I’m back from a bit of a hiatus on Ejecutive, and from all writing and work in general after a particularly busy exam season. I’ll have a lot of posts planned, including a review of the Toshiba Qosmio G40 laptop with a (now defunct) HD-DVD writer, and a round-up on the new cameras and lenses announced at PMA.
Veracity
July 20, 2007 – 9:42 pm
Ejecutive is now sporting a brand new design, called Veracity. This is my first theme based on The Sandbox, and also my entry into The Sandbox Competition.
Its my first grid-based design for years, although there isn’t much to do for grid based designs with a standard blog format, I’ve tried to be as faithful to the format as possible. I have to give thanks to Khio Vinh’s excellent post and related slides about good grid design which was a big inspiration for making this design grid based.
The design is very narrow, being only 650 pixels wide despite over 99% of visitors having a screen that is wider1 this is to artificially limit the width of the content to preserve readability.
I almost went with a plain black and white colour scheme, but I decided to retain Ejecutive’s traditional dark and deep tonality with bright highlights. It’s also the first grid based design Ejecutive’s had since Opacity, and its a welcome return I think.
The competition only allows modifications to the stylesheet and not the markup, so I was rather limited in what I could achieve. But The Sandbox excels at giving you a very solid base to design from, especially with a set of layout stylesheets included which saved me the trouble of setting up the sidebar on the right2 and very well thought through markup. This competition should show just how far you can go with this base.
Wish me luck!
- The remaining 1% are from small screened devices such as smartphones and PDAs. ↩
- Although I question the use of the word ’sidebar’ in the markup as I’d argue its describing the styling of the sidebar in the content and therefore is not semantic. What if you wanted it at the top or bottom of the page? ↩
Ejecutive is now hosted by Media Temple
June 14, 2007 – 5:49 pm
Ejecutive is now hosted on the shiny farm of servers at Media Temple. Page load times are down and hopefully reliability should be up from Dreamhost.
There were some stupid problems with the move though, but I think I’ve resolved most of them. If you do find any problems be sure to tell me.
Comments are back
January 25, 2007 – 5:04 pm
Well you wanted them, so they’re back. Commenting is now open on the majority of posts on Ejecutive1 and old comments are visible again!
For the meantime this is just going to be an experiment to see if enough discussions start. The commenting system is clearly bolted onto my theme instead of being seamlessly integrated, so if I do decide to keep comments open after the trial period then I’ll be refining them more.
Every comment is going through moderation at the moment, not because I’m going to cherry pick comments or because I don’t trust you lot, but it’s because of a bug with UTW and WordPress 2.1 that deletes the tags off a post if a comment is made. Until this bug is solved every comment will have to go through moderation to make sure I don’t loose all my precious tags.
So get commenting and discussing, and I’ll be sure to write about more controversial topics to provoke some of you lurkers.
- You’ll find most recent posts don’t have comments open because WordPress in it’s infinite wisdom decided to disable comments on all new posts I made even though my theme didn’t support comments. I’ll need to work up some sort of SQL script when I get the time. ↩
WordPress 2.1 released
January 23, 2007 – 9:57 am
WordPress 2.1 is out, the first major WordPress release for months. I’m updating Ejecutive now so be prepared for some wonkyness.
Introducing Incognito
January 6, 2007 – 1:55 am
It didn’t take me long to get bored of black text on white background, so I present the Incognito style for Opacity2. If you have a low contrast monitor, I feel for you.
The second year
December 25, 2006 – 2:37 pm
I missed it, but yesterday (24th December) was Ejecutive’s second birthday. I could bullshit about how I never expected it to last this long and be so successful, and how I love my readership and want to have their babies, but no.
Happy holidays.
Christmas spirit
December 23, 2006 – 2:15 pm
I think most people who know me will say that I’m probably the grumpiest person at Christmas. I couldn’t care less if we celebrated it or not, but I do enjoy the two bank holidays and the good food. But this year, I feel like getting a bit more into the festive spirit, so I’ve redecorated Ejecutive with a almost-Christmas-tree-like-but-not-quite-green colour.That’s all you’re getting, so stop standing around waiting for more and go away and enjoy Christmas away from your computer!
Cooking turkey
December 21, 2006 – 12:02 pm
As it’s “that time of the year again”, I thought I’d point you towards my How to cook a turkey article. However, this year we’re having duck instead. Enjoy!
A slow failure
December 14, 2006 – 10:56 am
Ever since I decided to disable public commenting on Ejecutive nearly four months ago, I’ve been closely monitoring the traffic and regular readership. I’ve released a steady stream of improvements to Ejecutive since then, mainly Opacity2 and upping the professionalism of my writing, so you’d think that my readership should improve eh?
