Break – Strike three! You’re out! You can obviously tell the customer is upset but you don’t do anything to try to make up for your company’s mistake. You just lost a customer.
The hilarious thing here is that I’m not talking about business rocket science here. This is common sense relationship life skills. Don’t expect any relationship to continue for too long if you continually ignore your “partner”.
Adventures Within The World Of Warcraft
I’ve been playing the World of Warcraft the last month and I have to say that while I wouldn’t really call it my “dream” massively multiplayer online game, I would still say it is very enjoyable nonetheless. Without a doubt, the expansiveness of the realms you play within is one of the game’s greatest strengths. There will be points where you’ll just stop in your tracks and just sit there and enjoy the view for a few moments. Yet what I still find lacking is the level of interaction that I’m looking for on a realm vs realm level that involves much more usage of community and culture to foster cooperation among players on a larger level.
For example, when I’m playing in the World of Warcraft, while I may feel like I’m part of the Alliance, I don’t see any direct correlation between my actions and that of the Alliance’s goals overall. To make players feel like they are part of something larger than themselves, the game world itself needs to allow them to be a part of an ongoing story, no matter how small their contribution to it. I’d love to see the borders between the various lands changing on a regular basis depending upon who controls these areas so that a player who is a miner knows that his efforts in collecting ore went directly to aiding a blacksmith who in turn helped produced armor and weapons for the warriors who help defend and maintain the borderlands. Each player focuses on what they enjoy and yet all contribute to the greater cause.
Technology That Just Works
That’s all that people really want.
Happy Birthday To Me!
I’m 40 but I still feel like I’m 4 exploring the world for the first time. I think that’s because play has been a big influence on my life. Well that is up until the last five years or so. Time to fix that I think, especially in 2006. I mean what’s the point of living if you’re not having fun doing it, right?
Talk Less, Say More
Enough said.
How I Want My Site Content Structured
Ok, I finally realized that I’ve stupidly been spending so much time trying to figure out how to build what I want that I haven’t clarified what I exactly do want to build with regards to the structure of my site. Therefore, the following will hopefully describe this.
As I noted before, I’d like to give the feeling of different spaces to my site. For example, one space would be focused on business, another on gaming, another on my personal life, and so on. As you visit each space, the weblog format is the primary thing you see. On the sidebar or footer area of each page though I’d like to have different types of content displayed that would also interest the reader. Some different types of content would be books, movies, music, photos, and so forth.
So if I was in my business space, my blog relating to my research and development would be the main thing that readers see. On the side though, there would be the top five books relating to the what I’m working on (i.e. blogging, web design, Internet, Web, etc). In addition, I’d also display the type of music that I usually listen to while working. Again, I’d display photos or images that relate to my work which could be artwork in my work room to photos of people I’m collaborating with on my ideas and so on. In effect, I want this space to emulate a space in real life. When you walk into my den office at home, you’ll see these same books, the same artwork or pictures that I’m displaying, and even a stack of music CD’s that I listen to while I work.
Now just like how my content is layered and displayed for each space, I’d like my entire site to be layered as well. For example, I want my business space to be the primary thing that you see when you visit my home page. However, I want my other spaces accessible as well but layered deeper into the site. The deeper you go the more personal the spaces get until you’d reach my personal space where I talk about life in general, family, and so on.
There you go that’s it in a nutshell. Doesn’t sound that difficult to create does it? Well the difficulty lies in creating it in such a way that your content remains flexible and easily manipulable, so that all of these groupings of different types of content by category and space are dynamically generated on the fly. More on this later.
Examples of Other Summary Views
I spoke before about summary views and I want to elaborate on them a bit more. What I’m noticing more and more is the importance of having a separation between your content and how it is displayed. For example, when people think of a blog journal they immediately think of a certain display of content. Yet in actual fact, you could take that same content and display it in a myriad of different ways.
Right now, a default weblog view is really nothing more than a chronological sequence of your content displayed in reverse chronological order with the last entry you created always at the top. Also archives are nothing more than other views of that same content. A category view is a summary view of your content filtered by a specific category type. That’s it.
So when I made this realization, I started asking myself, “If these views could be separated from the content itself, could they be reused repeatedly for different types of content?” For example, let’s say I have a weblog that focuses just on my music I’ve purchased and listened to over the years. What would it look like in a normal weblog format? Well, probably something like how I’ve already got on music listed on my site now.
But then I started asking myself, what are some other different views and how would this content look in that view? For example, what if I want to see my content in a calendar view showing three months per web page and with each day in each month showing a thumbnail of an album I purchased or reviewed on that day. I could look over the last three months and at a glance see very easily the albums I’ve added to my collection.
But again, lets say I wanted to see a yearly view of my favorite albums. What would it look like? Well, lets say I show all 12 months on one page with the top album thumbnails listed in a row for each month. So I’d see 12 horizontal rows one below the other showing say the top five albums from each month. Again I could very easily see my changes in my taste of music over the year and what music influenced me the most that year.
As I said though, the content for all of these different views is exactly the same. The only thing that differs is the display format of the content.
Again I start thinking about photo albums and I started wondering if this was just a summary view then how could I use it for different types of content. First off, what’s a photo album? To me it is not only a summary view of a specific collection (or categorization) of photos from a say a photo weblog but it is a type of view that I can also arrange to my liking. Unlike a normal weblog which follows a chronological order, a photo album should be of a type that I can rearrange the photos to my liking.
So what would happen if we replaced the content of photos with say actual normal weblog content? So lets say I wanted to create a collection of blog posts that I felt focused on a particular category, let’s say culture in my case. Even more so I though it would be great if I could manipulate the order of those posts so that flowed together better. As soon as I started thinking this, I realized what I was talking about. Yes, the idea behind Squidoo again.
Now what if the content was about people I’ve collaborated with in the past. A normal weblog view would be the person’s name as the title with a description afterwords being the post content. This would kind of look like my people section on my site now. But what would it look like if I only displayed the title for each post (i.e. their names) and instead of those titles linking to my post on them it link to their site. What would I have? A blogroll that’s what. Again, nothing changes with regards to the content. All I’m doing is just changing the display of it.
The question I have now is what is the best “default view” for each content type? For example, what do you do if one person prefers a Flickr photo stream view (similar to a weblog), yet another person prefers a default photo album view with photos grouped by album being displayed for their default view? How do you meet the needs of both of those types of people at the same time?
Flickr BETA
Doesn’t it seem kind of funny how long Flickr has been around (over a year) and yet it still says it is in “BETA”? It just kind of reminds of all those websites on the Web a long time ago that always said “UNDER CONSTRUCTION” all the time.