I am finally announcing that I am going to grad school. I will be studying applied mathematics at SFU. I am really excited about this opportunity, but have no idea what I’m getting myself into.
My last day of work (working full time) at Trinity Western University will be on Monday. I will continue to work as a Web Developer part-time for them while at grad school. This will allow me to avoid working as a TA while continuing to gain more software development experience.
Recently, jkwiens.com has under-gone a complete re-design. Although the over-all site is a huge improvement, there is still a lot of fine-tuning to be done. One of the areas that I have been thinking a lot about lately is how to format my link posts. The biggest problem with them is that it is JUST a link. There is no witty comment. Nothing that personalizes the link. Overall, the links are just boring. However, as of now, this is about to change.
The idea behind my link-sharing system is to make it as simple as possible. If it isn’t easy for me to share links, I know I will stop posting links all together. This is what makes Google Reader an excellent choice to share links. All you need to do is click the share button and shazzam that article is shared with all your friends. The cooler part is Google Reader creates an RSS feed of your shared items. You can then use this feed to publish your shared links to your blog using a simple script.
I am using a PHP library called SimplePie to parse my shared items. This is the same library that I use for my facebook application, Simplaris Blogcast. I can trivially connect to my feed with the following lines of code:
$feed = new SimplePie(); $feed->enable_cache(false); $feed->set_feed_url($feed_url); $feed->init(); $feed->handle_content_type(); $items = $feed->get_items();
We can then loop through the items and easily grab the Title, Author, and Link of the shared item.
foreach($items as $item) { $data = $item->get_item_tags( SIMPLEPIE_NAMESPACE_ATOM_10, "source" ); $link = $data[0]['child']['http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom']['link'][0] ['attribs']['']['href']; $created = $data[0]['child']['http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom']['title'] [0]['data']; $title= '[Link] '.$item->get_title(); $content = "<a href=\"".$item->get_permalink()."\">".$item->get_title() ."</a> (<a href=\"$link\">$created</a>)"; }
This is the exact format I used for my links until today. The new feature to my existing system is to grab notes from Google Reader. Google Reader allows you to post a note to any item that you share in Google Reader. This is, also, conveniently put into the shared-item RSS Feed which we can grab using SimplePie.
$note_data = $item->get_item_tags( "http://www.google.com/schemas/reader/atom/", "annotation" ); $note = $note_data[0]["child"]["http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"] ["content"][0]["data"];
Now that I can create my link posts programmatically, the only thing left is to publish any new posts to wordpress. You can easily do this by setting up the “Post via e-mail” feature. Using this feature, you get your script to email the new post for wordpress to pick-up. You can then configure your wordpress theme to display your link posts in whatever format you want.
I am now posting links to blog articles that I find interesting. They should be coming up now on my blog’s sidebar and RSS feed. By the way, I am sorry for spamming links earlier. I wanted to post links to all my shared items in google reader. Unfortunately, this meant that people subscribed to my RSS feed would see an abnormal amount of activity.
Now that I have my shared items importing to my blog, you should be able to unsubscribe from my google reader feed. All the shared items in google reader should also appear as links in the jkwiens.com RSS feed. Additionally, now that I’m posting these links, you will be able to comment on them directly from my blog.
jkwiens.com has finally undergone another facelift. I was starting to get really sick of the old design. The site was starting to get really cluttered and messy. The new design is very loosely based on Warped Visions’ design. Warped Vision’s design is simple… but professional. This is exactly what I wanted in the new design. I was able to maintain the essence of the old design while drastically simplifying the layout. I still have a lot of work to do on the site, but it is a significant improvement (I think).
It seems a bit counter-intuitive that a simple professional design would be so difficult to design. Simple professional design is all in the subtleties. When your site is more complex, you have more opportunities to distinguish yourself when compared to a novice designer. A novice designer would make a complex site unusable. The reason for this is because of the sheer number of “design decisions” that go into a complex site. When you compound all the non-optimal design decisions a novice designer makes, you end up with a messy and unusable design. Since a professional designer would make fewer non-optimal design decisions (and certainly wouldn’t allow the problems to compound), the differences in the sites would be obvious. However, when you reduce the amount of design decisions in a site, what distinguishes you from a novice? The answer is “not very much”.
The key to simple designs is in making subtle design decisions. This is the difference between a simple site designed by a professional and a novice. A novice wouldn’t waste his time making subtle decisions. However, these subtle decisions compound. When a professional makes his font color #222222, a novice would leave it as black. When a professional plays with the spacing pixel by pixel, a novice would set it to an arbitrary value. This is why simple designs are so hard. You have to be absolutely annal about your design. In a complex site, you can afford to overlook subtle design decisions. However, you don’t get that luxury with simple designs.
I am proud to unveil a new support system that I have been developing at bugz.jkwiens.com. The project is still under development, but the base functionality is complete. I would appreciate any comments that you may have with the site. I am always looking for ways to improve it.
The big question that everyone is probably wondering is “Why build a support system?”. A support system isn’t an original idea. If I needed a support system, why not use an open source project or buy one. Well… the answer is that I’m a programmer. We build things so that we can learn from them. In this case, I wanted to learn python and django. However, even though I was building it for the hell of it, I still wanted to create something useful. Since I had an existing project called Simplaris Blogcast which needed a support system, it became an ideal project. Additionally, I had already designed a support system for Trinity Western University. This meant that I could focus on learning django instead of worrying about design decisions.
