My Web Development Recap for 2008

This post is coming in a few days later than I had originally hoped, but that's okay. 2008 was a very busy and successful time for me in regards to my personal work online, and I wanted to take a moment or two and recap some of the highlights and numbers.

Four New Sites!!!

With the launch of my largest site, Ka'anapali Dreamin' back in 2007, I would have figured the majority of my time the following year would have been spent with upkeep and expansion of that site. Indeed, I put quite a bit of time into it, with close to 20 updates released last year, not to mention all the new content around our April '08 trip to Maui.

But who knew I'd also be serving up 4 new websites in that same year, bringing the total of sites in my portfolio to 9. Here's a quick recap of each of them.

• Maui Wall Candy - This is my online photo store powered by smugmug. While the Pro account that I'm subscribing to handles most everything for me, there was still a bit of customization to get the site looking unique, and it was anything but the traditional coding and markup process, either.
  View Site - View Announcement
• photonelly.com - This site is my portfolio site for my photography work, much like webnelly.com is the portfolio site for my web development. It was one of those that I decided to throw together in a matter of a few weeks and have been very happy with it.
  View Site - View Announcement
• kris.nelson - Shortly before completing photonelly.com, I came up with the concept for kris.nelson and literally launched the site in 3 days. It's not a traditional website and bends a few of the standard site design rules, but I think it's a neat little place to visit
  View Site - View Announcement
• Igloo Surfing - This little blog should have been the first site in 2008, but was put on the back burner almost the entire year. It's a small blog featuring photos of our rabbits doing cute things and my attempted humor with captions.
  View Site - View Announcement

While I have some site redesign and enhancement ideas for my existing sites, there are no plans for new sites (yet) in 2009.

Blogging

By the end of 2008, blogging finally became part of my daily routine, and I was very proud of myself. Setting small goes to start with, I finished the year with well over 200 posts on my four blogs, and in December I was averaging 2 a day.  Here's the breakdown:

• Ka'anapali Dreamin' Blog - 136 posts
• Kris and Cindy's Blog - 42 posts
• webnelly.com Blog - 28 posts
• photonelly.com Blog - 26 posts

Photos

With the launch of my photonelly.com site last year, photography, much like blogging, became a regular part of my life as well. As a result of our April '08 trip to Maui and my renewed interests in everyday photography, I posted 1,900 new photos to Flickr in 2008.  Checking the 2008 Archive calendar at Flickr, the biggest spike in April from our Maui trip, but the last 3 months really started to pick up in terms of frequency.

Twitter

It addition to making Twitter part of my Maui vacation in 2008, I've become a modest use of the micro-blogging service during the second half of '08. I recently posted my 1,000 update on Twitter before the end of the year, and while I only have a handful of followers, it makes a nice balance. My Twitter updates are already integrated into kris.nelson, and I have a few ideas on future uses as well. Fun stuff.

Pretty Much It

That about covers the major highlights. There were so many cool things that worked on this past year, it would just be too daunting to list most of the smaller ones. The new sites are always fun, but the blogging, photos, and Twitter conversations I engage in daily are really what is making it exciting to share my life online right now. The web is such a great place right now, and I'm happy to be a part of it.

Here's to bigger and better things in 2009!

Site Meets Blog

Continuing with my incessant curiousity and experimenting with 3rd party APIs and integrating them into my websites, I've made noticable progress lately working different aspects of my various blogs into the actual websites they complement.

The Beginning

Long before I started worrying about writing content, the majority of my web development was writing code. Lots of code. HTML, Javascript, PHP, SQL, XSLT, you name it.  And all was good.

Much of my self learning of the PHP scripting language came from working with a much older version of a community forum system which is now called XMB. The open-source software package also came with a nice user group that was always making enhancements and upgrades to the code, from the people that were using it. I even made my own contributions as well, which was both fun, and yet also a little daunting with the support and feature requests that I couldn't keep up with.

Anyway, this was all for the Nighthawks Hockey Online, which at the time had a distinct set of code and database tables that was running the site itself and one running a modified version of the community forum. In an effort towards a more unified user experience, I spent close to a  year (in between times when I was actually coaching the team) methodically picking apart the code from the site and the forum and merged all the functionality of the user forums to be shared throughout the site itself. A single login, single user profile, and tons of features both from a message board perspective and everywhere else on the site.  It was pretty fun to do.

The Now

I don't want to say that user forums aren't as popular as they were a few years ago, but there is certainly a new kid on the block.  The blog. And so, I found myself again in situation where I haddistinct code and functionality with my standalone websites and the blogs that accompany them. Was I scared? I think not.  Was it hard?  Not at all.

