It's an enjoyable trip, looking back...

I can't say for sure when I started blogging. Or, blogging as we now know it, at least. The first post here is circa April 2002, when I was in the middle of developing my own CMS. Before then, I had something like this. That was all long before I launched v6 of this site, in 2008, when I eventually migrated to WordPress.

From version to version, blogging has consistently played an integral role in the way I've presented myself online.

I don't feel much sentiment toward the majority of my blog content, which is a good indication that I never took it all that seriously. My archive is littered with trivial rubbish and outdated content which I no longer want to associate with. That, coupled with a lack of motivation, a desire to minimise information overload that blogging presents, the meteoric rise in microblogging, and how I now feel about amateur blogging in general, are my primary reasons for deciding to retire my blog indefinitely.

Moving forward...

My immediate plan (albeit long overdue) is an exercise in rebranding.

If you follow my activity elsewhere online, you might have noticed my new logo design, which I recently launched across all my social networking profiles. Next up, I will be redesigning this site. This will be accompanied by the simultaneous launch of a new brand to represent my business venture. Sparing the detail, my intention is to separate my personal and professional identities. I've outgrown my coda alias for business purposes, and am really looking forward to starting something fresh.

I do intend to keep my blog (after a thorough purge of my 800+ posts), and will carry it through in the redesign, but it will remain inactive and will not be a feature of the site.

To the readers of this blog over the last 8 or so years, old and new, I thank you for your time and sincerely hope you found some value in what I've posted here, or in the comments that followed. I have some good (and some not so good) memories of my blogging experiences and appreciate that I could share them all with you.

Please connect with me on Twitter @coda_za, where I continue to microblog more trivial rubbish, until the next big thing...

Follow @coda_za

Cheers for now!

Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary.

• Configurable Tag Cloud (hoping to switch to Cumulus when it's more customisable)
• Fuzzy DateTime (for the tooltips on my timestamps)
• Get Recent Comments
• Popularity Contest (most popular posts)
• Similar Posts
• the_excerpt Reloaded (more customisable than WP's default excerpt function, it allows you to exclude elements such as images, links, etc.)
• WP Super Cache (installed after reading this)

I should add that I've modified some of them to better fit my requirements.

And on to the rest.

Home: I'm still deciding if I like the "splash page" approach or not. The idea for the "latest updates" list is that it will include updates to my portfolio and photography sections. It's a nasty bit of work to make that happen so it's just listing my recent blog posts for now.

Portfolio: I removed a lot of old projects and added in a few new ones, and there's a couple others outstanding that I'll be adding over time. I'm using jQuery's ThickBox for inline popups which contain full screenshot images or iframed content.

Photography: I'm still using the discontinued Oberkampf script to mirror my Flickr content, but am considering switching to phpFlickr which is more active. Unfortunately the Flickr API doesn't support Collections yet, and until then I can't think of any better way to list my photosets other than a long list. I'm using ThickBox again to display larger sizes and slideshows.

Bio: I rewrote the copy and added a silly photo - not very exciting.

Contact: I added a downloadable vCard, and you can also find me on Twitter.

There are four sections that I've removed - "projects", "words", "links" and "weblob":

• Projects: this page stagnated from day one of v5. So I ditched it.
• Words: an assortment of jokes/quotes/whatever that I've collected over the years - are now integrated into my blog, and you can find them using the words tag.
• Links: I'm planning to reintroduce this section once I've integrated my 1180+ links with a social bookmarking service. I've tried the popular ones (del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, BlinkList, Furl) and I don't like any of them so far. del.icio.us I found to be the most ridiculous - by default it flags imported bookmarks as "not shared", which means I have to manually change each individual bookmark's privacy setting! Where's the love? I also struggled with tag renaming, it's really buggy.
• Weblob: my "mini blog" or "side notes" as they're more commonly known, which consisted of random links (accompanied by a short snippet or personal commentary) that weren't substantial enough to warrant their own blog post. This is also something I'd like to reintroduce but I haven't yet decided how exactly, although I have some ideas.

