Go big or go home

Welcome to a bigger, clearer, and a fresh new design of T Incorporated. My friend Mike Davidson likes to call this T Incorporated bad vision edition. I wouldn’t go quite that far, but with this redesign I pushed myself to really go big and bring the content forward. I wanted to stop hiding behind all of the meta data of my old design and push to have my work front and center. With my first iteration of T Incorporated a few years back, I was so excited to show all of the various information about the data I was pulling in. As a result the content itself started to get lost in the shuffle. I became far to enamored with what I could do instead of what I wanted to be presenting or letting the content stand on its own.

This design is a response to that but in the end I wanted to address a few main things:

1. Make the site easier to read and hopefully encourage myself to write more
2. Give myself more flexibility with the posts themselves. I often found I wanted to put a large photo in a post but the previous design didn’t allow it.
3. Simplify without blindly removing valuable content or meta-data
4. Highlight the photos even more by putting them on a dark background

This has been a nights and weekends project for a few months now, today was just time to launch it and move on. Designing for myself is such a difficult process, and in the end, just launching it is often the hardest part. There’s plenty of little things that I quite like with the design. The large photos on the dark background, the photo crop in the stream, as well as the stream itself and the large icons that denote the various sections. I also pushed my javascript skills a bit and you can now use the arrow keys (in Safari only for now) to flip through photos, posts, the stream, etc. It’s a hidden feature but one I absolutely love for myself.

The design is still powered by Django, bringing in my content via API’s from Flickr, Twitter, Delicious and others (hopefully Facebook someday here soon).

It’s not a massive shift, but one that pays homage to the old design while prioritizing the content first.

As always, I’d love to hear what people think!

Personal publishing frameworks

After a few comments and now more than a few emails asking me for my Wordpress theme for this site I figured it was high time to explain a bit about how my site works and the concepts behind it.

The idea is a simple one, but with a bit of an over-the-top solution: I just want a personal site that incorporates (go figure) everything I do online (the vast majority of it, anyway). Since new toys pop-up all the time, I want the site to be flexible enough to deal with any new service that I might fancy down the road.

Why go to such trouble?

Blogs aren’t enough. People are tweeting, posting photos to Flickr, adding events to Upcoming, bookmarking to Del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia and generally just “life streaming.” Each of these has their own community that I enjoy participating in, so I don’t want to abandon them with the hope of trying to build an entirely new audience on my own site. The solution is obvious, bring in all my distributed “stuff” from these services to my personal site.

As some of you might know I’ve got an aversion to social networks, at least ones that are all encompassing, walled garden type sites. Facebook, MySpace, they all just seem there to capitalize on my content: I just don’t want one company to represent all of me online. I love the smaller, content-specific ones. I’m a huge fan of Flickr, definitely enjoy Twitter, and Upcoming is useful for events. Each one is tailored to a specific need I have and meets that need just about perfectly.

Instead, I wanted a place that’s my spot on the web, a personal site. No, not something I had to update in addition to all the other services I use, but something that’s updated whenever I update them. I couldn’t handle the limitations of countless javascript widgets either. I realize it’s a decent solution for a lot of people, but to me it’s sort of the half assed attempt to get the stuff in one spot. The widget is the band-aid to this problem: it’s enough to stop the bleeding, but doesn’t really fix the problem.

Django to the rescue

I want true separation of presentation and content, and in order to do that API’s were the way to go. Luckily, my new office-mate, Jeff, was working at the time on just such a system in Django and it was perfect. Before working with Jeff I hadn’t spent more than a few weeks with Django tinkering, but after a few explanations and tutorials I was sold. The entire framework was designed for publishing content, in particular, structured data. And that’s just what all this “stuff” I want to collect is: structured data. My photos, links, status updates, and upcoming events are all being stored out there by these services in nice, organized groups, accessible via API’s. Huzzah!

But why should you care about structured data?

I know, it doesn’t sound appealing: structured data. I doubt it gets many dates, but it’s hot. It’s the same reason many of us care, or at least used to care about web standards: the separation of content and presentation. Poorly structured data hog-ties you to a specific presentation, whereas well-structured data leaves you free to mix-and-match ‘til your heart’s content.

