Minor Blogging Goal Reached

It's been just under a month since I launched my Blog Calendar widget for kris.nelson, and aside from a few kinks that I need to work out, it's been holding its own.

More worth mentioning in that post and in the review of my Dell Mini, however, is reaching my initial goal of posting at least one blog entry a day. I realize it's nothing to throw a parade over, but for me, I think it's a big victory and I'm happy to be able to reach my goal of one post a day for an entire month.

For me, it's not as much as being able to write enough or create enough original content to fill a blog post each day. Those who know me know I always have something to say, and coworkers in the past have commented on some of my emails being way too long. No, to me, it's about getting into the habit and making time in my daily routine to sit down, tune out the rest of the world, and write. I think that has probably been the most rewarding part so far.

My Blogs

A big part of the blogosphere is creating engaging content and generating user interaction and coummunity-based discussions with your blogs. Obviously I'm far from that, so that is yet another, longer term goal. For now, just the joy of writing is my motivation at the moment. I currently write on four different blogs, which has it's pros and cons. The biggest advantage is that I have that much larger of a range to write about, from things regarding Maui and my photography, to things in my daily life and for my web development work.

Perhaps the biggest disadvantage, though, is that having so many blogs covering different topics can lead to less continuity at the individual level. What I mean by that is by posting on a different blog each day (although there is no set rotation), there are fewer posts on each individual blog as there would be if I was focused on one topic solely. I have a combined RSS feed that aggregates all the latest posts from each blog, but with a wide range of topics, there is likely not a large enough audience out there that cares about everything I write. I mean, I like to think of myself as sort of an interesting fella, but I know the difference between what's important to me and what everyone else thinks is important are not always the same.

Next Goals

To counter that disadvantage of scattered posts at an individual blog level, my next goal is focused on targeting more than just one post a day, and getting to more of a regular schedule with my different blogs. Namely, the two blogs (and sites, for that matter) that are getting most of my attention right now are Ka'anapali Dreamin' and photonelly.com. I already have a recurring series for my Maui site, which is the Sunday Photo series that features a new photo every Sunday (hence the name). I have long since wanted to expand on that concept of scheduled topics, such as having a news post on Tuesdays and having something for Aloha Fridays, but haven't had the discipline to do so. I think reaching this first goal was a big step closer to that.

For my photography site, there are also many places I can go with that. There are still some functional aspects of the site I'd like to add, as well as more photos and locations that I have visited that I would also like to feature. Something similar to a Sunday Photo, or maybe just a regular post about some of my existing favorites. I still have a lot to learn in the photography arena, so as I push myself there, the lessons learned and notes from my experiences may also be worth writing about.

High Hopes

Like just about everything else, the sky is pretty much the limit here. For those of you who haven't had much experience writing regularly on a blog or similar site, you might not think it's such a big deal. For the rest of you that are already main contributors to the blogosphere, you know exactly what I'm referring to.

So, can I pull it off? I like to think I can do more than I am right now, but I don't know if I can reach that point where I have enough time to devote to this as I ultimately would like to. But as long as I never lose the spirit of wanting to write and continue down this path for all the right reasons, I think I'll do just fine.

What About You?

Have your own blogging stories or experiences that you'd like to share? Comment away.

Beta Testers Needed: Maui Photo Calendar Gadget

I'm looking for a few iGoogle users that are interested in helping me with beta testing my new, Maui Photo Calendar Gadget. This is the first Google Gadget that I'm looking to publish for public use, so I want to try and do as much due diligence in testing as I can. And alas, I can't do it alone.

The good news is that it is a really simple gadget. All it really does is just determine the current date (one small gotcha in a minute), retrieves a daily photo and details from my Flickr account, and put it all together in a layout as you see here. Maybe it's too simple and I'm only being paranoid about pushing that final "publish" button, but better safe than sorry I guess.



There is one custom setting, though, that might not seem necessary, but I wanted to point it out. There is a Timezone Offset setting that will trigger the gadget to know when "midnight" is and flip to the next day. I know I could use a little JavaScript to detect and retain the timezone information with a cookie, but I wanted to limit the moving parts involved, at least to start.