Well you’d be wrong.
Facing the facts
Things did start quite well, with an eight per-cent increase in visits in September compared to August, while the number of unique visitors remained the same. However October saw a 38 per-cent drop in visits compared to September, and 40 per-cent drop in unique visitors. Things got worse in November which saw a 21 per-cent drop in total visitors compared to October, but the number of unique visitors did remain the same.
If you look in the archives, it’s easy to see a big reason why this is happening, in September I wrote eight articles, all of which were in the first half of the month. Then there was a gap of over a month before my next article in the second half of October. In total there were only two articles in October. And again in November I only wrote three articles although at least they were spaced out evenly across the month.
Fixing Ejecutive
Thinking back, I don’t remember why I got such a boost in early September to write so much, but it obviously helped the success of the site hugely, especially seeing as one of my articles was heavily linked to and got submitted to Digg. But I know I have to get that drive back if I want stop the slide in readership after all the hard work I’ve put into Ejecutive to make it successful. So I’m going to try a little experiment, I’m going to post an article on Ejecutive at least five times a week. This means you’ll be getting ten times more love (articles), and I’m not just talking about links, these will be proper articles about anything I care about, not just technology, the web and politics, but also music, photography and cinema/movies/film.
I’m also going to add a more personal touch to this site, as you’ve probably noticed in my last article. I’ve asked for feedback, which as been 100 per-cent positive, so I’ll be sticking with it for the time being. With the standard blog format of Opacity2, I find some of my best articles are lost with time, and it’s increasingly hard to find them, I’ve got to figure out a way to feature them, and figure out some time to do it in.
I do have a cold at the moment, which probably means I’ll have it over the weekend too, so I may as well make the best of a bad situation and work on Ejecutive, making the site easier to navigate as a whole and bring more structure to the content. While I do love the minimalistic design of Oapcity2, maybe its turning my visitors away instead of inviting more in.
Bare
December 5, 2006 – 3:01 pm
Moleskine
November 21, 2006 – 10:44 am
Work has been keeping me quite busy lately, and other than having the side effect of giving me less time to dedicate to writing, it also means I’m forgetting many ideas that pop into my head during the course of the day.
I could write down notes on my mobile phone, but seeing as my M600i is acting up at the moment, writing a quick note using a number key pad on a W800i isn’t ideal. And you can forget about some online note taking application like Stikkit as I don’t want to be tied down to a computer when I want to take notes. I needed something I could use on the spur of the moment, so something I could carry with me everywhere I went.
Since I got my Moleskine yesterday, it’s been in my bag since and I’ve made many notes with it already. As I travel four hours a day, I do find that I get ideas while sitting on the bus thinking to myself. I’ve already written down many ideas for a couple new writing projects, which will be revealed soon, and hopefully I can improve the writing quality and originality on Ejecutive too.
As you probably know I love well designed products, and the Moleskine is as well designed as any. The rounded corners makes it slip into pockets with ease, the elastic holds closed the notebook and any loose bits inside, which you can put in the pocket at the back anyway, and the quality and appearance of the paper just makes you want to write on it. The size is just perfect to fit into a pocket in my bag (coincidence?) or in my pocket, which means it’ll probably go wherever I go from now on.
So forget about submitting your site to Digg or writing as many top ten lists as you can; get yourself a Moleskine and start writing down your ideas and watch the quality of your writing improve.
Opacity Strikes Back
November 9, 2006 – 12:54 pm
Here it is, the new design for Ejecutive, which I’ve dubbed Opacity Strikes Back (or Opacity2).
Being a Minimalist, I was never completely happy with the original Opacity. The initial design was too complicated, and so when I tried to implement it, the complexity got out of hand, to the stage where the CSS alone was split into seven different files and totalled over 20KB.
I didn’t put enough thought into the whole design procedure, and in the end design aesthetics won over usability. Even though the design was eventually scaled back and improved, a dark blue background made text hard to read for all but the lucky few with high contrast monitors. I also choose to justify the text, without doing much research into why this would make the text harder to read.
The problem lies in the current trend of having fancy graphics, reflections and bold colours, when the real design issue is typography. Information Architects explains the problem well:
Information design is not about the use of good typefaces, it is about the use of good typography. Which is a huge difference. Anyone can use typefaces, some can choose good typefaces, but only few master typography.
I’m not saying I’ve mastered typography, but I can tell the difference between good typography, and bad typography. Opacity had bad typography, and I was a little ashamed to have designed and used it on my website.
