The site doesn’t contain any i18n, neither I used any PHP framework or other toolkits to built it up. It’s really just some stupid likes of PHP code bound together with the Facebook SDK. Now that’s what I’d call RAD!

It was pretty interesting for me to see, how little effort it takes to “socialize” a site, especially when it’s built from ground up with Facebook-operability in mind.

Yesterday, I additionally implemented an automatic Twitter status update. I’ve registered @likemichde on Twitter, created an Twitter Application, generated access tokens for it and implemented automatic twitter publishing within several lines of code, thanks to Abraham Williams’ twitteroauth for PHP.

It’s very neat how modern media allows us to spread information all over the planet, even with only little knowledge of technology. And if you put in the effort to dig deeper, you use these new technologies to reach even more people and provide connectivity to all kind of different sites.

For example, my photography site mariusmm.com is using Yahoo!’s YQL to query my flickr account for the latest photos and randomly pic a handful of them for displaying as a slideshow. And I’ve implemented everything in 100% JavaScript, there’s no single line PHP or any other server-side language.

I’ve always used my blog as platform to share useful information with others, get feedback from comments that were posted and mails I’ve received. I’ve slowly built it up step by step from the 20th of March 2005 with a pretty rudimentary and early version of WordPress at that time. Due to my interest and work within the open-source area around Linux and the GNOME Desktop at that time, I had pretty much content I loved to share with other people interested in those topics.

By the time passing, the content of my blog also changed. I slowly moved away from Linux as an desktop operating system, towards using Mac OS X and its tools. Meanwhile, I took my own know-how about the Linux operating system on a higher level by starting to use it heavily as server-side operating system. My blog posts became from “Hey, check out this desktop notifications daemon I’ve written! There wasn’t anything like that on the GNOME desktop, now there is!” and “Oh look, this would be a great idea for a Sync-Application on the GNOME Desktop” to information sources for setting up a Linux instance on Amazon’s EC2 service, stripping down Ubuntu Servers to several hundreds Megabytes and setting up a Debian server that provides SSL-secured WebDAV with LDAP as authentication back-end. So instead of sharing useful information for Linux desktop users, I transited to share information about my experiences and creations on the Mac.

Through the years, my blog grew bigger and bigger, with more and more content. I was pretty happy with how it worked out, except of one part: The design. “devilx.net” never really had an unique identity shaped by its own design. I switched the look & feel several times, using freely available WordPress themes with smaller changes hacked by myself. For the pure sake of information sharing it worked out, but due to that my blog never really got its “own face”. I wanted to change this fact for like ever already, unfortunately I never really had the time and – what’s even more important – the muse for doing so. Now, after all those years – and especially after the last few months, in which the majority of returning visitors probably thought of my blog being another victim by the Twitter, Facebook and other Web 2.0 platforms’ distraction-hype – I decided to take the time, search for at least some creative inspiration and replace my yet-another-downloaded-WordPress-theme with something made with my own hands, giving my blog its own shape and style.

My abilities in the matter of creativity and design clearly aren’t the best, but I thought like… “Man, 2011 is coming, you just have to!”. So I turned on Pixelmator in full-screen mode and started drawing. I kinda had like dozens of concepts, drafts and even several PXM-to-XHTML implementations, but none really was something I’d like to have running on the internet, with my name on it. Meanwhile, I was testing Posterous, one of those Web 2.0-“we can streamline your blog with your Twitter account, your Facebook profile and the two-hundred-forty-nine other platforms you might be using”-services, which should have been the second update for today actually. I really liked it and I liked their theme-templating. I gave it a first shot, by exporting my WordPress’ database and importing it into Posterous.

The result unfortunately was… well… pure fail. It stopped at twenty-one out of several hundreds and didn’t advance for a couple of hours. After contacting the Posterous support, I got the advice to first clean up my WordPress’ spam-queue, re-export the database and try it again. So I did and finally the import ran through pretty quick. Curiously I checked out how the imported Posterous site looked, since I didn’t thought of for example comments being also imported. For my surprise, they were. Unfortunately, the import was incomplete. Some why three-fourth of my WordPress blog posts were missing. Again, I contacted the support which answered after two days, telling me that they’re on the problem and can’t provide me any help yet.

While I was waiting for a solution to my problem, I already translated one of my drafts into Posterous’ templating format – but soon I kind of realized, that Posterous isn’t pretty much what I needed. It works for many people and it surely is a very cool service, free of charge! But for me, as someone that’s pretty much into technology it’s just way too inflexible and closed. For example, I have found a way to import my WordPress’ data, but none to export the Posterous data. I guess, hacking through the API is probably the only way to do so. Also, Posterous’ content delivery isn’t performing really well, at least when requested from Germany. I built in some Base64-encoded images and a @font-face (because Posterous does not provide you any space for actually uploading pictures, which is why you would need to pay for some webspace or at least an Amazon S3 account anyway) and as soon as they were live, the page’s loading-speed decreased to a quite ugly value. Also I was unsatisfied with the template-editor/-previewer Posterous provides – it is really slow and for me (as web developer et al.) a pure pain to use.