What To Do
If you would like to help, the first step is to accept my thanks. I appreciate it.

Next, you just need to add the gadget anywhere on your iGoogle homepage. Just copy this url to your clipboard and click on the Add Stuff link on the iGoogle tab you want to use. When you click Add Stuff, the following page will have an option in the bottom left of the page that says "Add feed or gadget". That's where the url from above goes, and you're all set. You'll get a message saying that the gadget wasn't created by Google (obviously).

What Else
Just kick the tires and let me know what happens. Once you add it to your iGoogle homepage, it will show up anywhere you login. I have been trying it with a few different machines, displays, and browsers, so that's really all you can do as well. I know you can use these gadgets in other locations, and while I haven't gotten to trying that, feel free to do so if you'd like. It's not required, though.

If you experience any issues, such as error messages, timeouts, size, cropping, alignment issues, etc., you can post them here as comments, use the contact form, or send me a note on Twitter. Also, if you like it, have suggestions, or anything else, all feedback is welcome.

Timeframe
I'm not looking for anything long term from a testing period, probably a week at most. I'm also using Google Analytics to track the usage of this gadget, so that will help me gauge how much traffic its seeing and where I want to go from there.

So, thanks again for reading and if you decide to give it a whirl (now or when it's published), a big Mahalo.

New Project Idea: Online Photo Day Calendar

What an afternoon of random ideas.  During a rather slow drive home from work, I started thinking about new site designs for Ka'anapali Dreamin' and came up with a few goodies.  After some quick browsing for inspiration and a handful of pencil sketches, I arrived at something woth throwing together in Photoshop.

Getting ready to fire up the laptop, I soon became distracted by yet another idea while looking at one corner in my office at home.  You see, I have been a fan of the Islands Gallery Day Calendar for a few years now, and whenever I come across a day that features Hawaii, I put it on my wall.

As you can imagine, one would gather quite a few of these over the course of 3 years (I'm counting 39 so far, with a few of them practically duplicates).  And in all of that time, I had yet to think of using my own photos to create an online version.  But for whatever reason, today I did.

I already have a Today's Photos section of Ka'anapali Dreamin' that features three different photos each day (albeit it on a rotation).  The same three photos can also be found on the site's home page in the sidebar as a slideshow using the Google AJAX Slideshow and a custom feed I put together.  

I also already have a daily game called Is It Maui? that features a new photo (via Flickr) each day that was taken on one of the islands of Hawaii.  Each of these photos has a subtle (or sometimes obvious) hint in them that tips off which island it was taken on, and the object of this simple game is to guess whether it was taken on Maui or not, and if not, which island. I have to use additional photos from Flickr because all of mine are from Maui (and that would have just made for a pretty lame game otherwise).

Yet despite having those daily displays on the site today, I still have this urge to make something like this daily calendar just because I can probably do it in a day or two.  There is, of course, the laborious task of going through and finding 365 pictures to use (I don't plan on cheating and including the weekend as one photo).  I have certainly taken my share of photos that I could use, but that part of this would still be very time consuming.

Then, there are the options of what I could do with it once it's finished.  Obviously, I'd find a home for it on the Ka'anapali Dreamin' site somewhere (no doubt in the Daily Maui section).  I could also publish it as an RSS feed and style it for a Google Gadget that people can add to their iGoogle page (even if it's just me).  And as being an RSS feed, someone could also just add it to Google Reader and see a warm Maui photo everyday.  And then maybe I could integrate it with Facebook, ... well you get the idea.

I'll probably have a working prototype up by the end of the night, and then I'll see if I'm still as excited tomorrow about having to go through all those photos. :)

Stay tuned.

