Easy referencing Dropbox images in Scriptogram - It’s amazing how quickly you can find solutions for problems you thought you had a few minutes ago. For my part, this practically solves all of my problems. It’s an additional ‘service’ that my website will need to operate properly, which isn’t the end of the world.

We got married one year ago today. My parents were stressing out about it, and made sure to tell me about it as well. How it was such a terrible idea to have an outdoor wedding on the first week of May, in Lebanon. We should have pushed it back, at least 1 week if not 2. There were many clouds in the sky in the week leading up to wedding. The night before it really looked like the heavens were going to open up. It rained very early the morning of that day, and then it stopped to present this amazing sunny day.

Seeing my bedridden grandmother and other sickly family members make superhuman effort to come to the wedding was a gesture that I couldn’t help but marvel at. Having my friends and other family members travel from all over the world to come and visit was another aspect of this wedding that I will forever remember and cherish.

My wife was radiant (as all good brides should be), and the smile and happiness on her face was bright as ever. The food I’m told was pretty good as well, although we didn’t get to sample much of it to be honest as we were far to busy with everyone else.

Everything else was a blur. It went by far too quickly. It ended far too quickly for me. Months spent preparing for this day, gone in a matter of hours. Ultimately it was a good way to start off our marriage.

The first year of marriage has been both exciting and hard. The highlight for us was going to Malaysia for our honeymoon. A trip that Yasmine still talks about (and even calls Qatari Riyals as Ringits, because it sounds better). We were unlucky in our choice of first house, which was a construction mess - which triggered off Yasmine’s asthma, something she still has problems with. We ended up moving houses 6 months into our contract. Then I got made redundant. Because of this fact, we ended up moving houses again 6 months later, this time to a different country entirely.

It’s not been a calm year that’s for sure. Turbulent is one way of describing it. Thankfully life in Qatar is simpler. Quieter. That’s something we’re relishing at the moment. We feel much better for it. We feel like this should have been the start we wanted a year ago. We’re moving into our new house this weekend, so hopefully we’ll be there for more than 6 months.

Life with throw things your way, that’s a given, lefts hope that in the future the amount and frequency will be less than what it was in our first year.

Happy Anniversary.

There Everyday - This stuck with me as very true. Building your site’s following is down to delivering consistently. In recent years, I’ve not really continued up with my site, but that’s to be expected since it’s not my day job, and I’ve been writing it for over 8 years now. I’ve been working hard on updating things around here a bit, which should start appearing shortly.

Automate posting in Wordpress from Calepin using IFTTT - I have a massive post coming up about my preferred blogging solution, but right now, I’m experimenting with Calepin. I really would like a self hosted version, but this workaround is interesting. The thing is that using this system the site would depend upon my server, Dropbox, Calepin, IFTTT and WordPress all working nicely together. As opposed to Dropbox and my server (along with a self hosted version of Calepin).

I know, it’s been a while and by this stage I’m probably talking to myself, which is fair enough to be honest. There have been several things that have prevented me from actually writing and posting, which is really down to both environment and workflow. I was originally going to write a separate post for each topic, but I found that the two topics were closely interrelated.

###Environment The environment to help me publish hasn’t been ideal. The first reason was due to the fact that I don’t have any internet access in my home. It’s been like that for over a month now, and it’s really starting to become disruptive to me. I could post from work, however the firewalls are restrictive and that makes it a colossal pain in the ass.

Apart from the technical aspects of my current situation, silence is reflective of the mood I’m currently in about the internet. Once upon a time I used to love the internet. I used to live it on a daily basis. I was actively involved in trying to bring something different to it on a regular basis. Over the last few months and even years now that has changed. I think the problem is that the internet has changed considerably - and I have not found my place in it.

The barriers are smaller and the noise is much, much larger. Over time I could see less and less people commenting on my website, and my silly Facebook posts would garner more attention and responses. And so you loose a certain amount of interest in keeping things fresh, keeping things moving on the site.

The great thing about this site is that it has a history and it has a distinct style about it. I’ve written some good stuff and some shitty stuff as well. I’ve learnt a great deal, interacted with some great people.

Is it time to retire the site? I don’t think so - after years, I’ve finally got it into a state that I like it (I’ve had this site design for nearly 2 years now). As I write this I wonder if I could take it to part of it’s previous glory. Of course the main issue here is that it’s a completely different place and time, so things will be more difficult and that took a hell of a lot of commitment.

The reason I am still confident in the future of words on this website, is because of my new found love for simple text. I have this appreciation now of words that I have written. I think part of this new found love is down to a few tools, Notational Velocity, my iPhone, Simplenote and the brilliance of Markdown. The seamless integration between these tools, and the fact that all of my thoughts and notes about anything and everything are always with me, (obviously organised in a meticulous fashion) helps me to feel more empowered.

