So, I started One Fat Man – a journey back to fitness. I got home from work about 4:30PM, had a snack, did a trainer ride on my bike. It was my second official day or exercising and I figured I need to keep track of what I was doing, and set some goals to be motivated towards. I used to do this in a notebook, or some software diary, or even a spreadsheet. Now I figured why not a blog. Even better, I’ll share it with my friends and maybe the peer pressure will motivate me some more. So that was it. I was set, I’d keep a blog instead of a training log. But I didn’t want to spend a heap of time working on it. So, keep it simple, make it fast was the goal.

• Started around 8PM
• Installed another instance of wordpress on my dev server, using fantastico. My dev account had reached its max allowable mysql databases. Had to go to WHM and configure a new DB quota for the account. ~ about 15min
• Entered my first training log post, and deleted the default WP stuff. ~ about 5 min
• Wrote my About page. ~ 20min
• Went trolling for interesting WP themes. Got lucky and found one I liked fast. Installed it. ~ about 15min
• Futzed with the CSS to get the colors and layout the way I liked. ~ about 1.5hr
• Installed or configured some plugins, like Akismet and bdp-comments. ~ about 10mins
• That was it I was pretty much done in just over 2.5 hrs. But I futzed around reading it and went to bed at 11PM.

On the second day. I did my work out, and then posted my daily entry. I started to futz with the CSS a bit more, found some images of cartman I liked. Had an email from a friend who said I needed pictures, so I looked for some new flickr/WP plugins. I like Falbum which I use here, but its a bit of work to get installed and running the way you want. Instead I found crossroads. A really neat little plugin that lets you use Highslide another neat Javascript viewer. Maybe another 1.5 hrs and I was really truly done. Now I’m just loading it up with content. I might tinker here and there but that’s it. I’ll likely get post-by-email working so I can update from the road when I travel.

I’ll move a lot of personal blog posts of this blog now and do that over there at One Fat Man.

This site also represented an experiment in new process. The client had very little say in terms of the design of the end result. Unlike the current process which has a lot of client engagement, design reviews, choices, trade offs, education, justification, explanation etc.. Not that that is bad. Just that if the scope of the project is quite small, like this one, a designer can ‘get-it’ quite quickly and easily, and maybe the client can save quite a bit of money by well you know ‘trusting the designer’.

It’s kind of like those new Home improvement shows. Where the designers meet the home owners, understand their needs, ask a bunch of probing questions… then ship the home owner off somewhere at some point so they don’t get in the way. Maybe they are involved a bit in the tear-down and part of the renovation. They’ll inevitably hate the paint color, because they can’t envision the end result. But when they come back at the end and see the final product 9 times out of 10 they love it.

Well this project was like that. We chatted, set some scope and goals. Really tried to focus on the goals. Next we had the customer write a document that had all the content the site needed to present. They gave us their logo. Showed us a few sites they liked in terms of design and tone. That was it. No concepts, no design reviews, nothing. We took complete creative control. One day, or five hours later , the next thing the heard from us was—your site is done. What was the result? Here’s a quote:

“I LOVE THE SITE!!!!! You are AMAZING!!!! THANK YOu Thank you THANK YOU!!!!!” Dr. Heather Munroe

On that note, here are a couple a good resources to get started: http://www.netregistry.com.au/news/articles/57/1/Why-you-should-get-listed-on-DMOZ/Page1.html and http://www.mr-seo.com/blog/2006/06/getting-listed-in-dmoz-not-as-easy-as.html

And then I get to thinking, wouldn’t it be great if more stores and businesses started to publish their phone numbers in their meta data descriptions, so when people do what I just did they can see that number right up front and centre?

It will only be relevant to certain business. But I’m going to start suggesting it. One thing to be careful of when trying to do this however, is to realize you don’t have full control over what Google will use to build the description. Sometimes Google will defer to DMOZ data from the Open Directory project. You can prevent this from by adding another META data tag to your site’s HEAD. Just add:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP">

So put it all together and instead of seeing something like this:

You could see this:

Google Webmaster Help center has good article on the whole SERP, description thing and how google build’s your site title and description used on its results page.

When internet conversations reduce to petulant “I’m rigtht-you’re wrong” behaviour… well I just call that good interweb fun

The whole idea is that you don’t fret the details of the presentation, and if you just roll with it, and accept that you have no-to-little visual control of the mind map, you can very quickly create, and as easily maintain, site page architecture diagrams. It’s been really helpful to me lately, particularly in the early ideas stage of a project.

I’ve been using Freemind an open source mind map software available free from here.

Reading this was relevant to a current government engagement. You have to laugh at the following comment :

Seems very interesting. I guess I will read it later.

read more digg story

Update 24.02.2007
Apparently 43folders like the low-tec PDA too, and came up with an even simpler version…. errrr and they came up with it first… » read about it here