hyalineskies

Due to the amount of work I have to do for this week’s final exams, I’m not going to be able to write up the entries for this week (although I do have the topics ready.) I promise I’ll have something cool to see next week, though. In the meantime, I’ll give you some insight into things I’ve been kicking around that you may (or may not) see in the next few weeks.

Aerial Redux

The current theme, Aerial, has served me well in a lot of cases, but further clickmap analysis (thanks to Crazy Egg and increased traffic) has allowed me to find places where the IA and visual design could be improved. The first page to go through the shredder will be the index page, which may take some interesting experimental angles if my current sketches end up being produced.

Meanwhile, Aerial will get some image improvements as well; I’m going to be playing with some new backgrounds, colours, and other such things to try to make the design more coherent, clean and attractive.

Taming WordPress

On the other end of the theme, I’m going to be building some new WordPress plugins to manage comments. With Akismet filtering almost all of my comment spam, I get to spend my time building other plugins. I’m going to be building in comment thresholds and maybe even a reputation system for better comments, since the conventional system gets nasty on comment threads such as the ultra-popular MySpace div overlay post. I’ve also had to do my fair share of comment editing as of late, as people seem to disregard the massive cyan warnings on posts like Facelifting the Facebook, instead leaving totally irrelevant comments or alerting me to the fact that the exploit no longer works. In fact, it’s gotten so bad that for certain Google queries I may have to create a Lightbox-style “interstitial” overlay.

I’ve also built the framework for a real WordPress search interface, which uses Google-style search syntax. It’ll be nice to see WordPress search that allows for things like myspace +rss +"flash 8" as opposed to simple mySQL LIKE searched that WordPress currently permits. This power search will probably not be released until sometime in February, since it’s still buggy.

Following the power search I’ve also built a new way to interact with WordPress archives, since I’m sick of the flat-file archive list that seems to exist just about everywhere on the Internet. It’s not conducive to exploration, and since the majority of blog content lies in the archives, there need to be some new ways of managing hundreds of long posts.

For the RSS Geeks

If you’re an RSS subscriber, hyalineskies is going to get better for you, too. I’ve been working with FeedBurner’s tools to clean up the way that RSS is served to you and put focus on the proper content. RSS subscription is slowly increasing as time goes on, so I’ll be working on making sure that the RSS geeks are satisfied. If you are an RSS subscriber, please e-mail me at eston@hyalineskies.com and drop me a line as to what improvements would really benefit you. I have some ideas from my limited statistics, but feedback is really important.

More MySpace geekery

While I’m really not that fond of MySpace (or a lot of the traffic that MySpace stuff brings to this site,) it has paid off in many other ways: the work I’ve done on making tutorials for MySpace profile development (instead of just providing “codes”) has actually inspired a lot of people to learn standards-based XHTML/CSS to help them in their own career fields. Here’s an excerpt from a recent e-mail I received:

… i was so inspired by your myspace profile that i have decided to learn HTML and CSS and i wanted to thank you for the inspiration. i doubt if i will pursue it to the point of becoming a guru or anything like that, but hopefully i can learn enough to handle my own web content as it relates to my … endeavors.

This kind of pedagogy is what I was hoping for when I wrote the tutorials, so even if a lot of the traffic is asinine, those inspired to learn the real ways of web design compensate for it.

Because of this, expect to see even more MySpace stuff in the Pilot Training section soon. Pilot Training also has some WordPress-related content lined up for it, so budding WordPress hackers can also benefit from the section. Somehow, even though Pilot Training posts only seem to come monthly, the subscription rate to the Pilot Training-only feed has increased in recent months.

A new gig

On a note unrelated to hyalineskies.com but related to its author, it appears that I’ve got a new gig as a freelance technical writer. I’ll give some more details on this as things actually develop, but expect to see some of my writing and code appear on other (more popular) sites that place emphasis upon web design and development using cutting-edge Web 2.0-style technologies.

Looking back on this announcement post, it seems that maybe I could’ve written one of the entries for this week. For now, I’ll go and study. Check back next week for the same regular updates.