Which happily brings me to my next point. Once my technical barriers that have an affect on my environment, the next barrier which needs to be removed are those to my workflow. I’ve outgrown the current CMS. The current crop of content management systems don’t really provide the level of respect to text files that I would want.

###Workflow So what is the system that I would like to adopt right now? Well after trolling through the internet, I’ve not found something that actually fits my requirements (well nothing that is fully baked).

One solution which I thought had some potential (so much so that I actually coded the next iteration of my site using that system already), was Stacey. This had a couple of problems, mainly the lack of an iOS text editor that could be readily integrated into the workflow (there’s that word again) and secondly there is no archiving system, even though this could be a prime solution if something like this was added, although I have no idea how active the project currently is.

Marco does seem to be working on something that might be exceedingly interesting. He’s not published the source code, because he’s tinkering around with it, which is REALLY annoying. Get on with it and just ship the damn thing Marco. Geeks will huddle around it instantly.

Trolling on Github, I found a bunch of options available that actually do this (clearly I’m not the only one that feels this way). The most promising of the lot was MopBlown, which I’m actually talking with Chris about at the moment, to try and help him move things along, we’ll see how that moves along.

The existing paradigm where you login into an admin panel, wait for shit to load, then click on pages, wait for more shit to load, then you type in things, the wait for shit to get published or built or whatever is not for a small website. There is a better solution for this. Here’s a list of the things that I would like to see in the next generation of website management system with a direct focus on text and markdown.

1. The system should be able to parse simple text files that are written in Markdown. I should be able to write something in my text editor, and either directly FTP the file (using something like Textwrangler or BBEdit). Editing would be as simple as opening the file locally and then editing away and saving again. An alternative method is to be able to put it in a Dropbox folder which is synched to a specific account set up for this sort of thing. The real issue here is that it should be able to do either of these things on any iOS enabled text editor with Dropbox synchronisation.
2. I should also be able to send an email, also written in Markdown and it will parse this accordingly. Save it onto the server, as per the rest of the files as well should also ‘publish’ a file as well.
3. The other part of this puzzle is how you get a bunch of other items into this system. If I see an image I like on a website, I read a quote I thought was good, I want to send a link, maybe on the very very odd occasion I want to have a video (very rare for me to do that), then I should have a way to do this. I should have a backend of some description that would allow me to actually send this information. The backend should then store the post as a text file and an image, saved in a media folder.
4. The final part of this system is that it should resolve archiving in a simple way. Depending on the date that the original date from file in Dropbox and then should be able to show an archive of the files depending on when it was originally ‘published’.

As you can tell, I’m in this weird transitional state at the moment. There are so many excellent and mature methods of publishing on the web, but none of them are for me at the moment, they don’t fit into my workflow.

The thing that I naturally permeate towards instinctively are are the things that I basically want, admire or are curious about. These are the things that I basically would like to have. These are the things that put a smile on my face, and which ultimately I like to talk about.

Cognisant: adjective [ predic. ] having knowledge or being aware of

This thinking actually can be attributed in many ways to Objectified which honestly completely changed the way I look and appreciate products and design. I guess that was the point of it all, but it seriously touched me in a profound way that no other documentary has ever done. A year and a half after I watched it I still think about things it said or tried to say. Sure there were several douche bags on there, but the message was there.

Crucially, in an in advert way it’s basically opened my eyes as to what this particular site will be about and has been building towards all these years.

While I’ve always wanted a space for my projects to live, and my art, it’s only a small part of me and there may be months before I am able to show what I’m working on a regular basis, even though I honestly am creating things on a relatively regular basis. It’s not just about what I create, it’s not just my therapy. It needed focus.

Which brings us to the here and now. Over the last couple of years I’ve been honing and observing things as I develop a sense of what I like and what I don’t like. Sometimes I used this site to achieve this. Recently I’ve been thinking that ultimately the site needed a direction, something it’s not had since it began. The focus seemed to be on design in general, then it meandered off to blogging software, which was like this loop of eating it’s own tail.

The thing that I hope to concentrate on in the future is the idea Cognisant Design.

It took a bloody long time to finally come up with this collection of words. I kept floating between ‘Considered’ and ‘Cognisant’. They are close to each other in meaning, but it’s more than thinking about something. It’s about knowing the reasons for those decisions. I’m sure I’m not the first to come up with these words together, but I hope to bring to the fore what this actually means and highlight examples of this design sense in action.

It’s not a question of minimal design. It’s not a question of functional design, it’s a question of design that is thought out completely, where things we done in a very calculated fashion, even if those calculations lead to what might be hyper detail or bright bursts of colour.

