Rui CarmoWith a well-earned three-week vacation stretching ahead (my first annual leave with a kid), I’m sorting through a pile of drafts and personal to-dos to see what (if any) will find their way here. There is altogether too much of it, but these five things are currently striking my fancy:
- Doing a re-design – I’ve been mulling that for quite a while, since after all the current design is four years old, and it would be both fun and rewarding. Maybe one of those newfangled grid-based layouts, although it would be have to find a suitable replacement for the site headers. But Kubrick works so well that I’m reluctant.
- Updating the Yaki public repository – this is something a lot of people e-mail me about, and it’s not easy. Yaki now has a bunch of ad-hoc bolted-on features that require some careful refactoring of the code to be suitable for other folk to use (from the thumbnailer integration to an XMPP bot that warns me about some site processing), and although it keeps bubbling up to the top of the list, real life conspires to push it down (it simply requires too much time).
- Clearing out old stuff – the Archives currently go back to 2002 or so (most of the original stuff from end of 2001 was dumped when I switched to Yaki), but the web being what it is there are some posts with broken images and a lot of broken outbound links. I have been thinking of simply dumping most of the stuff pre-2004 and preserving only those that are back-referenced from more recent years, but that will also take some time (even if I already have some Python code I can modify to check the internal references).
- Improving navigation – I keep thinking that if the Semantic Web was worth the pixels it’s blogged on we’d already have come up with a coherent, standartized visualization for it. I’ve amassed a bunch of links on Graphs and suchlike over the years and have yet to find a good way to have people grasp the interconnected relationships between the nodes that make up the contents of this Wiki – Yaki has all the data, all I need is a decent way to present it.
- Building a mobile view – enough people ask me about that due to the iPhone craze that I’ve been wondering if it makes sense. I am openly against creating iPhone specific versions of sites (although that doesn’t stop me from doing small tools), but stuff like this gives me pause, because I enjoy the challenge of presenting information and data in a readable fashion everywhere.
Still, with the kid, a stack of books to read and the need to relax and figure out what I want to do with my life in general (it’s 2008, and I’m not getting any younger) I’m pretty sure I won’t make much headway in most of these.
But I’d love suggestions regarding the first one. I’ve been thinking of going extra-lean like Mark or Michael, and I’ve always loved the Subtraction layout, so monochrome could be a way to go…