Jay Meydad's Life Mashup

One of my new year resolutions was to refresh the design of this blog with a new theme. I am happy that it took me less than a month to complete it and get it off my task list.

I am now using the stylish iNove theme, created by mg12. I like its simplicity, cleanses and how it brings the content to the front. I also find the RSS button implementation very cool (hover over the button to see it). Hopefully it will get more people to subscribe to this blog and consume my thoughts regularly via RSS readers or email.

I kept only the essential widgets on the site in order to shorten page load time:

• Twitter badge shows the number of followers I have on twitter (if you are not one of them, now it is a good time to do it) and the latest twits.
• MyBlogLog gives me information about the community who reads this blog
• Disqus powers the comments and integrates very well with this theme and Wordpress
• Outbrain lets you rate my posts and provide feedback that helps me improve my writing over time
• And of course, all external hyperlinks are enhanced using the product we have created at Snap – SnapShots
• For analytics I use both SiteMeter and Google Analytics.

The last credit goes to Alex Sirota, founder of FoxyTunes, who took my portrait picture that is displayed at the top right corner.

I hope you will like like the new design as much as I do.

I like the new “Recent Readers” widget MyBlogLog released. The glossy design shaped as an iPhone, the simple configuration process (less is more) and the ‘flyouts’ – those little nuggest of information about a reader that appear when you point to a member, very much like Snap Shots.

Check out the new widget on the right sidebar of this blog.

iA, a strategic design agency based in Tokyo, released the web trend map for 2008. Around 300 of the most influential and successful web sites and services were pinned down to the greater Tokyo-area train map.

This year, the map (which is available as a 3D poster as well) not only uses Snap Shots to display previews of the home pages of the different sites, but it also lists Snap Shots among the successful and influential ones. Next to Snap Shots, on the “Technology Line” (green), you can find MyBlogLog, Wordpress, Technorati, Reddit, Blogger, Feedburner, Drupal, Opera, Adobe, Flash, PDF, MySQL, IBM, Linux, Python, Sony and others.

This is a very nice acknowledgement to the Snap Shots service, and a great implementation using Snap Shots.

A few days ago I responded on the Snap blog to a post on Read/WriteWeb and explained why Snap Shots is the most popular semantic application in the world. One of the applications mentioned in the RWW post is SmartLinks by AdaptiveBlue. As I wrote in my post, it looks very-very-very similar to Snap Shots.

Less than 24 hours after my post hit the wires, I received an email from MyBlogLog notifying me that I was added to a community that I “have shown repeated interest in: adaptiveblue”. Well, it’s always a good practice to follow the competition, but to be added without my permission to a community I have no interest to be part of, and to be notified after the fact – that’s brutal and rude!

Think about it this way. Amazon has one of the best recommendation engines on the web. Can you image that a recommended product automatically gets added to your shopping cart just because you visit the product page once or twice…

MyBlogLog should change this features in two ways:

• Implement some web manners and change this feature to be permission based (opt-in)
• Tune the Recommendation engine so it won’t jump to conclusions and suggest me a community just because I visited the site once or twice. A repeated interest means at least three times. But again, this should just be a suggestion.

Several readers and friends have asked me for tips and suggestions on how they can improve their blog or how to start  a blog. I thought it would make sense to list what powers this blog.

• Hosting service – I host this domain on BlueHost.com were I get much more that what I used to get from my previous crappy provider. I get more space (disk space, # of domains, email accounts etc), better tools, good CS support and a good price.

• Blogging platform - I use Wordpress.org (self hosted). In my opinion this open source blogging platform is the best. It keeps evolving, improving and it provides a large variety of themes and plug-ins which extends ever further the platform’s capabilities. I have tried using other platforms such as Typepad, Vox, Blogger and the hosted Wordpress.com and none come close to the capabilities of a self hosted Wordpress.org blog.

• Wordpress Plug-ins - One of the great things about Wordpress is the variety of themes and plug-ins. The control panel inside Wordpress makes it very easy to activate/deactivate plug-ins or switch themes. Here are the ones that are currently installed:
  • SnapShots – The product I am very proud to be one of its creators, provides a better user experience and an entirely new source of ad inventory for every web site owners.
  • Akisment – eliminate blog comments spam
  • Wordpress Blog stats
  • All In One SEO pack
  • iWPhone – A plug-in that automatically reformats your blog’s content for optimized viewing on Apple’s iPhone.
  • AddThis – social bookmarking & sharing made easy
  • Wordpress Database backup
  • Current theme installed is ISM – this might change in the future

• Other Sidebar widgets
  • Lijit – Search tools for a blog
  • MyBlogLog
  • Feedburner for content syndication (don’t forget to offer a “Subscribe By Email” option)
  • Site Analytics done by Google Analytics, SiteMeter with help from Lijit and MyBlogLog (all services show different stats for some reason…)

• Desktop blogging application – Windows Live Writer makes blogging very easy. I wrote in the past a detailed post, followed by another one, about it.

I hope it helps those who are currently blogging or about to start blogging.

A month ago I suggested to MyBlogLog to improve the way they display user’s online identities under the profile page. Today I noticed that they have listen and added favicons, with the matching social service name as Alt text, next to the usernames. This is a small change that makes a big difference.

Kudos for listening and fixing.

Since June ‘07, a MyBlogLog user can add services to his profile. These are the user’s online identities on over 30 popular social services (Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, del.icio.us and others). This is very useful and creates a richer profile.

But viewing someone’s profile and figuring out which username belongs to which service is a frustrating process that involves trial and error. Labels (text or favicons) would greatly help here.

Make labels for data fields distinctive, so that they will not be readily confused with data entries, labeled control options, guidance messages, or other displayed material.” (Jakob Nielsen, Sixty Guidelines)