Probably a little overdue, I just recently started getting around to integrating some of the blog features and content into my sites themselves.  All of my blogs currently run on Blogger in FTP Publishing mode.  In this setup, I create a template for how I want my blog to look, usually by reconstructing the main style elements and layout of the site I'm matching. I then use the Blogger interface to author all of my blog posts and when I'm finished, Blogger merges the posts to the template and publishes the files to my web host. This model has its restrictions, as well as causing a few headaches from time to time, but as you can see, it's worked pretty well for me so far.

My Site/Blog Integrations

By using Blogger, I also have access to my blog and post information using the Blogger Data API. At the moment, I'm only using it for retrieving content and not writing or updating data, which makes it very easy to use. In fact, calling just the retrieving portion an API is somewhat of a generous term, because really I'm just formatting URLs in a way that returns post and comment data in a standard Atom format.  Very easy.

I've currently integrated my blog content into my main sites in 4 different ways, as described below.

1. Recent Posts Sidebar using AJAX

The first thing I did with the Blogger Data API was to include the 3 most recent posts in the sidebar navigation on the home page of Ka'anapali Dreamin'. Since this part of the home page changes frequently (with each new post), I wasn't as concerned as building it into the page in a way that it would be crawled by search engines. This made it a prime candidate for some client-side AJAX to grab the site's current Atom feed and parse through the last 3 entries to display as links. 

Technically, I'm not using the API here, but I've been meaning to update this code to use a filtered API request to retrieve only the last 3 posts and not the entire feed. That would save quite a bit of data needing to be downloaded, thus making it faster. I also will be updating this script to use the Google AJAX Feed API instead of my own custom request handler to fetch the feed. I started using the AJAX Feed API for my blogging calendar, and while I still have a few cache issues to work through, it should be fine for this purpose.

2. Recent Comments per Page Topic

There are many pages at Ka'anapali Dreamin' that also have a blog post or two associated with them, and I wanted to display the comments from that post on the page on the site. Here's an example, the beach page for D.T. Fleming Beach, which is associated with the blog post, Sunday Photo: Waves at the Beach. By grabbing the PostID number from Blogger for that post, I'm able to construct a URL to retrieve the comments for just that post in an Atom XML format. By parsing that XML with a little PHP code and, I have blog comments on a regular ol' site page.

3. Category Pages

Now it gets very interesting, and the benefits of blogging become very clear when having a website, and this type of integration helps to further blur the lines between them.  Here's an example scenario, also from Ka'anapali Dreamin'.

Separate from the blog altogether, the site already has a News section. This section leverages various RSS feeds from different providers to display recent new stories in one place (with full attribution and links to the original content, of course). Meanwhile, at the blog, I also like to feature individual news articles I find online, adding my own commentary and having discussions with readers about things happening on Maui and elsewhere in Hawaii. 

Out of the box using Blogger, I can just tag each article with a given label, such as I have done with the label "News".  Blogger then automatically creates a category page for each label, and features all the posts for that tag.  You can see here all the posts that are labeled News. As you can see, in a standard blog view, it's not very easy to navigate. Since I'm using the FTP Publishing mentioned earlier, I don't have the option to offer paging or things like other blogs have.  All my blog pages are static HTML.

Luckily, I was able to use the Blogger Data API to request a list of posts with a given label, and retrieve them in, you guessed it, a standard Atom XML format. Cutting to the chase, you can see that I added a News Articles page to the previously mentioned News section to show abstracts of the 3 most recent blog posts labeled News, and using a list at the bottom for older posts. By doing so, this blog content is featured within my existing site hierarchy, and I just have to link back to the posts on the blog for the full version. Nice!

I've also followed this model for adding a Travel Traditions page on our site, that features posts from a blog series that shares the same name. Now, new visitors browsing through our site can find these pages, never even needing to know there is a blog power the content.

4. Recent Posts on the Home Page

The last integration example I have is from the home page of photonelly.com. It features similar recent post information as the sidebar example above, as well as the abstract view from the previous model. Since I don't post on photonelly.com as often as the other blogs, I wanted to keep this content as part of the web page itself (rather than using AJAX) so it would welcome readers as the page loads and it would be picked up by search engines.

I've been toying with similar plans to do the same for Ka'anapali Dreamin' during the next redesign of the site.

What's Next

The next big use of this integration is going to be in the site redesign on Kris and Cindy, whenever I get around to it.  The site itself has been in need of an overhaul for some time now, while the blog itself is more active than ever.  Initially, I would like to work in the recent blog posts into the site's home page, and then from there, probably break out into more of the different category pages and organize things that way.  It will likely take a good deal of effort, but it should all be worth it.