Opacity2 is the expression of my Minimalistic ideals. Every superfluous feature has been striped out, and replaced by white space. In fact, you’ll notice that there is a lot of white space between almost everything. I’ve optimised and tweaked the line spacing, letter spacing and word spacing to create what I believe is currently the most usable typography I can muster out of Georgia. You may also notice there are lots of white space between posts and between paragraphs, and all the white space is relative to each other, so the space between posts is three times that of the space between paragraphs, and so on.
It’s about time us so-called “designers” starting educating ourselves about the real design, and face the fact that over 95% of the content you create will be text, so you number one priority when designing should be how to treat the text.
Going off on a tangent here, but this is also the first design and theme I’ve made using completely open source tools, not relying on Macromedia Dreamweaver or TextMate as I usually do1 but instead using the excellent Notepad2 by flo. Thumbs up for using the right tool for the job.
- Although I admit that if I had access to my Macbook during the time I spent designing Opacity2, I probably would’ve used TextMate instead. ↩
On the move
November 1, 2006 – 11:51 am
Ejecutive is on the move to a new home with Dreamhost. If you see this post, you are seeing the new site, and the DNS changes have reached you. Give yourself a pat on the back.
Ejecutive is IE compatible
September 7, 2006 – 11:05 am
Internet Explorer users, rejoice! You make up over 60% of my readership, so it’s about time that I made Ejecutive 100% IE certified! You’ll see no more ugly headers, infact, the header works better in IE than other browsers!
Opacity: No more comments
September 1, 2006 – 2:37 pm
Comments for blog posts are as synonymous to blogs as the posts themselves. Nearly every blog has them, and every CMS worth its salt will cater for them. But recently I’ve started to wonder just how useful comments really are?
Comments encourage responses to the posts from readers, casual or regular (as long as there’s no authentication system used). However in the near three hundred posts this blog as had, and the four hundred comments that accompany them, I can only think of two situations where the comment system was really and truly used to its potential. Most of the time, comments don’t really add to a post, and don’t offer that much more insight other than the opinions of other people.
The biggest problem to a commenting system for a small blog such as mine, is that it makes it look small! Most readers of blogs judge the popularity, and sometimes even the quality of a blog through the volume of comments it receives. Ejecutive averages only just above one comment per post, and this is just not popular enough to warrant a commenting system.
On average, I receive under one hundred unique visitors per day (bar the rare traffic spike), and the majority of the comments are centralised on a few posts. So I’ve decided to take the rather unconventional measure of disabling comments on all posts as part of the second phase of the Opacity experiment, which you can already see happening.
This will be the last post with comments open to the public, and this will be closed in a few days. After that, if you want to contact me, I’ll make it painfully easy to on the contact page.
One very successful blog, in the form of Daring Fireball, doesn’t have comments, as it relies purely on the quality of it’s content, which is hopefully why people will start reading Ejecutive.
Deleted icons
August 22, 2006 – 10:56 am
In an attempt to bring more focus to Ejecutive and get rid of the clutter, I got rid of the lists of recent movies, music, books and photos icons on the right hand side on the info block. I don’t think anyone used it anyway, and I got lax at updating it.
Introducing Opacity
June 6, 2006 – 11:16 pm
For it’s entire life, Ejecutive has never had its own design. It’s switched from one design to another, but they were all templates for WordPress made by someone else. But finally it’s getting its own personality.
Theres nothing wrong with using another template. Kubrick and K2 are/were the most advanced and stylish designs around. However there comes a time when a site needs its own personality and structure, something that fits the style of the site more than a generic template would. Of course, I can do what many people have done and create a modified theme for K2, which serves a great base. However I felt that Ejecutive’s structure needed a more specific style that would be more suited to it, so I present, Opacity.
As is popular currently, this release is a beta release. Theres definately some rough corners currently, such as the lack of navigation links, the lack of an archives page and the lack of a search page. Well, it lacks a lot really. However I want to get this out of the door and live. I’ve been working on Opacity for six months, and the temptation to continually tweak is incredibly tempting which is why it’s taken such a long time.
I wanted to get a logo finished before I released Opacity, but I just don’t have the skill nor the time to design one at the moment, so that’ll have to wait until I gain some more Photoshop/Firework skills and get some more free time.
In the next few posts, I’m going to explain some details about Opacity and the choices I made in designing it. However for now I’m just going to relish in the fact that it’s finally out the door and I can start getting feedback on it, so please comment about what you think, and do expect the design to mature over time.
Even steven
May 19, 2006 – 10:50 pm
I do like round numbers.
Currently the archives are spanning 200 posts and 300 comments, contained within the meager confines of 3 categories.
Of course, this post has taken it over 200 posts!