Although I’ve tried to describe it in this post, I feel that the best way to show what it is that I am talking about is to actually show rather than tell. I don’t think I can post this sort of thing on a regular basis, so the linkblogging will continue, however in addition to these quick things I will be focusing on Cognisant Design and hopefully we’ll all learn something new together.

Read & Trust - Now see this is interesting. It’s basically a much better 9rules from way back. For those who don’t know what 9rules was, it was one of the original blogging networks. The great thing about Read & Trust is that it appears to be run by someone who appreciates and knows what they’re doing. One of my biggest online failures was Inksmith. I loved the idea and it’s a shame it never came to be as i originally envisioned it, but I guess having something like this is the next best thing.

So I’m off to Greece on Saturday. This is my first time off since I started work in Lebanon and at PDP. I’ve had a couple of days off here and there (Bank holidays, not my own days off mind) and it’s been a pretty long slog. There’s sooo much that has happened over the various months that honestly I don’t know where to start.

Needless to say I feel it’s well deserved. To be fair it’s not all fun and games as I’ll be trying to sort out my suit for the wedding and also trying to finish off the invitation cards (we’ve been designing the hell out of these cards with Yasmine).

Anil Dash - See that’s what I’m talking about, a bit of good old fashioned blogging. Also I miss browsing blogs and getting design ideas or things that they’ve done. In this case, the ‘Read Later’ button which links to Instapaper. That’s pretty damn cool. For the longer posts, definitely a must, need to get onto that.

So, the first part of this experiment is complete. I’ve basically spent the last 3 weeks blogging solidly on the ‘Kode. It’s been a mixture of links and opinion columns and random thoughts. in that time I’ve not tweeted at all, in fact it’s all been on here. So the next step is to see which of the two platforms garners more attention in general. Obviously on Twitter it’s just going to be that, a whole bunch of links with very little commentary, but lets see if that platform is any good at generating traffic towards this site.

I’m just curious how powerful twitter is and if it has effectively killed blogging as I know it (I believe it has, but I’d like to make sure). So it might be a little quiet over here. If you are looking for the same type of content, then I’d suggest you head on over to @khaledaboualfa for a little bit of the same, although I’m sure I’ll post things on here as well (just no where as near the level of the past 3 weeks).

That is pretty strange. I just was looking at the traffic logs on the site and I noticed a really really strange trend. At the start of the year I was seriously moving back up in terms of traffic. June was an epic month but I think that’s mainly attributed to the fact that I had a spreadsheet hosted here for the world cup and that generated a ton of traffic from Google.

But after that month there is this unbelievable drop of nearly 1/5 of the visitors. I mean even the months before this epic month were not as low as that. Did I change anything between the two months? Well for a start there was a less posting on the site? The ‘Kode is not like other sites where I basically post 3 or 4 times a day and have a super specific niche. The site is a personal blog that talks about all sorts of random pop culture items.

There is a ton of those on the web nowadays, but the question is finding which ones have got a unique voice, and that’s actually incredibly difficult to do. I neither have the time, nor do I feel like I am part of a community of people any more. Blog comments don’t exist any more, or no one really uses them as much as they used.

I guess it’s all a matter of perspective, and I don’t mind the smaller readership, it’s kind of fun to be honest, because I can go back to being as foul mouthed as I want without having to worry about anyone taking offence (or maybe less so than I would normally), it’s just what the hell happened in July to drive EVERYONE away :).

The plan is, and lets see if I can keep this up, is to give at least 2 posts a day. Sometimes they will be links, other times it will be longer based posts on things that i enjoy or am going through, lets see if I can keep this up.brok

The act of blogging on a daily basis, seriously seems like it was centuries ago, when only a few years ago I would have been doing this nearly every day a couple of times. The amount of words that I typed over the years now that I sit down and consider everything is a lot (others did a hell of a lot more, but then again others made it their business to do this).   I’d talk and discuss just about everything that was on my mind, in detail. Reams of consciousness would come out on a daily basis for people to digest, and there were many people at the time digesting it all. Now it’s very quiet over here. Part of me actually likes this quiet, and another part remembers the good old days when blogs reigned supreme.   I guess now it’s all about the 140 characters or the facebook updates or the plethora of other ways that people communicate online.   Also I don’t spend enough time tweaking the site, but that’s only because I’m actually happy with the overall look. The pages are clear (it’s taken me this long to get to this stage) and I finally have a mini portfolio section that I can point people towards. It’s not innovative in any way. Hell it’s not even particular exciting, but it’s clean and it’s minimal and it does it’s job to convey the information well. I would argue that it needs three more sets of colours to signify the changing of the seasons (which I very well might actually do).   The thing is that a site is only relevant if you actually continually update with current issues. From a promotional point of view I don’t do that any more. I hardly go online to other blogs, I don’t reply to many tweets. I don’t find things I’m interested in and go for it. The main reason? I guess it’s because I did that for years…not months, years. And now, I don’t really care about that stuff. I finally have what I want in terms of an online presence, one that I am happy with. I’ve tried over the years to give something back to people that gave me something and gave a great deal of my time and sleep to this.   Now it’s about my day job and the free time that I have I want to concentrate on my comic book. I’m slowly starting to creep my way back into getting my second draft completed. Obviously life always seems to get in the way, which I’m going to have to learn to either balance or deal with, but that’s a post for another time.

