Now that my recent site overhaul project is nearly complete, I thought it would be useful to share my carefully developed “plan of attack.” The following seven-step strategy is designed to facilitate the entire renovation by logically ordering events and breaking down complex tasks. Upon execution, the following plan is designed to improve overall site functionality, presentation and structure, while factoring in several critical parameters:

• Modular time organization — due to my hectic schedule, it is necessary to break large projects down into manageable chunks.
• Separation of main site from test site — I need a clear distinction between Perishable Press and my many test blogs, pages, and projects.
• Separation of main content from tangential content — distinguishing between main content and other material (e.g., private content, FTP files, etc.) is critical.
• Facilitation of future WordPress upgrades — keeping up with WordPress is important. Before the site overhaul, upgrading was nearly impossible. In fact, the primary thrust of this site makeover is aimed at making it easier to stay current with WordPress.

Thus far, adhering to this plan has helped to eliminate confusion by simplifying an otherwise convoluted project. With this plan firmly in mind, stepping through the entire process happened in a clear, nearly mechanical fashion. Without a doubt, being prepared provided an expediency and thoroughness that would have otherwise remained elusive. Is this the “perfect” plan for renovating a rather large, preexisting site? Probably not. Will you learn something about preparing for and executing WordPress and other site upgrades by reading it? Probably. I suppose, in any case, that even if readers find the proceeding plan all but useless, posting it online is great for prosperity and may even serve useful as future reference material. So, without further ado, here is an outline of the activity recently unfolding behind the scenes here at Perishable Press.

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For those of you still hiding your bookmarks within the dark confines of your browser’s “favorites” menu, may I suggest stepping into the “here and now” with a fresh new approach: social bookmarking. Hopefully, most of my readers are already familiar with the many wonders of managing and sharing your bookmarks online, but for those who may still be questioning the whole idea, allow me to expound briefly on several of the immediate benefits:

Universal access to your bookmarked sites

Forget about time-wasting browser extensions that fumble to synchronize your business; manage your collection online at a great site such as del.icio.us and enjoy quick access to a definitive set of bookmarks from virtually anywhere in the world.

Better organization of your bookmarks

Drop the resource-hogging browser extensions that supposedly enhance the organizational efficiency of your collection; many social bookmarking sites employ user-defined tagging architecture to provide unlimited flexibility for organizing your bookmarks.

Don’t be tight with your bookmarks

Sharing information is the wave of the future! Help others locate the information they need by sharing your favorite sites with others. Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us provide a simple way to keep select sites private, so get over yourself and get sharing!

One-click backups of your entire collection

Last but not least is the drop-dead simple method that most social-bookmarking sites provide for backing up or exporting your entire bookmark collection. For example, with a single click, del.icio.us exports your entire collection via a nice little html file. Fresh. Delivered.

Ahh.. so much better. If you still don’t believe me, then just stop reading here and go home. However, if you are totally feeling the whole social bookmarking movement, then read on, my friend — I have a few sweet little tips that I would like to share with you..

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Recently, I found myself drowning in an ocean of RSS feeds. Even after switching to Google Reader, which definitely speeds up the process of plowing through posts, I was wasting too much time consuming subscribed content. Thus, in an effort to find balance between saving time and staying current, I executed the following five-step feed portfolio makeover:

1. Drop lame feeds. Previously, I had subscribed to a number of feeds simply because they were recommended or mentioned in an article somewhere. Unfortunately, sound referrals and interesting commentary do not necessarily equate with strong syndicated content. I often found myself reading post after post about stuff that was not useful or even interesting. After some careful deliberation, I dropped around 25 of these lame feeds and moved on with my life.
2. Consolidate similar feeds. After following my previous collection of feeds for awhile, I began to notice ridiculous amounts of redundancy. There is just no need to subscribe to multiple blogs covering the same material unless they blog from truly unique perspectives. After choosing one or two authority bloggers for each of my focus areas, I unsubscribed to the “echo” feeds and thus reduced my feed collection by at least 20.
3. Eliminate overly aggressive feeds. I love to see fresh content from bloggers who post quality posts, especially when they only post once in awhile. It’s like getting a scooby snack or something and I just love it. Conversely, I hate to see overly ambitious bloggers bomb my reader with a jillion junk posts about the same old garbage — nothing new to say and no new ways of saying it. Needless to say, I kicked about 10 of these feed hogs straight to the curb.
4. Subscribe to summary feeds. When it comes to staying current with world news, tech news, and other frequently reported topics, it is easy to flood your reader with unnecessary content. Fortunately, many of the most prolific news-related sites provide an alternate summary feed that consolidates and highlights the day’s or week’s worth of material into a single post. By trading full feeds for summary feeds, I greatly reduced the quantity of incoming feed content without sacrificing the quality of its information.
5. Drop John Chow like a bad habit. Just kidding. Chow is great, but really, how many blogs about blogging and getting stinking rich do you really need? The point here is to craft yourself a diverse collection of enlightening, educational, and enriching feeds. Trade mindlessness and redundancy for thoughtfulness and original content. Drop the mind-numbing “list” sites and find sincere bloggers with experience and wisdom. I am continually fine-tuning my feed diet towards a diverse, eclectic, and original collection of insightful, high-quality content written by authoritative bloggers who aren’t pitching at me around every corner.

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Looking ahead at the events planned for this year, I feel the need to completely restructure, reorganize, and streamline my entire digital universe. This will take a sweet amount of time, I realize, but given the complex behemoth that my digital archive has become due to the accumulation of over seven years’ worth of projects, reformats, and acquisitions, the time is now.

It all started out simply, with my first computer a mere two folders, “art” and “business,” were all that I needed to keep things in order. As time progressed, there were a few digital expansions, where loads of new software, hardware, documentation, support files, and resulting experimental files were heaped onto the already flimsy organizational structure that my “archive” had at that time become. Then there was college, various lines of employment, and a million scanned documents determined too important to simply toss. By this time, my artistic output had increased as well, with bandwidth intensive projects like Dead Letter Art, F-Disk Media, and StopSystem, my then new 250GB external hard drive was almost full. Along the way, I’m afraid, most attempts at “starting fresh” and reorganizing everything were shortsighted if not temporarily efficient.

So now, after having attained a small foothold on the internet with a newly designed, all-powerful Perishable Press website, I have taken a few steps back to contemplate the “big picture” and evaluate an optimal plan of attack. I truly cannot believe how inefficient and unorganized my system has become. Truly, it is a mess.

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