Graham Smith of ImJustCreative.com recently interviewed me on a wide variety of topics, including everything from blogging and web design to theme development and social media. The interview is presented as more of a dialogue between Graham and myself, and will be presented as a three-part series. Check out the first part of the interview here.

After announcing my intention to redesign Perishable Press, I received some great feedback addressing everything from site architecture and navigation to appearance and usability. As the conversations continue, I want to spend some time thinking about usability, navigation, columns and sidebars. The current minimalist design features a single column layout with no sidebars. Content is located prominently front and center, with all navigational links appearing in either the oversized “footer” area or at the end of each individual post. As several people have pointed out, such navigational strategy (or lack thereof) discourages visitors from digging deeper into the site. Apparently, the pile of links at the bottom of each page — the menu, as I like to call it — requires far too much effort to decipher. I mean, really, just because it all makes perfect sense to me, doesn’t mean that everyone else will “get it” too.

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I want to redesign Perishable Press. The current design was released around a year ago, and has received numerous compliments and criticisms. Compliments tend to focus on the theme’s minimalist sensibilities, while criticism is generally directed at the design’s poor usability. Personally, I find the “grey-on-black” color scheme to be very inspiring. Others, however, have difficulties reading the content, and that’s not good.

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It’s been awhile since my last personal news post, and I figure that enough has been happening to warrant yet another exciting news update. Yay! ;)

So let’s see, first on my mind is the recent launch of the new design for Monzilla Media, the official site for my personal website and graphic design business. The first two versions of the site were single-page brochure sites, but this new version is fully loaded, featuring tons of portfolio content, business news, and service information. If you’ve got a minute, I would love to hear your feedback!

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After much deliberation, I have decided to take a short vacation away from the computer. I have been working like a dog recently, and feel that a change of pace would help recharge the ‘ol brain cells. I haven’t decided exactly when it will be, but I am thinking that some time off in August (my favorite month) would be swell. Maybe go to the coast, do some traveling, take a long nap, or whatever. Technically, I haven’t taken a break from blogging here at Perishable Press in almost three years! So it’s definitely time..

Generally, I like to post three or four times a week, depending on my schedule. As most of you know, I like to post quality articles on just about anything related to Web development, graphic design, blogging, social media, SEO, site security, and just about anything related to technology, creativity, and design. Given a two-week hiatus, I am asking for help with around seven or eight guest posts, preferably from a few different authors.

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Testing new Stealth-Post plugin.. this post should not appear on the front page or in feeds..

In celebration of CSS Naked Day, Perishable Press has disabled it’s CSS stylesheet for today, April 9th, 2008 (which also happens to be my 36th birthday)!

What are you waiting for? Go get naked!! ;)

Before you comment here at Perishable Press, please take a moment to review the official comment policy. Here is a simplified overview of the complete policy:

Comments are open to everyone. Name and email are required. Email kept private, never shared. Website URL optional. The form accepts basic XHTML. Line and paragraph breaks automatic. Please wrap each segment or line of code in <code> tags (no <pre> tags). I reserve the right to edit/delete any comment. Spam will be deleted. Pointless and otherwise lame comments may be deleted. Please stay on topic and comment intelligently.

Official Comment Policy

First, everyone has something to say, including people who disagree with your opinion. One of the purposes of this site is to provide an open forum where everyone is entitled to express their ideas. The goal is to encourage new ways of thinking by listening to the thoughts of others. If your goal is merely to argue and rant about some particular issue, please unload yourself somewhere else. If, on the other hand, you are genuinely interested in exploring the topic at hand with openness and honesty, then by all means, get involved. We are all looking forward to hearing your opinions and learning from your ideas.

As for the fine print, there are a few additional points, encompassing several technical and administrative aspects of the commenting process. First of all, use your real name or nickname, not a site name or business name. Using a site name or business name is a good way to get your link or comment removed. Technically, commentators must provide a valid email address. All email addresses will be kept completely private and never will be shared with anyone. Each comment author may provide an optional website link, which will be served with the author’s name. If you do not provide a website link, your author name will be displayed in text only. When leaving a comment, basic XHTML (e.g., <em>, <strong>, <a>, etc.) may be used to format the text. Line breaks and paragraph tags are automatic. Please wrap code examples in <code> tags. Also, please note that certain comments are moderated; if your comment does not appear after several days, or if you wish to comment privately, contact me.