My god, it’s been a good long while since I’ve posted here, and honestly there is sooo much good stuff to talk about. The main issue I guess is that now my thoughts are distributed across the net. From Flickr, to Facebook, from Twitter to Instagram, to Google Reader. It’s no longer concentrated in one spot.

Also, I don’t update with personnal stuff, which really is what this blog was originally meant to be about. It’s a long form of expression, something that none of the above are.

So here’s the first bit of news, I’m officially engaged. Yeah, pretty sudden, even for me, but I guess, when you know, you know. And I knew very very quickly with Yasmine, from the first date I knew there was something up. Hopefully I might get her to start blogging on here as well.

Now all I need is a Habari app for my iphone and I’m good - yeah I got myself a brand spanking new iphone, which I love of course.

OhLife - If you start seeing more blogging action here on the ‘Kode in the coming months, it’ll be thanks to this site. Over the years I’ve used different methods to actually communicate online. First it was a newsletter to my friends as a long bastard email. Then it was this blog. Then it was Facebook for a while and a bit of twitter. Now, now it’s nothing really. But I love writing, and I love maintaining this site. Writing an email to myself every day, with my most banal things is a good way of getting back to blogging again. At least that’s the thought process.

One thing I love about the OhLife site is just how beautifully put together it actually is. It’s a single column design (just the way I like it) with subtle backgrounds and little details everywhere. The colour scheme is calm and the little bit of red brings out everything as well.

The guys have been smart enough to make sure to allow you to export your entries as well incase you wanna do something with them, and setting up an account is exactly as it should be, completely painless.

You probably haven’t noticed but now the ‘Kode comes with a completely responsive shiney design, and by responsive design I mean it responds to the size of your screen, well by responds to the size of your screen, I mean if it’s less than 480px (size of your iphone/ipod/blackberry?) then you’ll still be able to read very clearly (without scrolling horizontally) my AMAZING writing, and the brilliant commentary that I provide to you on an extremely sporadic nature - what can I say I’m feeling in a sarcastic mood today.

So if you’re reading it on your feed reader, I guess you could visit the site properly to have a look. The main area i’m pretty happy with is the fact that even the images resize to accommodate (like in the illustration section).

The truth of the matter is, the current version of the ‘Kode is soo simple that doing this was pretty painless, and took an a few hours to read up on how to actually do it. The best resource as you would expect is found at these two A List Apart articles:

1. http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/

2. http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fluidgrids/

Then of course there are the prime examples to look at how this is achieved. Jonathan Hick’s for example has gone ALL out, with stylesheets for the iphone, ipad, 600px resolution, smaller, bigger whatever, it’s crazy - who the hell’s got the time? The general plan for the site is to keep doing general maintenance on the site and adding little things like this and generally bringing the design tighter together, trying to stay abreast with what’s going on the web (rather than being ahead of the curve).

Obviously, I could give a shit if it works in Internet Explorer.

So I’m there minding my own business, just checking my feeds and I see a familiar sight. Manji was mentioned on Devlounge as one of the single column themes of choice.

That’s pretty cool actually, seeing as it was designed over 4 years ago and hasn’t really been modified since. What’s interesting to me really is that there does seem a severe lack of super simple themes out there. Super simple is fucking hard to do and make stick - but that’s a topic for another time, which I fully intend on exploring.

Oh and btw, this is officially Broken Kode’s 1500th post.

Inspired by Coudal, I’ve decided to have a Page 2. It’s basically everything that doesn’t fit into my minimalist design. I’ll have to go into this design a bit more to be honest, because it’s basically longest running design. Every time I try and make it ‘better’ I always end up coming back to the same thing, only with a minor tweak here or there. I’ve not really talked about it, because it never seems all that interesting. What is interesting is that I’ve got over 15 iterations of the current design as I experimented with layout always coming back. I’ll have to post them in a gallery at some point.

So it seems I might have come across as being negative and I guess some have seen my last few posts as diatribes.

Just to be clear on something I’m genuinely not trying to be rude, I’m trying to build awareness because I can see a problem that I think will ultimately have an effect on the software and the developers themselves; which obviously I don’t want, because I enjoying using this software immensely and I want it to succeed. I don’t gain anything personally from doing this, except the satisfaction of giving something back.

