smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

Do you ‘bog’ rather than blog?

That may seem like an odd question, but it’s none-the-less highly relevant in today’s ‘instant’ world where the speed in which we require input has increased, inversely proportional to the patience required to wait.

Over the last few weeks I have taken a keen interest in where people are going when browsing this website, along with the realisation that I have too many plug-ins in use, that generate far too much javascript, which is seldom actually used.

Case in point? The immortal archives. I had both live archives (a great, but terribly javascript hungry function) and tags listed. Closer inspection of visitor navigation patterns shows that the archives are often landed upon, yet they seldom then direct those visitors to content. To make matters worse, the live archives doubled up on the tags.

It’s clear that once the live archives are presented, one has to know, down to the month, when a particular entry was made, in order to then locate it. That strikes me as entirely the wrong way around, one should be able to find an entry via discovery, not pure blind luck.. and whilst search is your friend (and mine) common terms can easily dig up numerous posts..

Thus, the live archives are gone <cue Wagner’s ‘death march’>. In it’s place, is a more search engine and, most particularly, human engine friendly option — months are presented in both a short format, for ease of navigation, along with the actual posts, the entire point of archiving, listed, one after the other. Fire up the ‘find’ function in your browser and you have a fast method of finding pretty much any post title you want, in nano-seconds — javascript not included.

Virtually the entire point of blogging is to highlight content, something that often gets drowned out in our web 2.0 world, where shiny sliders and buttons, useless functions (not to mention bells and whistles) are all too common. It has a place, do not get me wrong - but that place is to help power content, not become it.

I’ve recently noticed a number of my preferred reads have embraced an ever increasing array of gadgets and gizmos, all crippling the performance and the impressions gained. If such things put me off from actual, live, visits (I don’t just read your RSS, should you blog, I will often visit, too..) what might it do to my readers? Put them off too? Quite probably. There have been times that my comments are swallowed, because some ajax function breaks, or it takes so very long for all that bloat to load, that the page times out and I, well, I give up and leave.

So, cometh the Axeman. Gone are live archives, gone are wasteful and pointless plug-ins and gone are gadgets and gizmos (word to the wise? ditch pointless widgets, including those bundled with WP - better still, just don’t use a widget aware theme) that reduce navigational sense or content value, don’t validate, or bundle suspect javascript.

The result? .. a lean, clean design, that highlights the content that you, dear reader, are reading.. be it direct, via RSS or via a mobile or hand-held device.. and I hope the results make it a better return for your time and energies invested so that, perhaps, you’ll visit more often (and suggest others do too).

From time to time, I’ve bumped into the odd cash-for-comment blog entry, with many views and thoughts on the topic.

Lets get this out in the open from the get go. I am not a fan of the concept and indeed believe it’s the worst possible option for a blogger ((.. more on that, shortly)).

Enter stage left, karma.

Thus, is is often the way with the universe, I happened upon a Whirlpool ((.. whirlpool is a large Australian broadband related forum)) forum entry today, entitled Pay Per Post.

I’ve been battling with the previous theme, this_is for a few weeks now.

Due to a few design flaws it’s proving a challenge to get some of the content ((.. particularly topic sensitive sidebar related data.)) to display correctly. This comes down to a combination of limitations in the template structure I used and a small number of foibles in the 2.0.x wordpress family ((.. specifically, is_page() detection flaws.. although there are others.)).

I’m also more fond of the ’split’ layout option — that is, where the sidebar has migrated to the ‘bottom’ of pages.

Having cut my teeth converting a basic XHTML template into a wordpress theme, it’s time to up the anti and look at developing ‘the look’ from scratch.

I came to the conclusion, many years ago, that at any given moment, the universe will purposefully do something unusual, as it appears to truly enjoy a good joke.

Take this morning for example.

I had been listening to ‘Principles of Lust’, by Enigma, from the MCMXC a.d. album, via my slightly battered yet faithful iPod and indeed had spent much of the morning trip listening to a wide selection of Enigma tracks.. having become quite disassociated with my environment as I fell deeper into the music, it was almost as though time itself had slowed down.. as though people were walking more slowly.

The experience one gets during moments of extreme stress when the brain artificially slows down the construct we call ‘time’ in order to get a better grip on a specific experience.

And it was at that moment, the universe spoke — to remind me of a certain truth.

A dark black BMW raced past, obviously in a hurry to make work, on time. Number plate HELL666. A small smile broke across my face.. which vanished briefly when the next vehicle shot past, one of those faceless minivans that all look the same, number plate LORD00. The smile was replaced with a sheepish grin as the irony of Good versus Evil crossed my mind.

The universe, however had one last sleeved card. The third vehicle to race past? A Paramedic.

Tyme over at the 9rules network asks a very good question, namely —
What is your site about?.
I should be able to quickly find this out with categories (tags). Or something on the about page. Or something on the front page. If you have a tag cloud, that’s awesome (I’m putting one on my site) […]

For those who have been under a rock for the last two weekes, 9rules
recently opened invitations for round 4.
Many great bloggers made the cut, including
Master Punsalan and
quite a few others, some 115 out of 700 sites.
However, as is always the case, there is at least one person who
takes it upon themselves […]

As has been noted by a few people now, smackfoo has experienced some issues issues recently with mySQL db corruption and severe post duplication.
This is yet another lengthy post, so if you’re reading this via your RSS reader of choice, you might want to check out the full post. :)
It’s amazing how quickly one […]

Please, if you are one of the millions of unthinking lemmings who insist on a daily ‘daily links’ post ((
This, of course, should not be confused with ’shorts’ or ‘asides’
- i.e. concise entries with a single specific point, resource or topic.)), stop.
A number of the RSS feeds I read daily, have just been deleted out […]

And now a short message for those who seek to spam, or leave ‘advertiser’ comments - !@&#$ off.

Ed asks three questions about their new feature -
recent activity. Option three is in use here, with the post title linking to the post, the comment count linking to the comments and finally the author’s name links directly to the comment - this helps orientate visitors and regular readers alike to the desired navigational […]