The Conclusion

Hopefully these examples offer some good ideas on the purpose and benefits of integrating blog content into an existing website. I think as that line between blog and traditional website continues to blur, and with micro-blogging sites like Twitter openning up their APIs to further integration on the web, the concept of just a standalone website will be even more rare than ever. Very exciting stuff.

Project Time Next Week

Next week is going to be the second year in a row that I get the entire week of Xmas off, which is giong to be very nice. Since I haven't been skating as much I as want to, that leaves me with more time for working on different site updates and projects during that week.  Now, the only issue is deciding what to work on!

Here are a few things that I'm considering giving face time to next week.

Finish my host migration

Believe it or not, the host migration to a new web host has been going better than I had thought. In fact, I only have 3 sites left to migrate, upgrade, and test. They are, however, the largest sites that I have, which is why they're going last.

Add my Maui Photo Calendar to Facebook

I just recently launched my Maui Photo Calendar as an Google Gadget, and I was thinking yesterday about trying to add it as a Facebook application. I was doing some research and found opensocket, which is supposed to take care of much of the integration for existing gadgets to work on Facebook. Going through some of the settings, however, I think it would be more beneficial to grab a book and learn more about Facebook apps first.

Finally launch Igloo Surfing

It seems like only yesterday I had this idea of launching a fun little website named Igloo Surfing.  Actually, it was over a year ago. Going through the web host migration, I revisted were I had left off with the site, and I was a lot closer to finishing it than I remembered. So that makes this another good candidate. Odds are it could be my first new site of 2009.

Redesign for Kris and Cindy

Speaking of a year ago, around this time last year is when I put Kris and Cindy in a dormant mode. Not only is it long overdue for a redesign, but probably some restructuring as well. The current site structure and sections were good a few years ago, but SO MUCH has happened in our lives since then. Mainly for the good, the current structure just isn't going to hold all those new pages.

This is still one of the sites to be migrated to the new host, so that makes time for a redesign a good candidate, as well.

Minor design and layout changes for Ka'anapali Dreamin'

I mentioned last month that I had a few minor changes in the queue for Ka'anapali Dreamin'. The biggest of which I'm thinking of is a slight redesign and layout change to increase the standard page layout for 1024px browser widths, rather than the current 800px width. My other motivation is that we leave for Maui in less than two months (yay!), so I really need to get caught up before we come back with even more content to add to the site.

New feeds for kris.nelson

Last week I shared something I discovered with Google Reader to be able to share my favorites from the different RSS feeds I follow. That, and a few other similar additions, are racing around in the design part of my brain right now, and are itching to come out.

Flickr and Google Map integration for photonelly.com

Just this week I quietly snuck in some new changes to the home page of photonelly.com to include recent posts and photos from Blogger and Flickr. That was more of a spur-of-the-moment idea because of recent work with the Blogger Data API I was doing, so it was completely unplanned. What I really want to add to photonelly.com is an integrated photo gallery like I did for Ka'anapali Dreamin'. You can view that here, and as you can see, there is both Flickr integration and maps displayed with Google Maps. 

So that's what I have to look forward to next week. Obviously I'm not going to get to all of it, and I don't really have a set idea on how to prioritize the above. I'll end up playing it by ear, but if I can get at least two of these things knocked off the list by New Years, I'll be happy.

photonelly.com Launches Today

It's official, after only two short weeks of development (which at times felt like two months), I'm happy to announce another website in the webnelly.com portfolio.

photonelly.com is my new photography portfolio website featuring all sorts of info about my favorite photos, my gear, and even a new blog where I can talk tech about the cool new cameras and gadgets that are coming out these days.

You can find out more from the welcome post at the photonelly.com Blog, and as with my other sites, you can read up more about this new one in my website portfolio section here at webnelly.com.

Take a look at let me know what you think.

Thanks.

Sneak Peak: photonelly

After finishing the Maui Wall Candy site this month, I was feeling inspired. Browsing the web and looking at different photography sites and galleries left me with the desire to create my own.

So that's what I'm doing. :)



photonelly is going to be my online photography portfolio and serve as a collection of all different photos I've taken over the years. A good portion of my photos have shown up on my other sites, but I have taken others that don't fit into a particular website that I have today. Take for example, the Lunar Eclipse from this past February. Not going to be showing up on my Maui site anytime soon.

I'm riding this inspiration wave pretty hard and hope to have more content finished in the next week or so. Be sure to check here for updates if you're interested.

Thanks.