I think the general consensus in Habariland is split with regards to my logo proposal:

1. Those who think the current logo is good and we don't need something new.

2. and those who like the 'idea' of the question mark, just not the current execution of the one I've presented.

Honestly, I can live with that; actually this can be considered as progress. Would it be useful to have a look at drawing a couple of other question marks? Would that be a rewarding or ultimately futile effort/exercise? Should i just carry on with the next task I’ve been working on (namely the website)? Would it actually be something to present for a vote by the community? Is there any point?

I ask only because I obviously want things to move in a positive direction to make the software better and to make the experience of using the software better.

You don't need a designer. You need a marketeer.

That’s what my brother said to Yanni last week sometime when we were discussing his online radio station as he was lamenting that not many people were listening to his station. That got me thinking about Habari. It’s been going on for a while now, and yet I don’t feel like the software has hit a critical mass, which is a shame. I think there are several reasons for this, but I’ll start with the first part in trying to help the guys and gals move forward.

Branding

To be completely blunt, from an aesthetic POV it’s not terribly elegant and doesn’t really convey anything about the actual software, the community, etc. That eyesore has to be sorted out for the good of the software (I’ll be going into this in more detail in a future post). Rather than just bitch and moan about something, and not actually do anything about it, I thought I’d take up the challenge. The thing is I did attempt to do this 3 years ago, and I came up with this lovely collection:

Yeah, shut up. I can actually see my thought process, but I guess at the time I was more interested in making something that appealed to the people that had originally started the work (the original Cabal). Thankfully, now I’m just out to make a good logo, that people can use in a plethora of applications, is memorable as the Habari software and is nice enough for me to want to include said mark on my website as well.

Obviously the logo should reflect the software itself, which I have repeatedly been calling it elegant, both in code and in design.

The Question

1. Habari

2. What's the news?

Then I paused. Why the hell didn’t I think of this before? Habari may by definition be a noun, but it’s also a question. What’s the news? Habari is also the answer, a method to provide the news online. The simplest answers are sometimes staring you in the face. The logo should be the question mark. For some reason I instantly knew how that question mark was to look like, at least in my head, but first I thought I’d try seeing what it looks like with some typical typefaces, Helvetica, Gill Sans etc. This is what it looked like:

Convinced that the actual idea had legs and the more I thought about it the more I was convinced that this as an idea is a good one I started sketching. The thing is I didn’t need to sketch for long, because like I said the second I had the idea, the logo was fully formed in my mind. There would be no harsh lines. The reason for this is because that’s not what Habari is about. It’s about elegance, not sharpness. It does things slightly differently than other to smooth your general experience (this is evident from the installer through to the admin panel and beyond).

So here’s my proposal for the new Habari logo:

I’ve also included this set of iterations, which show the logo in both dark and in light colours, on white and on dark backgrounds. The logo remains distinct in all these incarnations.

This next set shows the logo at different sizes: 100px, 75px, 50px, 25px and 16px - click here for the full size of the image.

There have been other attempts at looking at this in the past, all of which have failed, so I don’t think that this time is going to be any different, because it’s a very touchy subject (which is why it’s not moved forward in 3 years). I don’t really expect anything from this exercise to be honest, except that I for one want to at least know that I tried to help in this regard and gave a viable (and hopefully useful) alternative.

And if anything, it would make an awesome t-shirt as well:

So now that we’ve got ourselves a kick ass logo, now would be a good time to make some badges so that everyone can put them on their websites and you know, spread the word.

In this set you’ll also find a few with Habari written in them.

See how that logo gets integrated? The font used is Gill Sans, which is one of my favourite fonts - you can see it in use on this site. The reason I think it works here is because it’s rounded so it retains an element associated with the logo (the playful nature of the logo), and yet bold and modern (like the software). The package contains:

Logo

1. PNG - Light grey on white background

2. PNG - Dark grey on light grey background

3. PNG - White on dark grey background

4. EPS - Vector for you to customise as you wish

Logo with Habari

1. PNG - Dark grey on light grey background

2. PNG - Light grey on dark grey background

3. PNG - White on dark grey background

4. PNG - White on light grey background

Download entire set.

These will also find a permenant home at www.brokenkode.com/habari .

One of my absolute favourite plugins on Habari is the Publish Quote plugin written by Michael. The plugin has done well by me for like over a year, but in my mind there is some room for slight improvement in the way it operates. Habari does a great job of staying out of your way (as I found out the hard way) and I feel that this plugin is really a direct extension of that, which will make it even easier for you to actually publish your thoughts quicker and faster, ultimately making you blog more.