Why not X?

Because I’m tired of hacking. I’ve hacked countless content management systems trying to do what I want, but always only getting “almost there.” I wanted something that’s designed from the ground up to pull in all this data. I didn’t want another blog engine hack, or a tumble log that’s geared towards just tossing the content up as quickly as possible.

Instead, I consider what’s powering this site now to be a personal publishing framework. Not another CMS, but a framework, geared towards the specific purpose of pulling in content from any number of services out there and storing that data locally, in a structured format, so I can display it anyway I see fit. It’s the best of both worlds, community services I can use and participate in, getting all the benefits of their reliability and expertise in handling various content types, but then getting to display and represent the data here on my site to express the myself how I see fit. After all it’s my content.

The future

Honestly, I think this is how all personal sites will eventually end being. Some sort of personal publishing framework that allows you to pull in all your content from a wide array of web services. This site took quite a bit of technical jiggering and a lot of help from Jeff to get it all working, but I see many more tools coming to make this concept a lot easier.

Anyone out there hacking something together to create some sort of personal publishing framework in the interim?

Design decisions

Over the past few weeks I’ve been adding features, shifting servers and generally just getting T Incorporated into top shape. I’m glad I went ahead and launched but I found it a bit frustrating that I’ve been spending my time working on T Incorporated and not writing. So, now that things have finally settled down a bit (I’m not rebooting my server every 10 minutes anymore) I’d like to talk a bit about some of the design decisions that went into T Incorporated.

First, the goals:

1. I wanted to incorporate all of the stuff I do online. Well, at least almost all of it. I upload photos to Flickr, post my status to Twitter, create links in del.icio.us, write blog posts, etc. and I wanted to get them in one location, but in a structured way.

2. I wanted the site to be at least somewhat lasting. I tend to get in the habit of wanting to redesign my personal site often and I wanted to try and find a way to keep from doing that.

3. I wanted the site to be flexible. I often change my mind or think up new ideas and I didn’t want to have to redesign the site every time I thought of something.

4. I wanted the site to be representative of me.

How I went about solving them:

1. I don’t want to get into the technical details, but, by working at Blue Flavor, I’ve been lucky to sit next to and become good friends with Jeff Croft. He was working on a new version of his own site and I started to see the power of it so started to help out myself. Being able to pull in all my various data sources into a new structured database has given me a ton of flexibility in how I present the content which was really what I was hoping for. In short it helped make my design ideas a reality.

2. To try and get that lasting appeal I went for classic with a hint of modern. As you can tell the site is fairly straight forward, crisp, clean, a bit professional feeling and a touch “newspapery”. It’s content heavy so my goal was to borrow a lot from newspapers, rely heavily on a strong grid, careful amounts of whitespace, and type to bring out the content. I couldn’t get far away from using Helvetica but I varied the size, color, and capitalization to try and emphasize different ares of the pages. I also wanted my photos to be shown more prominently than my last personal site incarnations. So, now they’re bigger on each detail page and there are 6 different shots directly on the homepage and 5 which have a different background and horizontal grid to call them out even more.

3. Yes, I wanted the site to be flexible, and the back-end provided the means, but I wanted the design to be able to accommodate that goal. As you can tell from my content pages there are quite a few different grids going on, and that’s intentional. I wanted to be sure and not just design a nice looking home page but that all the different content pages were designed to best represent that content. The navigation is horizontal to take up minimal space as is the footer. This way I can limit any administrative debris for any new page types. I plan on creating a few section pages in the future that might include photos, blog post, links, and a map or two say for a vacation and this layout allows me to do that. It also has the added benefit of letting me keep designing without having to redesign the whole thing.

