DM Blog

In a previous article, I mentioned that I would be making some changes to my sites and eventually creating an HTML5 WordPress theme for this blog, but not before figuring out what to do about amalgamating some of my other sites. Well, after a lot of hard thinking and juggling around, I was able to merge a lot of my sites and I also eliminated some outdated sites that hadn’t been updated in forever.

My thinking, before, was to have separation of everything – a website just for my music endeavors, a website for domain names for sale and web-related things, my blog, a website for Michelle & I, a website for my resume and non-music related work, and a personal website too. But after a while, I realized that having that many websites, for me, was just too many and I thought it was time to take the opposite approach and consolidate a lot of that. Plus, it’s a lot easier to keep things fresh and updated that way, no? The best way to accomplish this, I realized, was to merge everything onto here. I’m still using some domains as shortcuts to certain pages (like dmbiz.ca as a shortcut to the resume page, or dmpix.ca as a shortcut to the photos page, etc.) but everything is now in one place…

I also realized that all the info I previously had on DanielAndMichelle.ca was just a waste since it never got updated, so it made sense to get rid of that site (for now). In terms of email addresses, Michelle and I still use that domain for emails, but I was still able to reduce the amount of other email addresses I had and my main email address has become much more multi-purposed now…

In the end, I think moving everything over to one site was a good call and I feel much better now that I have less outdated sites out there and less sites to have to update and refresh. It doesn’t make a whole lot of financial sense to have so many "shortcut" domains either, but at the same time, some shortcuts I use often, (like dmcharts.com for example), and they’re probably worth the extra expense… Some of them anyways…

Whereas my initial approach was separation of everything, this new approach instead links everything together and provides an easier way to simultaneously access all the various "things" that are me… Obviously, I didn’t merge everything onto just one site, (I still have my music site and this blog on separate domains), but in those cases, the separation actually makes sense…

Michelle has also recently decided that she’d like to have a doggy blog, so I’m still thinking about the best way to approach that. Do I add an account for her on this blog (the "DM" in "DM Blog" can then mean "Daniel & Michelle" instead of "Daniel Menjívar")? Or do I create a whole new blog for her on another domain? Or maybe just as a subdomain? I suppose I need to figure that out before I can start creating the new HTML5 WordPress theme for this blog…

One of the things I’ve been thinking about in anticipation of the new HTML5 theme is HTML5 video and audio. It means that going forward, I’ll have to encode my videos twice (in both mp4 and ogg formats), which is kind of a hassle, but not a huge one. Of course, it doesn’t make sense to go back and re-encode all the existing videos on my blog, so those videos will still need QuickTime, but at least all future videos won’t require any plugin… But since all my videos use custom shortcodes (and naturally I’d like to keep using the same shortcodes) it means I’ll have to work out some new behind-the-scenes logic to determine what HTML is generated for the old vs. new videos.

Another thing I’m excited about is getting rid of Scriptaculous and ProtoType and moving things over to jQuery. It means I’ll be able to use FancyBox to display my photos (like on DanielMenjivar.com) which should make it much easier to view all the full-size photos in one article consecutively without having to click on each individual thumbnail, which is annoying. Apart from usability, I’m also going to try to focus on significantly reducing load time – and I’ve learned a lot about that recently!

I can’t wait to get started on re-designing this blog (it’s been in need of an update for a while now, I know) but I have a ton of other things on my plate right now that I have to address before I can even start…

Anyways, I’d like to hear some ideas from you before I start redesigning things on my blog. Most people seem to be reading my blog via RSS feeds (and/or via FeedBurner’s email subscription service) but for those that actually read my articles directly on my site – what would you like to see? How important is a mobile/iPhone friendly version? iPad? Any features in particular that I should incorporate? Colors or design ideas? A single column layout? Things to avoid? Let me know what you think!