UK Editor at ContentNext
Announcing a change to this site
January 7, 2010
2002 – June |
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2003 – Apr |
2003 – Jun |
2004 – Mar |
2005 – Feb |
2005 – Feb |
2006 – Nov |
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2007 -Jul |
2010 – Jan |
Better late than never? It’s been nearly three years since my last proper blog post here.
When I first turned robertandrews.co.uk in to an actual weblog in 2002 (about two years before the height of blog hype), it was because I had things to say, analysis to offer, news to share.
When I was freelancing for publishers like Wired News, Journalism.co.uk and E-consultancy in 2007, I was already writing plenty elsewhere, not here. I flipped the site to automagically feed to here the articles I was writing out there.
When I consolidated one of those clients, paidContent, in to my full-time gig, it became clear that all my writing existed just on that one site. As I had built it, robertandrews.co.uk required constant feeding, and I just didn’t have anything to give it – neither original posts that weren’t already being seen by a great audience elsewhere, nor links to aggregate from a variety of off-site sources.
So static information – not rolling, constant blog output – has become more important to me as a personal web destination – a blog, I have concluded, is not a good snapshot of a man.
If you visited this site at all in 2009 or late 2008 (and, I make no bones, there’s no great reason anyone would have done so with any regularity), you will have seen that I embraced static by simply scraping in my Google profile – just a single page that says who I am. Google has done some great work with its profile pages, it lists all your other website profiles and there’s a fantastic algorithm behind the scenes that identifies even the ones you don’t tell it, giving a more complete picture of your online identity by social graph. Plus, that big slab of static text is a great way to tell people who you are right off the bat.
So, for some time, my website has been a one-page Google profile with my WordPress-powered blog firmly in the background.
And yet – what if I ever do feel the urge to write something more… bloggy? Google profiles don’t have that feature. And what if I wanted to do so in more than 140 characters? Twitter can’t do that. So here is the latest incarnation of robertandrews.co.uk…
My Christmas 2009 project was to marry Google Profiles with WordPress. I had already seen how I could scrape over just the single page using Simple HTML Dom – but I needed also to offer additional WordPress functionality – blog posts, additional static pages etc.
So I created a new WordPress theme that deploys Simple HTML Dom, scraping in the relevant parts of my Google profile and replacing the necessary portions with WordPress code. It’s effectively WordPress, wearing a cloak of Google. So, unlike the standard Google profile, my site now includes extra tabs below the title – one for the blog, another including my lifestream (a chronologically-reverse aggregation of feeds from various of my web profiles and activities), and one for testimonials.
Technically, it was a matter of having WordPress pull over the Google profile, then replace elements of it with the necessary WordPress items at the required moments. If either that is gobbledygook to you or you notice this looks a lot like Google, then mission accomplished, I say. As someone who is completely bought in to the Google Apps universe, that clean, consistent look is exactly what I was going for; and there’s no reason you should know or care this is a WordPress-powered site.
One of the things I like about this new site is Google Profile’s list, I mentioned above, of links to one’s other, off-site online profiles; many of mine are there on the right-hand side. I don’t intend to replicate their content here – what has changed in the last two years alone on the web is that, whilst our blogs used to be the hubs for our online outpourings and identities, now so much of our online activity occurs off-site, on services like Twitter and Facebook. So robertandrews.co.uk is for 1) profile and 2) rare blog posts, but 3) if you want to reach me at other places, just click away via the right-hand side.
I’m quite aware that, should Google significantly update its profiles page HTML code, my site, which depends on that code, could break quite easily. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, as a non-coder, I’m proud to have accomplished this – I enjoyed getting my hands dirty again with the PHP language, which I find to be very therapeutic, perhaps because I have plenty of it to learn.
Don’t take this as an intention to start “blogging” and so on – I don’t really do that anymore. But I now have the option to write personal blog posts if I choose (let’s say, I have the urge to write a poem, or need a place to dump a rant about the state of public transport – anything longer than a tweet). Plus, I can now pad out my profile with those extra pages.
So, this post is just to place a flag in the soil of time, to indicate the moment at which I once again overhauled the architecture for the online expression of myself.