Potential New Project - Auto Blog Utility

Driving to the office this morning, I happened to be brainstorming a few ideas for another project to work on (in addition to the other half dozen I haven't finished yet).  One of the items I kicked around over the weekend was to follow up my new Blog Calendar widget with a version for my Twitter feed.  I thought it would be neat to go back and see my tweets from a particular day to see what was going on and how much of it I actually remembered doing. :)

Going down that rabbit hole sort of reminded me of something I had did earlier in the year with creating my Maui Twitter page.  I created that page before our most recent trip to Maui in order to record different activities and locations we were visiting using Twitter as a log, and then displaying those entries on my Maui site for others to view.  After the trip, I used the same logs to create the Trip Itinerary pages, which included the time and message from each tweet, as well as comments I wrote up for each activity when I was putting the pages together.

...Back to the Point

So I started thinking about doing something similar when I'm not on vacation, where I could gather up all my tweets for a given day and put it into a blog post or something with comments if I wanted to elaborate on something in particular.  That itself doesn't seem that hard since I've already played around with the Twitter API for the page mentioned above and for work on kris.nelson.

From there, the idea just started to snowball.  Instead of just tweets from a given day, I starting thinking I could import a few photos that I might have uploaded to Flickr that day (probably tying them back to the date taken instead).  I've used the Flickr API quite a bit, too, so that seems easy.

But wait, there's more.  :)

I started thinking about what else I do online all day and where I can pull that into this new little idea.  I'm on Facebook, and even though I haven't looked at the API for that yet, that would be fun to pull in certain things from there.  I could bring in feeds and posts that I read from other RSS feeds using Google Reader (either through it's API or just through the individual feeds themselves).  I could probably use something like del.icio.us to pull in other pages that I might have read and wanted to include, too.  All that seems like a good start, don't you think?

The Plan

This could just be an old fashioned mash-up and not really have to be something that I publish everyday, but for now, I'm kind of feeling like it would be better off if it started as blog posts, at least to start.  Thinking through it initially, I will probably create a standalone WinForm app in C# that I use to go out and gather all the feeds and data for a given date.  Using a few things behind the scenes (thinking XML and XSL/T), I could create a boilerplate blog post with a merged set of all these various items listed out in chronological order and ready for me to fill in the gaps.

Heck, I'm even thinking of using the Blogger API to post a draft version of all of this mashed-up goodness so I can just run this little guy and go right to Blogger to review, add/edit and publish.

It's starting to look like this could keep me busy for awhile, what do you think?

Updated Flickr Section and other fixes - kris.nelson

With a lot of the time and effort I've been spending on my photography lately, I thought I'd clean up the Recent Photos view over at kris.nelson. I switched it from the small 75x75 square thumbnail view to a little bit more profound by comparison, as well as added a few details about each photo.



Behind the scenes, I did some housekeeping as well. Previously, the Flickr integration on this site was being handled through the phpFlickr package, as I'm using for Ka'anapali Dreamin' (at least at the time this was written). Instead of using that entire PHP library just for this simple part of kris.nelson, I decided to switch over to the REST version and made a few corresponding changes on the scripting to display the results. It feels like it's running just a little bit faster (without the PHP and MySQL overhead), but I haven't actually don't any formal testing with it.

Other Updates
In addition to just making this piece of the site look nicer, I also cleaned up a few bugs here and there, including a weird issue that I didn't realize at first on the Twitter updates display. It turns out that the date format that is returned from the Twitter API (for example: Mon Nov 03 18:32:33 +0000 2008) is supported by and parses fine with Firefox, however IE treats it as NaN. I ended up just manually parsing out the fields and building the date parts manually. Oh well.

Minor Updates to Ka'anapali Dreamin' and Future Plans

I haven't made a lot of changes to Ka'anapali Dreamin' recently, with all the work I've been doing on photonelly.com and kris.nelson taking most of my spare development time.

I did make some minor tweeks this morning, however, by rearranging and updating the home page just a little. I added a preview of the daily Is It Maui? game in the upper right hand corner to add a little bit more "above the fold" and also added an update to the top story on the page. The next step there is to add a quick goal setting in Google Analytics to see how effective that change will be in getting more visits to that page on the site.