4. This design represents me best when compared to any of my previous designs. I’ve spent many years, emulating others, stealing a technique here or a style there and while I always created my own new design, I’ve spent countless hours trying to make sure it didn’t look like anyone else’s. And that’s where I went wrong. If I’ve learned anything about design it’s that while you want to constantly push yourself, you also need to make sure you’re being true to yourself. I made this design be about what I like, what I think works and to represent me. I stopped worrying if it looked like someone else’s. It’s not the first to use black, white, red, and Helvetica—instead I just focused on making it good. I find designing a personal site incredibly challenging (you’re always your harshest critic), but following the “just make it good and like you” mantra worked well for me. I recommend it to anyone if you’re struggling to design your own site.

There’s plenty more to talk about, things like my love for Gotham (my chosen identity typeface) or my new locations section, man, I do love maps, and the inspiration for my stream page but I’ve already rattled on. I’ll save that for another post. For now, I’m just glad it’s done, up, and most of the polish has been applied.

Launched

A few months ago I was riding the subway out to Coney Island during a visit to New York and I had an idea. It wasn’t necessarily a new idea, but it stuck. I wanted to incorporate my life online. Sure, I’ve had ideas like this in the past. I’ve even tried using tools built on web development frameworks to make it happen, but this time I had some help. After a few conversations over ping pong with my good friend and co-worker Jeff Croft I realized how I could make it a reality. He was working on a framework in Django that sounded perfect, and I was willing to be a bug tester and spend some long nights learning some Django templates. The forces of geek were in full swing.

The concepts had been rolling around in my head for a while, so I started in on some initial designs, worked out some basic templates and have been iterating and implementing on what’s here now since. It’s me, or as some friends call me, T, and almost all my online publishing “incorporated” onto one site. Hence the name, T Incorporated.

Consolidation to the extreme

At this point I’m pulling in my photos from Flickr, my status updates from Twitter, my events from Upcoming and my links from Del.icio.us but in time it will likely do more. The framework offers me the choice to decide what web services I want to bring in, but more importantly a lot of flexibility on how I use that data once I have it. It also allows me to combine and use the data in fun, new and unexpected ways. If you click on a tag you not only see all the photos tagged with that, but you can also all my links, posts, photos I’ve favorited and even the events I’ve attended.

It also allows me to not always have to write a post to keep the content updated. I can just post a photo or link to something and T Inc. gets updated. I still plan on writing here even more, but it’s nice to know everything is being updated here without many changes to my behavior.

Saying goodbye to an old friend

I’ve been publishing online, on what started out as only a personal site, since 2001 and really started full swing in 2003 when I wanted a way to keep in contact with family and friends. That’s roughly 7 years on my old site, 110am.com, and so it’s a little strange to be here in my new digs. 110am will exist in it’s current form for a while, but eventually I plan on bringing all the content over here and shutting it down. I wanted a place where I felt like I could write both about my personal and professional life and so all new was in order.

It’s taken me a few months to get this far and I never would have come close if it wasn’t for all the help Jeff has given me. There are plenty of things that are still a bit buggy, but just refresh the page and things usually straighten themselves out. I’ve still got a long list of minor fixes and features to get completed in the coming months but I just wanted to get it up and start writing.

I plan on following up this post with a few about the design and some thoughts on what I consider personal publishing frameworks but that’s for another post. For now, just take a look around and at the new digs and let me know what you think.

A Case for the Crusty Old Website

Sure, you have your Facebook page, your Virb profile and your MySpace “thing”. You’ve got your Flickr stream, your Upcoming events, and your Twitter status.

But I’m talking about having a website. Those services are great, don’t get me wrong, and maybe you want to use one of them to create your website and that’s fine. What I’m making a case for is a stake in the internet ground to call yours. A little online personal identity. It doesn’t have to be much. Some of my favorites are just splash pages or compilations of links to peoples other online profiles or identities. There’s the now old standby, a blog, where now you can even get fancy and start using pulling in data from Flickr, del.icio.us/Ma.gnolia, Upcoming, and the other “Web 2.0” mash-up ilk. It doesn’t need a fancy domain name, just someplace to call your own.

I guess I’m just tired of joining the next social network and instead just enjoy the plain old vanilla internet. Is that old skool? Have I jumped the shark? Do you remember joining Friendster having fun for two weeks, then asked yourself what’s the point? Now do you look at MySpace and Facebook and just think Social Network 2.0?