I managed to post just a single entry to this blog last year. And ironically, it was a link to previous posts.
I suppose "micro-blogging" via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Foursquare, and now Path has been my main outlet for communication. I'm clearly not alone, as most of the individual blogs I follow have migrated to Twitter. But that's not true for everyone. Some bloggers have remained prolific, others have reduced their posting frequency but continue to publish high quality stuff, and others have moved to Tumblr (and Posterous) for lighter communication and easy reposts with stronger communities.
I originally intended for this site to be a hybrid blog/wiki, where I could log stuff like code settings and what-not that might be useful for others besides me. But these days, I find it easier to keep everything in Evernote.
So what's next for MikeyP.com? Should I retire the blog and put up a new static site? Should I try to get back in the habit of posting something interesting, maybe at least once a month? Focus the site on a single topic, like game design? Slim the site down, and archive all of the old stuff except for the most interesting posts? Should I redirect over to Tumblr, or convert the site to a "lifestream" that reposts my content from Twitter, Instagram, etc?
Or perhaps I should continue to let it sit derelict, like a time capsule from a previous internet age...
Okay, I'm two days late on this, but I love the idea. Shawn Blanc (via Marco Arment) proposes that every January 20th, bloggers post five links to previous posts they've written.
Since I haven't had time to write new posts recently, I love this idea! I'll just keep linking to old stuff. Genius!
So without further ado, here are five, fun, "blast from the past" posts on MikeyP.com:
I can't believe I've kept this blog alive for six years. I wish I was posting more often, and I hope I can get back in that routine again soon.
I still spend occasional time tinkering with the blog software and performance. Let's call it a hobby. I've done a few things recently that have had a fairly major impact behind the scenes.
I updated my meta-robots tag to force Google to re-index the whole site. It was indexing the pages by date, which by default was returning an entire year's worth of posts for many searches. That's not a big deal for recent years, but older posts would cause ugly search results. Google now indexes article links directly. It was interesting to watch the search queries on the Google Webmaster Tools site plummet over the course of 8 weeks (!) while Google performed the indexing.
I noticed that several searches were for the Sony Qualia. I have a picture of the Qualia 005 in an older post. I didn't think much of it at the time, but I posted the raw JPG from my camera, which was a 1.2MB file. I've since scaled it down, but it turns out that some Qualia enthusiast sites were leeching the image and embedding it in their own pages while still being served from this site. So I updated the .htaccess settings in my images path to load a tiny GIF if the referrer isn't my site or the feedburner feed.
Also while fixing the Google search results, I noticed that the site was loading a lot slower than I expected. I discovered that the "moreentries" blosxom plugin was a major bottleneck. I used it to limit the number of posts per page and show a "previous/next" button. I never bothered to take a look at the code before, and I now I can't believe I had it in the pipeline for this long. I yanked it and replaced it with the much faster (and 1/10th smaller) paginate_simple plugin.
While I use Disqus for new comments, the older "writeback" comments are still available to read. However, they were a bit hidden, so now older posts with writeback comments have a "2 writebacks and 1 comment" link below the article.
Finally, I took some inspiration from Brian Cantoni's site optimization post and sped up the basic delivery of the site. It turned out that I was only GZIPing the article text but nothing else. Now everything is compressed by default thanks to mod_deflate, including all CSS and JavaScript. I also forced the Cache-Control max-age to be 10 days for all images, CSS, and JavaScript. The only thing that really slows the site down now is the Disqus comment system. Maybe I'll code a native plugin for it some day, but I'm fine with it for now.
I added an iPhone stylesheet to the site this weekend. I'm using the proper "meta viewport" tags to implement it, so it should work fine on any device supporting that tag. I tested it with Safari and Opera Mini on an iPhone 4. Safari looks great, but Opera Mini seems to want to make the page a little wider than the viewport. I have no idea why, but it might be related to one of the "widgets" I have on the page (Google Reader, Twitter, Delicious, LibraryThing).
Let me know if this blog looks fine or wonky on your device.
I finally deprecated the old RSS 0.91 feed for this blog, and redirected it to the Feedburner Atom feed. I don't think that'll cause problems for anyone, but if it does, just head back to MikeyP.com and re-subscribe using the "Subscribe" button. Alternatively, just use the feed icon in your browser.
The direct feedburner URL is http://feeds2.feedburner.com/mikeyp
