Short Term, Long Term

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Here’s a quick idea for a website.

Focused on the interpretation of current events the editorial style is one that discusses the short term and long term effects of news.

With a tentative name of ShortTermLongTerm.com the site would make digesting and reacting to current events easy.

The easiest example right now is with the looming SOPA vote:

Short term effects:

  • Mostly none. Sites will continue to operate without any immediate interruption.

Long term effects:

  • Your favorite websites might experience occasional and sporadic spouts of downtime, going dark and unreachable as IP infringement inquiries mount.
  • New novel companies are limited in their creative scope for fear of attack through the SOPA act. If Facebook were to have been created post-SOPA they could face early attack and downtime due to complaints.
  • Future laws piggy-backing off SOPA arise and are based leading to tighter control over the Internet by the Government. Big brother becomes real and a threat to daily internet use.

I’d love to create this site however I’m not sure on what’s the best approach: maintained by editors or a community.

What are your thoughts?

How To Choose a WordPress Theme

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The old saying goes, ‘the clothes don’t make the man’, to which I reply, ‘Yes that may be true, but they certainly don’t hurt.’

For instance, take this blog. For the past few months I’ve used one theme that – while not ugly – wasn’t the best looking theme in the world. The readability of the text could have been better, the page elements were too close to each other, and (despite originally desiring) there was far too much white space.

When I chose to that theme my process for making my decision was to look for all the features that I wanted. That list remains largely unchanged: the theme must be clean and minimalistic while making it easy to read the content – be it text or visual.

The main problem of looking for a theme in this way is that most themes seemed to fit my requirements. I found it very easy to convince myself that most themes I found fit my requirements. This process wasn’t efficient and caused me to deliberate much more than necessary.
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Updated Blog Theme, Using Twenty Eleven

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For a while I’ve been itching to use a new theme for this blog. That’s why starting today I’ve switched over to using one of the latest WordPress default themes ‘Twenty Eleven’. Some of the things that I love about this theme is its awesome readability, support of post types, and compatibility with all the plugins that I use.

I intend to slowly make edits and customizations to these theme so don’t be shocked to see things moved around one day. To be honest I was hoping to have more customizations ready to show off today but time wasn’t my friend.

It’s my expectation that this new theme will make reading my blog more enjoyable. There is now much more white space around the text, making the process of enjoying the words a little less cramped and a little more fun.

This theme also gets rid of the fixed menus on the left. I liked those guys at first but I’ve grown to find them very annoying.

Also something else that I’m excited about with this new theme is its support for Aside posts. An Aside post is an update that is usually a link to a trailer or a cool YouTube video: something which I want to share but doesn’t need a full-fledged post. I hope to take advantage of this short-form post and share even more fun links I find throughtout the day.

Till next time.

Import Posterous Posts Into WordPress

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Even though I’ve been using Posterous to host my photo blog for the past few months I’ve begun to grow weary of not using WordPress. While Posterous is easy to use I don’t feel like I’m in complete possession of all the content I’ve been creating. With that in mind, last night I started the process of exporting my Posterous posts and importing them into a WordPress installation.

Exporting posts from Posterous was not as easy as I had hoped. There is no native export tool on Posterous’ website nor any 3rd-party Posterous export tool.

After a fair amount of searching I found the only way to get my posts out of Posterous was to use WordPress’ import Posterous tool.
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Blogging In 2011: A Year In Review

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This is my year in review blog post, and oh what an exciting blog post it’s going to be!

2011 was a good year of blogging for me. I managed to kick my addiction of compulsively checking Google Analytics to see how many hits I was getting and instead was able to focus more on just getting words on the screen and out into the interwebs.

With that being said I did crack open Google Analytics today to do a post-mortem of the year and I must say I’m very pleased!
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