Currently the plugin works by taking you back to main admin panel with all the various fields filled in (according to your option preferences). There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with this approach. As long as you’re logged in, you have no problems (and seeing as I use the persistence of memory plugin my Scott, I’m ok on that front as well).

Proposal

The ‘new’ Publish quote plugin would operate in a similar fashion. Clicking the bookmarklet would provide a drop down card which would sit above the page. The card would look like this:

Details

The card has rounded corners (to be consistent with the admin panel) and also includes the slightly greyed rounded box in the top left hand corner around the title of the plugin (more on this below).

User Experience

After all the whole point of this is to communicate your thoughts and ideas as easily as possible in an enjoyable fashion.

Future Iterations

Lets turn our attention to the main menu in Habari. As I mentioned before there has to be a better way than the current method. The reasoning for the current menu is simple, once you start adding all the menu items (including those provided by the various plugin) the list becoming very long indeed. Without any plugin menus this is what is currently there (including one of the expanded menu version):

And here’s that menu with one of the side menus popping out:

From my personal use, I only need 8 menu items in total:

1. New Entry

2. New Page

3. Manage

4. Comments

5. Dashboard

6. Plugins

7. Options

8. Logout

For me everything else is completely superflous, or at least it’s bloody rare for me to even go there, like once a year if that (I don’t think I’ve ever gone to the logs and groups menu for example). As I said that’s only because of the way I choose to use Habari. Other users might feel like they want something a bit different, and this type of functionality would allow

Proposal

The other aspect of this Menu plugin that would also hopefully enhance the experience, would be bringing the shortcut numbers back. In the options menu we would also provide an option to assign the menu option with a keyboard shortcut to a menu item. This way we’d get back to a more streamlined workflow, which is slightly hindered by an additional keyboard stroke (at least in my eyes it is).

Future Details

For those who know me from my professional life (I’m a Chartered Engineer), know what a complete filing freak I am. All graduates that have helped me out, or that I’ve had anything to do with their training have gone through an induction with regards to how to file things properly. It’s a MASSIVE bug bear with me.

When I had that moment of madness and I moved over to WordPress, what struck me was that Habari’s elegance doesn’t extend to just the admin panel. In Habari it extends to the filing structure, which I really want to shine a bit of a spotlight on, only because I think it’s not generally discussed and I think that the developers deserve mad props for building this elegance in.

When you download a copy of Habari and you open your folder, you’re presented with the following files and folders:

Let’s compare some of the other people:

WordPress

Textpattern

Chyrp

There are a couple of things to take from the above. The first is the number of files without folders. In Habari, this is a total of 3, in WordPress it’s 23, in Textpattern it’s 4, while in Chyrp it’s 5.

The second thing to pay close attention to is the names chosen for these folders. I know which I feel is the clearest filing structure of those above.

Earlier this month I moved this blog back over to WordPress in an act of madness. I hated it and did little blogging in that time. In considering why I hated the experience at WordPress so much, I came upon an interesting parallel. Habari is to WordPress what Apple is to Microsoft.

One of the things that can be said about Apple when compared to Microsoft is that Apple provides a more elegant computing experience that has been better thought out. In a similar fashion Habari is by far the more elegant product where the details have been sweated out and the experience has been better considered.

As a simple example when you install WP you get a random password in your email box and then the second you log into the panel you get a message asking you to change your password. Why didn’t you let me choose a password during the installation process?

Meanwhile on Habari, the installation is all done on the same page, you insert your preferred password right there.

As another example once you’ve logged into WordPress you’re bomobarded with this clusterfuck of items - TMI (too much information). Yes, i know you can remove most of that stuff (but this is all feeding into my analogy). These items aren’t necessary, they’re added first and you are asked to remove them. It’s like when you buy yourself a Dell PC and get a whole bunch of crapware installed on it, which you can remove (most of the time).

Habari doesn’t have that shit to begin with. These items have not been added from the outset. These things have been considered. And who else do we know that doesn’t like superflous stuff cluttering your view and generally getting in your way? These are just a couple of examples which I might expand upon, because the above is basically the tip of the iceberg.

These are subtle differences but important I think in the final assessment, afterall the devil is in the details.

After a moment of pure madness, I went back to WordPress, only to find that actually the creature comforts that I had become accustomed to in Habari were not present. It had such a detrimental effect on me that I could even post small links. The bookmarklets didn’t work, the thing felt heavy and I couldn’t wrap my head around the various elements of the code that had passed me by.

I’ll be writing more about Habari in the coming months as there definitely is a lot of work being done, but it just needs a bit of, consolidation of sorts.

If you’re reading this in your feed reader, then have a look at the site, which looks a little bit different, as I’ve also updated to version 9.

