featuring technology tips and music recommendations with a personal touch

Welcome to the latest incarnation of Alaeddin’s Blog!

It’s been almost a week since I took the old site down and started working on it. Since this is a major redesign of the old version, taking it down was necessary to maintain consistency between my local and remote version, so I apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused.

This is a snapshot of the old version, which suffered from many problems:

I’ve worked hard on designing this new new version. I spent a couple of days picking out a nice-looking theme from the hundreds of available WordPress themes out there. Then I spent about a week tweaking the theme’s guts until I got something out of it that lives up to my standards and everything I’ve learned about blogging, SEO and web usability so far.

In short, I’ve focused on few key points when tweaking this theme:

1. Clear, simple and contextual navigation.
2. Separation of different topics since my blog is quite diverse in nature.
3. Bringing the content forth and make it easy to read and scan.
4. Increase the stickiness of the blog (see point 1) and make it easy to subscribe.
5. Increase the loading speed of the pages.

It’s really been a wonderful (although a bit tiring) experience to unleash the developer in me and let him work out some PHP, XHTML, and CSS magic. Of course, let’s not forget WordPress, the greatest open-source blogging platform ever made.

Having said that, I’m dying now to find out what you guys have to say about my new (vs. old) blog design. Don’t hesitate to be constructively critical, I’ve been known to be one so I naturally expect it from other people. It may also help to know this is still a work in progress so I’m not really emotionally attached to it (OK, maybe just a little bit).

Looking forward to your comments and feedback.

While I’ve been busy lately preparing for my Certified Usability Analyst (CUA) exam on September 13, I’ve been quietly studying this blog’s performance, vision and roadmap.

I’ll admit that in the blogsphere there’s not much room for a personal blog to thrive, but my idea is that if this is the case, then I might as well build and maintain the best possible personal blog out there that provides kick-ass content and value to my friends and readers.

To that end, there are many things that need fixing (both technical and otherwise), that have piled over the last few months. For example:

• Optimize load time - Last time I checked, this blog’s load time stands at a whopping 25 seconds!
• Easier navigation - While current one isn’t all bad, I’m not fond of the menu labeling. I have ideas for improving navigation, mostly inspired by Steve Krug’s awesome book, Don’t Make Me Think.
• Browser compatibility - This problems continues to exist in minor forms, despite changing theme last May.
• Clear purpose - I want to further focus this blog and I want new readers to get at a glance what this blog’s about and where to find valuable content (again, navigation).

So in my spare time, I’ve been planning out steps I will take to meet those goals:

• I will start by switching to a more browser-friendly, fast-loading and awesome-looking theme. I already got a theme picked out.
• I will make sure everything that’s wrong with the current theme is permanently fixed in the new one upon launching.
• To celebrate the new launch, I will start writing a massive post series that’s going to be really valuable for virtually anybody who uses a computer. Stay tuned.
• To go along the post series, I will embark on a massive ad and marketing campaign to bring in fresh and interesting new readers to spice up the community around this blog.

It’s all about you!

Yes, without you, the lovely readers of this little blog, I wouldn’t have the motivation to plan and do all of this.

Recently, I’ve done something I’m really proud of: I’ve reached out to a fresh new reader of this blog and thanked him for having the interest to follow my blog. Then I asked him of what he thought of the blog, what he liked best and least. I was really amazed that he took the time and effort to reply, thoroughly describing his experience with the blog so far. He suggested some very good points that kind of reaffirmed my existing suspicions.

So now I want to generalize this concept:

In the comments, write at least one thing you like about this blog and (more importantly), one thing you’d like to see changed. Be brutal, I can take that (as long as it’s constructive).

Your comments and suggestions will feed into my lists above and the relaunch of this blog will see most of the things you like reinforced and the things you disliked hopefully patched up.

I had a little time tonight to revisit my old plugin, Welcome Visitor! Reloaded, and enhance it with couple of nice features. My original post about this plugin explains how the need for such plugin originated. Basically this plugin displays custom welcome message in the sidebar or anywhere in your blog for new or returning visitors. Kind of neat thing if you want to create a positive atmosphere for new or returning visitors, don’t you think?