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Finally, after many grueling weeks of relentless determination and tedious repetition, I am pleased to announce the return of the entire collection of Perishable Press themes. Enabling users to change the appearance and functionality of the site, the fifteen unique themes were dismantled several months ago for the ongoing Perishable Press site renovation. Since then, links referring to the removed themes had been redirected to a temporary “Labs” subdomain (labs.perishablepress.com), which featured various installations of WordPress populated with “lorem ipsum” filler text. Although this was suitable as a temporary fix for those interested in exploring the different themes, full theme renovation and restoration remained an ongoing task that finally (finally!) reached its conclusion late last week.

Each and every theme has been painstakingly evaluated, optimized, improved, and tested. During the process, many structural, organizational, and presentational improvements were made. Each theme now operates independently, requiring no files (images, scripts, etc.) beyond those contained within the theme directory itself. Further, each theme has been integrated into a sitewide error-logging process whereby all errors (PHP, 404, htaccess, etc.) are logged in a centralized location and appended with plenty of theme-specific information. Thus, if someone begins to experience issues with one of these newly restored themes, I will be the first to know. This is important as people begin to use the themes under different circumstances (operating systems, user agents, extensions, etc.). I tested as much as possible to ensure universal functionality, but must admit a significant reliance and dependence on Web Standards throughout the restoration process. Thus, if something breaks on Internet Explorer, I won’t be surprised ;) So, without further ado, here is a summary of each newly renovated theme — feel free to check ‘em out!

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Ever since writing that last review article, I have been feeling the need to cut loose, relax, and blog about something a little more “down-to-earth,” like recent things that have been happening around here. If you are new to Perishable Press, rest assured that I try to keep these “site/personal news” update posts down to a minimum. Whenever possible, I save up a bunch of interesting off-topic things that I want to talk about, and then cram them all together into a multipurpose article like this one. I have found that consolidating and summarizing multiple news items into one post helps keep noise to a minimum while providing a more complete “snapshot” of current events. That said, let’s see what’s been happening ‘round here lately..

Toggle High Contrast Style

Due to popular demand, I have implemented an alternate “high-contrast” CSS stylesheet for the current theme. If you find the content difficult to read due to the low-contrast, “grey-text-on-black-background,” click on the small sun icon located in the lower-right corner of the browser window to brighten things up a bit. Conversely, to restore the original (dark) appearance, click on the moon icon in the same location. This “toggle-contrast” functionality has been around for awhile, but I have not found the opportunity to mention it until now.

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Just a note to announce a site upgrade to WordPress 2.3.3. The upgrade went well, but overall server performance continues to suffer. I am aware that some people are experiencing difficulties leaving comments and even accessing the site in general. Rest assured, I am working with my hosting company, A Small Orange, to get everything back on track and running smooth. In the meantime, I appreciate your patience as we work to resolve the issues, restore full functionality, and return to reliable performance.

Please share any helpful observations regarding the site here. — Thanks!

One of the year-end maintenance rituals that I have decided to adopt involves sharing a few annual site statistics for Perishable Press. Over the course of the previous year, Perishable Press has gone through many changes, including switching servers multiple times, eliminating nofollow attributes from comments, and even a complete site overhaul and restructuring. Despite the chaos surrounding such events, traffic levels have continued to increase, bounce rates have steadily decreased, and the number of feed subscribers continues to grow. Overall, I extremely pleased with how the site is doing, especially considering my disdain for formal advertising and social marketing nonsense. Fortunately, with virtually zero promotional effort, Perishable Press has grown from a simple hobby site into an actual destination for web design and development information. Sure, in the endless ocean of the Internet, I am but a blip on the screen, however, looking at the statistics for 2007, I am optimistic and even excited about what the future may hold for this site.

2007 Stats

In order to save everyone time, I present the following statistics with minimal commentary. As my readers are well aware, I could spend hours and hours discussing every bleepin’ detail of every bleepin’ aspect of every bleepin’ statistic. See, you know what I’m sayin’. Instead, I will let the stats speak for themselves and then, if necessary, field any questions or concerns that you may have. Alright, enough bull droppinz — let’s get on with it..

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Just when I thought I had finally solved my web-hosting woes by transferring to a virtual private server, I am slapped in the face by the cold realities of server memory limitations. Apparently, WordPress-powered sites are extremely resource-intensive, requiring insane amounts of random access memory (RAM), something which does not concern those of us working from shared hosting accounts.