Although not an immense milestone by most blogs estimation (especially the professional blogs which pay you by the post), I think 1300 posts on ‘Kode is a significant achievement to sit back and take stock of. 1300 posts is roughly 216 posts per year, which is a little over 1 post every two days for the past six years. Truth is, there have been some pretty busy days and some very quiet days (nay months) over the years but overall there has been a consistent output of ideas, thoughts, critism and links over the years.

Changes

However the biggest change I’ve made here this year is removed comments. Comments were really sporadic in general, and the only thing I could count on was bloody spam. Getting rid of the spam has been great, but of course it’s also meant that if in fact I wanted to have a discussion with anyone then it’d have to come from an email, or on twitter.

Design

Future

Gummisig - One of the best looking blog/websites I’ve seen in a good long time. It’s the combination of the colours, gridlines, and big bad bold type that does it for me.

It’s been nearly 4 1/2 years since comments were officially not part of this site. Back then it was because I couldn’t actually host them on my own site, until of course I moved to WordPress and during the blogging revolution of the early naughties. So what’s changed? Twitter and Facebook. Both of which have brought the internet to the world that hid themselves from it, but they’ve practically killed the blogosphere, or at least how it used to operate.

The funny thing is turning them off was on the cards for a while now. I’ve noticed this downturn for about a year now (probably a few months before I even moved to Habari as my blogging engine of choice).

Does it upset me? I guess it’s a different kind of change. While sometimes I like twitter, there’s too much noise for me on there. Also the fact that everyone only speaks in soundbytes does annoy me. I can’t read people’s thoughts about things because they’re limited and effectively people’s voices on the internet are silenced.

In the meantime I’ll be here writing more than 140 characters and hopefully sharing some good links from around the net. If you want to comment on something, drop me an email or you know…send me reply on twitter (maybe I’ll even integrate that twitter reply thing that Michael is attempting at the moment).

OokahBlog - Pascale’s blog, who’s in my art class (which sadly ends tomorrow evening). So much work seems to go into any one post, but some how it’s a pretty engaging scroll. In a day and age where I can’t be bothered typing out more than a couple of lines, she’s creating montages and cartoons for her posts.

FAIL Blog - Easily one of my favourite websites at the moment. The humour just appeals to me on such a base level, and the word FAIL is just the perfect way to describe most of this stuff.

TweetBacks - Great little plugin for WordPress (that will hopefully be making it’s way over to Habari) that bring Tweetbacks. Think of them as trackbacks only made of tweets.

The problem is that 2008 lacked focus for these areas, so it’s time to provide them with a slight bit of structure. I doubt I’ll be able to meet these deadlines, although I might try and attempt to do something about it, the harsh reality is that life will no doubt get in the way; however it’s better to have some structure than none at all.

Japan Photo Album

Finish the script

Clemency

Character Designs

Broken Kode

Simple takes time - Jason Santa Maria on design times. I loved the Mark Twain quote, which I’d never heard before, “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.” So true, as I’ve been struggling the last couple of months to come to a final design for the ‘Kode. As you can probably tell, it’s still not finished.

Broken Kode has finally reached the 1000 posts milestone. It’s taken nearly 5 years to get to this stage (I’ll be celebrating 5 years of the ‘Kode in January) and honestly there have been several times when I’ve considered shutting the blog down and just keeping a few images and a brief note on here, but I just could never do it, it was like shutting down a part of me. One thousand posts, some good, some bad, some controversial, some stupid, some clever, some offensive, some thoughtful, but one thing I’ve always tried to be is honest.

As always thanks for both reading and providing your comments on the site.

Or so Paul Boutin will lead you to believe from the latest issue of Wired. In what is clearly blog-bait, Paul does raise some interesting points although I don’t think his thoughts past the fact that blogging has had it’s heyday as we got to know them these last few years are all that poignant to be honest.

Sources

He is right that blogging isn't as prevalent now as it was 4 years ago, but then again, very few things on the internet has got that much of a shelf life. He sites Technorati as a source, to which I say, who the fuck searches Technorati anymore? I mean seriously? I've not visited Technorati in like over a year probably, that site died a slow a mostly deserved death years ago (we can talk about the fall of Technorati, but honestly I don't give a shit).

Methods of Expression

Which then leads me to his thoughts on what we should do. Go and tweet apparently; write stuff on Facebook and show my photos on Flickr. I think he's missing the point here. I do all of that (except Flickr, can't get into that site to be honest); the thing is all of my other outlets are connected to my blog. I post something here, it's shown on Twitter. My posts show up as notes in Facebook. All of these services have their reasons to exist and provide me with a specific service, but they could never replace my blog.