Nothing terribly large as you can tell. I am toying with a few more drastic changes with the site that I'm sure I'll stop putting off someday and jump on. The first has to do with the homepage again, and consolidating the "Site Sections" content area into a rotating and/or tabbed display to show one at a time and add a little animation to jazz it up a little. I'd also like to work on getting more of the recent blog updates on the home page, too, besides just the list of posts on the sidebar.

The other change I'm considering, and will make eventually, is updating the site template. Whether it's a full redesign or just an expansion, I don't know yet. What I do know is that the current site design is using a fixed width layout assuming an 800px screen resolution. With monitors being much larger than they used to, and with less than 5% of my visitors having a resolution of 800x600 (thanks to Google Analytics again for that number), it's time to add a little bit more breathing room and expand it to a layout that is based on a 1024px screen resolution (35% of the site's visitors, in case you were curious).

I currently use Dreamweaver CS3 and their support for templates, so that should help with updating the 100+ pages on the site, which doesn't included the blog posts. Unfortunately, I do have 10 different page templates to accommodate different page layouts, so there's some work there and maybe the chance to consolidate a little bit. Then, its a matter of retesting all those pages and making sure I don't have float issues or things like that (plus, I never really did a regression test once Chrome came out to see how my site works there).

After I update the layout, then I get to play with those extra 200px!!! I have plans to expand the Maui Island Guide map section, which seems a little cramped at 800px right now, and then work on building out a map and details section just for the Road to Hana (with all my geotagged photos and stuff). I really need to go back and clean up the Photo Gallery as well, adding a better layout and using more of the Flickr API integration and probably more user interaction like I did with kris.nelson using script.aculo.us. Also, maybe some Google Map integration like I did on the Ka'anapali Beachwalk Photo Tour. And then, there's the videos, but I won't go there right now.

So as you can see, I have my sights set pretty high on the next set of enhancements for Ka'anapali Dreamin', and it's really just a matter of finding time to get it all done. It's going to be a lot of work, and I'm sure I'll need a nice, relaxing vacation afterwards. Hmm, I wonder where I'd go...

In any case, that's where I'm at with this site. If you have any thoughts or comments, please share. I'm always interested in what others have to say and try to accommodate what my sites' visitors are looking for. After all, that's the point, right?

New Blog Calendar - kris-nelson.com

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not going to win any awards for blogging, and although I currently write on four different blogs, I've only posted about 200 times in the last year or so. There are probably different reasons and/or excuses why I don't post that often, but I'm putting forth a new effort to change that.

Like many people, I do well with rewards and incentives, so I went ahead and ordered myself a little Dell Mini earlier this month to make it easier to blog any time, any where. So to prepare for it's arrival (since there are severe delays from Dell), I went ahead and created this fun little Blog Calendar widget to supplement the Blogger section at kris.nelson and my combined RSS feed. It's a little motivation to keep me online and contributing to the Blogosphere on a more regular basis.

What it Does
It really isn't that big of a deal, but I had fun putting it together. It's just another little calendar control rendered with JavaScript like the 11,000,000 others out there, but it showcases days of a given month that I have posted on one of my blogs. You can see when I've been a happy little blogger, like back in April when I was in Maui, and when I've just been asleep at the wheel like this past July when I seemed to have taken the entire month off.

The days with at least one post are highlighted and when clicked, the posts from that day are displayed. And it all is done with a little flashy animation created with script.aculo.us. There are still a few quirks that I need to track down and work out, but it was working enough to roll it out and, of course, blog about it. There are a few interesting things going on behind the scenes to aggregate all the archive feeds from each blog and querying against them, but I'll save that for another time.

To view it in action, just go to http://kris-nelson.com and navigate to the "Blogger" section from the menu. Once it pops up happily in the upper left hand corner, you can use it to travel back in time and view my previous posts (or lack there of), all the way back to my first post (I really need to update that blog template).

In the coming weeks, I'm thinking of putting this on a bigger stage instead of just a small little widget. But for now, I've been playing around with my newest camera and trying to be a regular contributor to my photos on Flickr as well. Not enough hours in the day, I tell ya.

Anyway, let me know what you think of the new blog calendar.