Please don’t get me wrong – as I’ve said before, Posterous (as well as Tumblr and all those other services) really is something great, especially when you’re into writing quick shouts most of the time. But for me, as a person who likes the ability to extend the platform for sharing information to fit my (growing) needs, Posterous and others simply are too limited.

However, after realizing that I won’t give up my WordPress from one day to another (and by that actually had no second update to share with you today while I’m still sticking with the plural “updates” in this article’s first few lines), I’ve re-started concept-creation, drafting, mocking and all that stuff professional designers probably do the whole day. In the end, I came up with a pretty neat design that fits my taste pretty good and isn’t too exaggerated or improper to be used on a blog: It’s the design you’ve been staring at for the last, well, I would say fifteen minutes, if I haven’t already talked you into sleep.

“Okay, so your blog isn’t dead yet, huh?” – Yepp, that’s right (and that is the second update, hah!). I’m really looking forward to the next years of blogging, sharing and communicating with others. In the past several years digital life changed a lot and blogs became more and more irrelevant thanks to the possibility of fast and instant exchange with each other through Twitter for example. Unfortunately people sometimes tend to forget, that all those tweets would be nothing without the information behind them, that contains more than only 140 characters.

Having said this, I wish everyone a nice evening (CET UTC+1) and furthermore a great year in 2011. Have fun!

However, I could philosophize even more about the pros and cons of this themeable-web-interface-for-YQL but I’m actually not that much into it to do so. The reason for registering was mainly for the hype’s sake and besides, I actually planned to reserve my everywhere used nickname “devilx” – unfortunately it was already taken by an as-it-seems porn addicted guy.
If this guy should coincidentally follow my blog and read this: I would be very thankful, if you could pass me that subdomain name, so I can make use of it for more than just an empty page named “Default” and following porn. Thank you!

Oh well, enough for today. Read (someday) more on http://mariusmm.tumblr.com/. Enjoy!

For example, on Twitter it’s possible to personalize messages by inserting the user it’s destined for with an @ as prefix. By using applications which spread the Twitter status-messages all over the net, you begin to see posts from the very same person on platforms like Facebook, where the @user doesn’t make any sense. Also it’s a matter of syntax: While Twitter allows you to write messages the way you want to write them, Facebook forces you (by placing your Name in front of the actual status-message) to use sentences like “has gone away.”, “is finally back home”, et cetera. Since many people now seem to be using Twitter as primary input-channel, you often get to see Facebook messages that look like John Doe Going now to bed. – what’s really ugly and doesn’t make sense in any kind.

I’m asking why? Why do people need to spread one and the same message over dozens of web-platforms? Why can’t they just personalize each message to not make the other “friends” think it’s just another-useless-nonsense-mass-message?

I mean, come on. What’s the deal with multiple platforms then? I still keep each platform personalized and decide what information I would write on what platform. I mean, maybe the circle of followers of my Twitter account (where I personally have more techies than regular people) aren’t interested in reading about stuff I would write to my “normal” friends in Facebook – and the other way around. And as I just said, by making Twitter (or whatever other service) the first input-channel, people kinda stop caring about the other platforms they spread their information at – so it’s actually useless to comment on their status on other platforms than Twitter.

Of course, one could argue of this being a time problem, since he/she would not have the time to write messages into each platform separately – but I mean, why is he/she then registered on every web-community existing on the internet? If time only allows me the usage of one service, I choose the one that fits best for my needs and keep using it.

I think otherwise the whole idea of different platforms is for the birds – why not creating one huge web-community which includes every platform like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. into one service, so nobody would need to spread the information anymore onto ten different services.

Hmpf… oh well.

Facebook's new Layout

I’ve just noticed Facebook’s information about their upcoming new layout and took a closer look to it.

The most radical change that’s visible is the three-column-layout they’re going to use. I personally like this more than the actual design, since it’s not pressed together and stretched as long as it is right now. Unfortunately, because of these three columns, they now seem to have mixed together the right side with relevant informations and ads, what’s pretty meh.

The center-stream is still pretty much the same, they now changed the pictures to have rounded-corners and it’s not called “What are you doing?” anymore, instead it’s “What’s on your mind?”.

What I could not guess from the picture they’ve posted was, if the ugly bars at the top/bottom will finally be replaced by something better. Besides, I’m wondering whether they’re also going to change the iPhone-Client to display the new layout.

We will see….