Category — gregory-brine.com

I’m at that point where my blogging has calmed right down. I used to write several blogs a week, either for work or for myself.

But of late, I’ve been struggling to get the inspiration and I’m not sure why. To defend myself on how slack I’ve been, I love writing, as you can probably tell by the way I’m waffling now. I always have enjoyed writing, and I also love helping people review things they’ve written to help them target their audience better. Be it for a client, internal procedures, technical explanations or even personal documents like CVs.

That’s just the way I am, and I enjoy it. So what happened?

I’m using Twitter a lot, and talking to people getting links, re-tweeting and sharing dialogues with people. Maybe that’s the problem. I also still have my large number of feeds attaches to my Newsgator account - I check that on my work machine, home machine and my iPhone. Maybe I have too many feeds and am overloading myself and can’t focus on things.

At Amnesia Razorfish, I’m a project manager, but have involved myself in a lot of other projects. This has seen me moving away from my technical role, where I was quite a pioneer in researching and documenting things for the various companines I work for.

In my personal life, I’ve not been travelling much of late, and I like to keep my more personal adventures to my close friends on Facebook - I’m sure a lot of people understand where I’m coming from with that.

So what’s happened? What’s gone wrong? Maybe I just don’t have time anymore. My trip to work is now a walk, so I’m missing out on that hour of travelling a day that used to let me watch numerous podcasts.

I just don’t know, and I feel like a part of me has gone.

But then on re-reading this blog, maybe I just need to start writing again… Just sit down with a computer, see what happened on the day and write. Maybe that’s what a good personal blog is all about.

I love reading about what’s happening and as a result, have subscribed to a lot of RSS Feeds. Be it about Web Development, or around the World News. Some are focused on SEO, some on marketing. There’s ones that are fun such as Dilbert. Several about one of my passions, cars and photography.

But, I have far too many. I’ve recently swapped over to NewsGator’s tools for both mac and PC, and one of them has a curious feature, and one I’ve found myself using far too much. A “Panic Button“. What does it do? Well, when you have too many unread articles, it offers to go through and mark anything that is more than 48hrs old, and unread as read.

It sounds like a trivial thing, but it made me realise that I’d accumulated so many feeds over the years that I rally needed to do some house cleaning. I think in doing that, I’ve probably removed about half the sites I was subscribed to.

Am I sad about doing that? Not really. I think in the long run, the feeds I have left are much more focused, and given time, I’ll probably thin them out a little more.

If, like me, you find you have too many to read, do this little exercise and I think you’ll feel much better about yourself - and be able to find much more time to read them.

In a future blog I’ll be outlining some of my 10 favourite RSS Feeds and why I think they are som

I’m relatively new to using Wordpress to completely manage my site, but I have found a few plugins of particular use in getting my site to a point where I feel it is really usable and enjoyable for everyone that visits. In this blog, you’ll find the 5 I’ve found most useful to help me do that. I have more but they’re for a different purpose and a different blog.

Flexi Pages Widget
If like me you’re using Wordpress as a CMS (Content Management System) to manage other pages about you, then you’ll quickly come to realise the standard side menu doesn’t work so well because it shows everything all the time. The plug in gives you a large degree of customisation, allowing you to make your menu behave like the one on my site, with everything collapsed until you go into that section.

NextGEN Gallery
I love taking photos, and have explored a few options in this area. There’s several that integrate with services such as flickr, and one that works off you Facebook account. But none of them were quite what I was after. The NextGEN gallery allows you to manage galleries within your site’s folders rather than using a 3rd party. I find this approach more appealing as it means my site is almost completely self contained.

Redirection
The site you’re looking at used to be www.gregorybrine.com. That had a lot of links, and folders within it, each with a pagerank and some valuable traffic. You can do a simple URL re-pointing, but you risk loosing this traffic. Instead, you should do a 301 redirect for all key URLs on your site. This plugin has allowed me to control all traffic to the new www.gregory-brine.com URL, as well as some some of my original URLs that were valuable but of no use in the current site such as my old Personal Blog and Travel Around the World URL - thanks to Cheb for pointing me to this one.

WordPress.com Stats
It’s always good to know how much traffic your blog is getting, and this tool allows you to get some basic information back about who’s reading what on your site, and where they are coming from.

Google XML Sitemaps
You’ve gone to all the effort of writing fresh content for your site, and the pinging service within Wordpress goes a long way to spreading the word, but a Google sitemap takes it one step further, which is especially useful for those using the CMS features of Wordpress.

Ok, so I made the switch to having my site running completely on Wordpress. Originally it ran just my blogs, and I ran a custom front-end to pull that information out. But, since that site was built, Wordpress has matured a lot, and it’s now able to do a lot of what I wanted my site to do. There’s still a few bits missing, but that can be ironed out.

I’m going to write more on this, but it’s late, and this way I have more to write tomorrow. But so far, I’ve installed several plugins ranging from SEO to a gallery - only pain is having to bring all my images back into the new site.

Blogs were easy as they were already in Wordpress. But it amazes me how easy it was to set-up and install extras. The plugin framework is phenomenally flexible and really impressed me. It is more like a CMS now, managing pages in the same way it manages blogs - a sensible move and one I really wanted to incorporate into my new site.

Then there was the upgrade process. I had version 2.3 installed, and running happily, but then wordpress released version 2.5. Usually I will let a piece of software settle down before taking the plunge, but everything I’d read about this new version made me keen to dive in and try it. It was as easy as dragging files into your site. The next time you go to the admin section, it asks to run the upgrade script - makes some small changes to the database indexes - and that’s it. You’re up and running!

I looked around at several themes, but the Cutline 3-Column Split 1.1 theme from Chris Pearson over at personified.com was exactly what I was after. It’s a nice, clean, 3-column layout that only required a few small tweaks. The header images have been changed with some of my own, and the top navigation was amended.

I will be building my own theme over the coming weeks, but for now, I think you’ll agree, it looks pretty good.

I just had to link to this blog written by a friend of mine:

Oh bliss, another Valentine’s Day

Too funny.

This site is going through a bit of a re-vamp at the moment. The old site, at www.gregorybrine.com has been live for a while now, and I felt like re-developing it to have a more web 2.0 design and feel.

A while ago, I built a demonstration version of gregorybrine.com using Ajax. The reason being that I wanted to test a idea I had for a very fast, highly interactive site that we could use for Wiliam’s new web site. The site needed to make heavy use of Ajax and also be search engine friendly. No easy task. That demonstration version has been sitting on my computer for a while now, and I finally started having the ideas I wanted to really push.

So what’s going to be new? Well, I can’t tell you everything yet, as there’s some under the hood stuff I’m doing that I don’t think anyone’s done before. Then there’s the URLs. I wasn’t happy with some of the old ones as they had spaces and non-compliant characters in them. The new site doesn’t have these, and the SEO benefits are already shinning through. The site’s been up for about 3 weeks, and it’s already getting traffic from Google, and hopefully With my planned updates, that’ll increase further still.

The design you see is not the design. It was simple a design I put in to highlight the highly modular nature of the site, and how elements can be updated on the fly. The final one will be something special I hope - I have an amazing web designer helping me get it just right.

Watch this space… I’ll be updating the technology over the coming weeks, and hopefully start designing it too.

And the old URL will soon be pointed to be pointed to the www.gregory-brine.com content