On a shared server, system resources are shared among the various accounts that reside on a particular server. When one of these sites takes a hit and requires extra bandwidth, it “borrows” it from the total amount of bandwidth available for the other shared sites, leaving them with limited memory and other server resources. This is one of the reasons that shared hosting can suck so badly at times. If you happen to be located on a server that hosts a few resource-intensive or unstable sites, chances are high that your site will not perform as well as it might if its neighbors weren’t such stinking pigs.

With shared servers, it is this sharing of server memory that enables WordPress-powered sites to enjoy their resource-hogging plugins without too many issues. Sure, sharing memory can sometimes be a drain when you are fighting with hundreds of other sites for that extra megabyte of precious memory, but at least your site doesn’t shut down if you happen to exceed the predefined memory limits. This is exactly what happened after I setup Perishable Press on my new virtual private server at WiredTree. To be honest, since this was my first move away from shared hosting, I really had no idea how much memory my site was using. Turns out that just this one site — with its reduced number of plugins and optimized content — was enough to gobble up every drop of the 256 MB of allocated RAM without even blinking. It was like, okay, site now online — oops, not any more — you just exceeded your memory limits and crashed Apache. Again. Ugh.

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..And we’re back. After an insane week spent shopping for a new host, dealing with some Bad Behavior, and transferring Perishable Press to its new home on a virtual private server (VPS), everything is slowly falling back into place. Along the way, there have been some interesting challenges and many lessons learned. Here are a few of the highlights..

The tide may be turning for A Small Orange

I am certainly not alone when I say that shopping for a new hosting provider and transferring websites is one of my least favorite aspects of web development. In my experience, switching hosts requires waay too much time and rarely unfolds without significant problems. Nonetheless, when service and/or support turns sour, upgrading to a better host is well worth the effort. In my case, A Small Orange just wasn’t working out.

Everything was going fine for the first several months — excellent service, fantastic support, and consistent, reliable server uptime. However, during the last several months, server uptime frequently dipped below the 98% level, an unacceptable amount of downtime, especially since it generally happened during critical times: peak hours or while I was trying to work on the site. When I finally submitted a support ticket addressing the “unacceptable levels of downtime,” ASO support staff put my mind at ease by moving my site to a “a more stable server.”

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Hello!

As many of you already know, the popular WordPress anti-spam plugin, Bad Behavior, caused some problems yesterday, and as a result many bloggers and users were locked out of their favorite sites, including this one. As for now, the problem seems to be fixed, however, the experience of being locked out of my own site has left a rather unpleasant taste in my mouth.

Needless to say, I will be reconsidering the continued use of Bad Behavior as a part of my long-term anti-spam strategy. In the meantime, everything is up and running fine again (with Bad Behavior disabled) — comments are working, and I can even log in to admin to write new posts :)

In other news, Perishable Press is moving to a new server! I just switched the DNS to my new VPS nameservers, so hopefully everything will propagate and transfer without a hitch. Nonetheless, if something does happen to go wrong, Perishable Press may be offline for a spell, but rest assured, I am all over it..

So — here goes nothing — I am pulling the plug on the old server — see you on the other side ;)

One of the necessary evils associated with creating a highly customized WordPress-powered site involves the inevitable necessity to hack the WordPress core. WordPress is built for mass-consumption and tends to cater to the largest audience possible, making it necessary to bend and poke around the corners to get WordPress to function in a more specific or specialized capacity.

Of course, there is a major downside to tweaking core WordPress files: upgrading. The overambitious WordPress peeps are constantly rolling out upgrade after upgrade, many of which are required security fixes, patches, or whatever. The point is that editing the WordPress core on your current version of WordPress requires that you edit each and every subsequent upgrade, for each and every one of your sites.

Over time, I have realized the importance of documenting core changes for any sites that require them. Having a concise record of the files and code involved with each hack greatly facilitates the entire upgrade process. Without such a reference, subtle changes may be forgotten and key hacks may be overlooked. Here at Perishable Press, my former Core Hacks Log served me well from WordPress 1.5 to 2.0, however, much of it no longer applies to the new WordPress 2.3 configuration. Since the latest site overhaul, I have dramatically reduced the overall number of required core edits.

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Just a note to let everyone know that Perishable Press will be undergoing site maintenance for the next several hours. I apologize in advance for any inconvenience this might cause. Thanks for your patience ;)