And that's all folks! Regular blogging will resume...

My previous design lasted for almost half of that time. Despite its shortcomings (lack of a feature-rich CMS) and obvious design flaws, and given the amount of recognition that it received, I became hesitant to change it much. Until the waves of spam attacks began.

Since my blog was running on a bespoke system, it became increasingly difficult and time-consuming to manage, which partly explains why I haven't been posting as regularly.

So after a tricky data migration and clean-up (the volume of crap I've written in the past 6 years is embarrassing), a tiresome metadata capturing process (adding titles and tags to 770+ posts), and a couple of design revisions later, this blog has undergone a complete overhaul and is now powered by WordPress 2.5.1 with a super collection of plugins.

I had a couple of goals for this new design to improve on my previous one:

• Readability was top of the list. I ignored all instinct saying that bigger text is less aesthetic and am now happily using a large font size for primary text content. I've decreased the number of words per line, and colour contrasts have been tested to meet the W3C's accessibility guidelines. But I'd also love to hear your honest feedback.
• I actually started off with a white background in mind, but never quite got it right in any of the conceptual designs and ended up with what you see now. I quite like it, but it still feels unfinished in places - especially if you compare the home page to the rest of the site, so I might work on it a bit more.
• Another goal was for the design to be more elastic and scalable, ie. by adjusting your browser's text size, the grid remains intact while page elements resize accordingly. I still need to make a few tweaks to get this right.

I've adopted a progressive enhancement strategy:

• The behaviour of this site is designed to downgrade - disabling JavaScript doesn't numb any functionality. I'm using the jQuery library - sorry mootools, I gave you a good chance, but I'm just not that into you!
• The presentation of this site is 100% contained in external CSS files - the way it should be.
• The better your browser, the better this site will look. I'm using PNGs with alpha transparency for all images. For the 10% of you visiting my site with IE6, you get crappy JPGs. I'm not going to use ugly PNG hacks that are too limiting in any case, so may I suggest that you get a real browser.

Some other big changes worth noting:

• You might have already noticed my new logo in the header, which I redesigned earlier this year.
• Permalink and RSS feed URIs have changed, but permanent redirects are in place, so hopefully there won't be any hiccups. Please let me know if you experience any weirdness.
• If you're subscribed to my RSS posts feed, you can now also subscribe to comments, or individual posts.
• I have a tag cloud! I think this is the most efficient way to navigate a blog. A lot of designs - my previous one included - use a calendar view or lists of months and years, which don't engage or captivate. Tag clouds provide a quick and accessible overview of the blog's content, so fare much better. Together with the "Related Posts" list on individual post pages, these two features have really shaken the dust off my archive.
• I have a blogroll! If you're linking to me and you're missing from the list, please let me know and I'll hook you up.

The rest of this site has also undergone some big changes (most noticeably the new "splash" home page and omission of my "weblob", "projects", "words" and "links" sections), but I'll leave that for another post.

An appreciative hat-tip to Grant for his awesome photography on the home page, to Craig for his Flash expertise, and to Avi for his blog icons.

Meet Sunday Times' columnist David Bullard, sharing his thoughts on bloggers. Too funny.

Vincent responds: David Bullard owes South African bloggers an apology
So does Uno: David Bullard plays Air Opinion

UPDATE [07/05]: David responds to the blogosphere's "Bullardgate" backlash.

UPDATE [08/05]: Can't get enough of the Bullard bluff? (or not? or what?) Then here are some more links to keep you occupied:

• The Bullard blog charade (by Matthew)
• The Poynter Institute: Bullards "bald-faced bigotry ... should have no place in a responsible news organization" (by Vincent)
• Bullard on blogs - storm in a teacup? (Bizcommunity)

That's not the last of it, so follow the conversation on Afrigator, Amatomu, Muti or Technorati.

Out!

Three new categories for this year: Best SA Music blog, Best GLBT blog and Best SA podcast, which bring the total to 16.