Many have sited Twitter as the blog assassin. I don't necessarily agree. It serves an excellent purpose, it really does. The thing is though that Twitter is filled with bollocks, but that's what it's meant to be. Intermingled within that bollocks are some pretty cool things for sure and he is right in that the vibrant feel of mirrors blogging four years ago, but its not the only method of expression, it's but one method.

Is blogging as relevant as it was 4 years ago? No it's not. Things have changed considerably, the blog isn't new and fresh, because now it's an established institution of the internet landscape. If you have a website then you have a blog. Some web magazines are now seen as blogs (like Treehugger), but blogs are the personal sites run by one man or woman, not a collection of writers churning out 30 posts a day.

Personal Experience

In a perverse kind of way I am glad that the spotlight is off. It means that I can concentrate on all my thoughts and that eventually the people that comment on my site are either the ones that have been reading for a while and therefore have meaningful contributions or people that have found something useful in their search for other kinds of information.

Blogging was never about being the best and most popular voice on the internet, it’s about freedom of expression to the masses in a way that was never before possible. Saying that blogging is dead is like saying that the written word is dead; if you think like that then I have honestly nothing to say to you.

There is definitely something to be said about a slow burning design. At least from where I’m sitting. I started redesigning the ‘Kode last week but the deal I made with myself was that I would limit myself to doing one small thing every day. One element of the design. Be it the typography, or some colour changes or implementing how the asides look. Nothing drastic, just small increments.

The honest reason for this approach is that my life doesn’t allow me the luxury to come in every single night and just hack away and try and sort the code out test it make sure it’s all pucker both locally and online before I unleash it in one big fell swoop. I’ll average 3 nights a week (usually less) when I’m actually at home at a reasonable time and I guess in part I was also suffering from a bit of design fatigue.

Trying to get to that final result seemed pretty daunting at first. Soo many pages that I want to sort out, so many elements that need to be designed for and implemented that when I’ve tried in the past year to deal with them, I just get overwhelmed and often they just live in an electronic graveyard on my computer.

So my tip for all you hobbiest blog designers that do have a bit of redesign fatigue, I would definitely recommend this approach of breaking the pie into smaller slices. Don’t get too upset if things are not there. Start on a solid foundation (I started from my favourite coding base from a previous design) and add to the design in a slow but controlled and consistent fashion. It might not get there as fast, but you’ll definitely enjoy the process more, at least I can claim that I am enjoying this tweaking a lot more than I’ve ever enjoyed sorting out my site.

Maybe it’s because you’ll have moved the design forward, maybe it’s because there’s something fresh to look at every day, maybe it’s both.

I was thinking about this today and basically, blogging involves removing the additional thoughts that are in your head that take up valuable space. Things that you should think about but not necessarily keep in your brain knocking about. That way it leaves you with more time to do other things, like in my case watch ‘The Wire’ (best police series EVER created) and read a few books (got a couple of reviews for books you really should read) and most importantly for my sanity, create things. That’s when I’m most happy, when I’m creating stuff.

The issue with me is that that part of my brain has been laying dormant as I began thinking and doing a bunch of other things that seriously didn’t really add to my being,…overall…in hindsight and all that. Part of the problem I guess is that I’m not angry enough at stuff, so it’s time to start getting angry again and flex that muscle again. It’s time to start creating again, it’s time to start blogging again, none of this 7 posts a month bullshit.

To the internet. So last week we were offline at casa Khaled. Yes, that’s right, no net access whatsoever. At first I’ve got to admit that I was REALLY angry. Not at anyone but at the situation itself. I mean seriously, my computer felt like it was neutered. I felt completely cut off from the world and all because as it turns out one of the cables coming into the house decided to collapse on itself. Maybe because it finally decided to give up the good fight because of the cold weather? Maybe it was because the workers outside moved it a fraction and it was to frail to deal with it, either way I was cut off.

This has happened before to be honest, however this one I was a bit more composed with the whole thing. I was actually able to deal with a few things that I’ve been meaning to deal with for a while; like do a bit of writing, do a little bit of drawing and generally do a couple of things that I’ve been meaning to do for a while. One thing I did miss was this site. I realised that I need this place for venting, something which i’ve been doing a lot less of in recent times. One of the main reasons I continued to blog was because I liked the cathartic process associated with brain dumping, because after all that ALL I’m doing here. Sometimes I rattled a few cages, sometimes I make a couple of people smile, so I think I’ve found that spark that I need to really start making the words on this site start coming alive. So as of tomorrow, you can expect a lot more ‘Kode action coming your way, daily even.

It’s also time I kicked WordPress like a bad habit. Seriously, this shit takes FOREVER to log in. Once you’re in it’s kind of OK, but honestly SLOW as a fat man in water. Some things in 2.5 are nice, but alas I’m thinking too damn little, too damn late, I guess I will write something about it at some point.