As a result of this upgrade, I’ve trimmed down on some options in the previous version that are now pretty much unnecessary. So this new version (1.1) is much more simpler to setup and use.

Click here to continue reading →

The fuel that keeps any blogger going is the positive reaction he receives from his audience, and boy did I receive plenty of that!

This post is simply dedicated to thanking every one of you who’ve visited my blog and left a comment or sent me a thank-you e-mail, especially during the week where I solely featured the works of fabulous Canadian musicians. Man, that was a fun week, wasn’t? :)

Here are some of the great e-mails I received from some "satisfied customers":

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I've added two pages to the site which I think are worth checking out:

1. Fabulous Songs is a new page with a complete list of all songs I've posted, and then some. It's useful if you want to get a quick overview of all of them, plus you can download or listen to any song just by clicking on it.
   (Kudos to the Box.net team for providing such useful widget)

2. Shared Listening is a new page that is similar to Shared Reading (which lists my latest read blog posts and favorite blogs) except that it includes up-to-minute listing of my recently played songs as well as my weekly and overall top tracks and artists that I’ve listened to.
   (Kudos to the Last.fm team for providing those useful set of widgets)

Go ahead and check those pages out and let me know what you think in the comments.

I’ve been thinking for the last couple of days on where I’d like to go with this blog.

I realize that maybe one of the main reasons people subscribe to my blog is because they’d like to discover new inspiring music and artists. Since there are a lot of noise out there, it would help if someone pointed out notable songs and artists for you and preferably provided you the opportunity to download and listen to them.

This is exactly what I’m trying to do. I have a lot of passion for music and an appetite for discovering new wonderful tunes. Plus I have a tempting desire to share my discoveries with as many people as I can.

This is where this blog kicks in.

To this end, my aim from this post is take a quick poll:

How many of you think that we should focus exclusively on music-related stuff in this blog?

If you’re in a feed reader, click through to cast a vote in this poll

I'm really going to miss the old design. It was a 1-column simple and beautiful layout called Black Minimalism. However, it had too many flaws, some of which:

• Looks horrible on IE 6
• Bandwidth whore
• No support for widgets
• Being a 1-column, it makes you miss out on potential subscribers. Had it been two column, the arrangement could be made so that subscription options are more visible and easier to spot.

So I knew someday I had to give it up one day and, well, today is the day!

Introducing a new theme based on the popular WordPress K2, and a custom style to the latter called Jolie. I must have browsed about a a hundred theme before adopting and customizing this one. What I liked about it is its simplicity yet level of sophistication (read, Ajax) that it delivers. Also, the two column layout is handy when you want to organize your stuff for better visibility.

Some of the customization I've done on this theme were:

• Header image (yes that is me).
• Subscription options at the top.
• Blog statistics sidebar on the homepage with a link to the full page.
• Search engine optimization in the HTML header tags used throughout the theme.
• Miscellaneous style changes (my favorite is the alternating color on the sidebar which makes the items more readable)

Overall, so far I'm really satisifed on the performance and usability of this theme. But what matters is what YOU think. I'm sure many of my readers use different browsers on different platforms. So what's your experience so far?

Finally, to celebrate the new look, in the next post I'll bring you an awesome new song by a really really popular rock band from an album that will be released soon. This one will blow you away. So stay tuned!

Although no one has tagged me yet, I got enough questions from my friends and relatives that I decided it’s finally time for the inevitable “Why do I blog” post every blogger writes about at one point or another.

However, unlike other bloggers, I realize that there are reasons why one blogs and there are the other hidden reasons. By “hidden” I mean those reasons which we are not aware of at a conscious level but they are still a driving force that keeps us going. A good example of what I’m talking about is ego-boosting. In my post about why would someone love public speaking, a reader suggested that on some level a blog is something similar to that. However, there is no reason to be ashamed of that. “The ego needs validation and there’s nothing like an audience to give that rush”, says another reader.

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