Some smarty-pant bloggers recently started tagging local blogs on del.icio.us, check out the list of 350+ so far. Although if you're relatively new to the blogosphere, rest assured that the number of South African bloggers is much larger. I was hoping to add a link to Technorati but I can't for the life of me figure out how their tagging system works (does it?), apparently there are no blogs tagged South Africa yet! Huh? It appears to have sorted itself out.. 924 results found on Technorati!

Google Blog Search is useless too.

Here are some more lists/networks that I'm aware of:

• Blog247.co.za
• iblog.co.za
• 24.com Blogs
• SA Blog Top Sites
• MyBlogLog search for "south africa"
• TashiTagg Blogs
• Blogs at UCT
• blogmark
• iafrica.com weblogs
• BlogIT

They all seem to make it really difficult to get any indication of numbers though. All of that aside, since we were shunted in this year's Bloggies, let's make this one count! Give it some thought and get your nominations in!

With blogging technology and the buzz of community advertising through blogging I am trying to establish an effective channel to do this for my core business services.

However, MySpace, Technorati and the likes are focussed globally and although it might be a good idea, I'm wary of driving untargeted traffic to my site. Is this wrong to assume this?

Are there blogs which are dedicated to the local market and can be used in similar fashion to Technorati and his friends?

Although I don't think MySpace and Technorati do this, it would essentially involve connecting brands (not bands/fans) with relevant bloggers (or vice versa), and then managing that relationship. Is anyone doing this, locally? And if so, with what worth are blogs regarded?

Which brands would you associate your blog with, and why?

While I'm not the biggest online advertising fan (ooh, there's an Adblock Plus!), I do think there's some serious, untapped, soul-selling business potential there.

Let's hear what you think.

The winners were supposed to be announced on Tuesday this week. But not even a suggestion of a peep so far - I guess it's to be expected. Media24 just continue to rack up popularity points, don't they...

I probably say this every year, but I have a special feeling about 2006. It will be the year in which I make things happen.

My final post for 2005 is simply to wish you and your loved ones all the best for the new year ahead. May it bring much peace, happiness and health!

I'm regularly asked which blogging tool I use here. It's a custom-built solution that I developed over a number of months, using a LAMP bundle, the 'Open Source Web Platform'. Developing your own blog tool is a good way to build on your PHP experience. If you're interested, this tutorial - Building a Weblog with PHP and MySQL - is a great place to start learning: "written by a curious non-expert who ventured out of the land of programming languages and linguistics into web applications".

Parkour, anyone?

Parkour (rhymes with par four) is the art of movement where participants (known as Traceurs) use objects within their urban surroundings, to move from point "A" to point "B" in a motion that is both fluid and interesting. Whether it's moving over and around boulders on a mountainside, or navigating a particularly intricate Jungle-Jim, the basic philosophy is the same; precision and unwavering confidence.

ZA has it's own parkour community website, complete with blog, events, gallery, forums and other goodies. Dugg!

And fifth, two nice finds over at devart: 'Guitars2', unique illustration style by jin-dadaly, and 'Tower Bridge', a tsunami photo manip by phyzer (check out his gallery for more).

Anyway. Thunderbird 1.0.5 is out! I'm hoping that the bugs I've discovered are due to my fiddling around earlier this week with nightly installs - a fresh install should provide some answers. When I hit the download page, the favicon was no longer the Thunderbird icon but a favicon of a little brown bird (sparrow-like) with an unrecognizable greenish background. I could have been hallucinating, but I did take a screenshot. And then unfortunately closed the PSD by mistake before saving it. Oh well... it would have been funny. *canned laughter*

I've linked to them before, but this is just classic! Behold the beauty of the jeanpant...

Pushing the senses: R.E.M. and Feeder in Hyde Park this saturday! Some crappy zoomless Casio photos will follow. Yee-aaa!
UPDATE [18/07]: Photos are flickr'ed!

And that my dear readers, is every tedious bit of minutia filling my uneventful life.