Continuous Learning

The foundation of Wordpress API is built on XMLRPC, and hence if you want to know how the API works then you need to know XMLRPC.

XMLRPC Specification

The authoritative source about XMLRPC is its spec, which includes the following information:

1. Sample request & response
2. Method name
3. XML representation of scalar data (boolean, integer, double, date, string, and base64)
4. XML representation of complex data (array and struct)
5. Failure response

You might find the spec itself is a bit sparse (which is a prevalent feature in the whole xmlrpc.com), and might want to have some tutorials and samples to go along with the information. Furthermore, who wants to manually construct XML these days?? We want a library to do the work!

PHP Implementations of XMLRPC

It turns out that many people have answered the call - I found that at least 5 major branches of XMLRPC libraries in PHP (there are probably more, but I can’t boil the ocean ;P):

• PHP itself has included an experimental xmlrpc functionality, which can be turned on/off
• The PHP experimental xmlrpc functionality is based on eOpinion’s library
• PEAR also has a library for XMLPRC called PEAR::XML_RPC
• PEAR’s library is based on Edi Dumbill (Useful Inc)’s XML-RPC package
• Lastly but not least, Incutio has a very easy to use XML-RPC package (this is the package used by WP)

How should one go about choosing the right package to use? Below is my quick checklist for decision points:

• Is the library stable?
• Will the library be supported?
• Will the library be available?
• Will the library require additional effort to get setup (e.g. require compilation process)?

And how the libraries stack up:

Conclusion

While the pure library XML-RPC package such as Useful Inc’s or Incutio’s do not necessarily offer speed, IMHO they are easier to include for distribution, better documentation, and possibly active support.

When comparing the two package, what I found is that:

• Useful Inc’s has more active development and better documentations
• But Incutio’s is easier to use, and is used in WP

What really sold me with Incutio’s package is that by default it assumes that you shouldn’t have to even think in XML at all - it helps you handle as much of conversion from XML to PHP objects as possible, where Useful Inc’s version still requires you to explicitly control the conversion (it does have helper functions that will simplify the process). Incutio’s abstraction will help speed up the development of a WP XMLRPC client.

We will talk about the various API for WP next.

The following are the stats for February 2007:

• Posts: 16 posts for 20 weekdays - 4 posts/week
• Visits: 905
• Page Views: 1,802
• Average: 1.99 pages/visit

This is of course a big decrease from January - good thing this drop is by design So what happened?

1. I spend majority of time developing instead of writing.

2. The traffic from Reddit is dying down without being renewed.

As noted in the How to Generate Compelling Content series, going forward I am leveraging my technical skills to bring content to this site. You probably have noticed the Web Clippings for different categories (Bizscape, Leaderware, etc), and these are generated by my script that can pull from del.icio.us by different tags. I am also working on a couple other ways of pulling contents, but as they are more complex they are still in development progress.

Right now I am going through the process of refining the script and add documentations so I can release it for wide use. If you are interested in having similar functionality, stay tuned

This is the sixth post in the series. You can find the rest here.

In the last article I talk about RSS aggregation. While aggregation is great, it does not add additional value over going directly to the author’s site if all we do is republish their articles. To add value, there must be more:

• We republish articles that are focused on the topics (i.e. being selective)
• We relate articles with each other (again, reinforcing the focus)
• We provide additional commentary on the articles if applicable

Let’s see what we can do.

This is the fifth article in the series, to see what the previous posts are, just click on the TOC link.

In the last article we cover the concept of republishing, and try to make it work via the built-in RSS widget, but run into the following limitations:

• It does not create post, and
• It does not display excerpts and metadata

Both kill the approach as a potential solution. We need to look for something more.

RSS Aggregation

What we are looking for is a tool that will be able to create posts based on the source, preferably multiple sources. We did not talk about multiple sources last time because RSS widgets technically allows for multiple sources if you create multiple widgets, but it ultimately does not matter because it is not the right solution anyways. Now we are looking further than the widget, we need to include the ability to pull from multiple sources.

This is the fourth post in the series - you can read what experts say about this particular topic, my experiences so far, and my thoughts on alternative approach.

In the last post I describe a different way to think what compelling contents are:

• I do not have to write all of the compelling content
• Just about all of top blogs are journalistic (i.e. link to other’s contents)
• Google, Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit are all alternative models to content generation
• Research & organizing relevant content has value to readers

Of course, no one qualifies Google, Del.icio.us, Digg, or Reddit as blogs, but they offer values to readers regardless.

My goal is to experiment with the above concept to generate content quickly and almost effortlessly

A Bit of Bookkeeping

From here on out I will talk about the journey to achieve the above objective. It will follow the Ready, Fire, Aim principle. We will try multiple solutions and see how well they work out, what the gaps are, and how to close the gap.

It means I will spend quite a bit of time researching and developing solutions, and the posts will reflect the journey. It also means that I might not be able to post as frequently as I’d like, so going forward my postings will be a bit sporadic, but hopefully I can still achieve my monthly posting quota (for this month the goal is a minimum of 12 posts).

Anyhow - let’s get started

First Idea - Republishing

The quickest way to generate content is not to generate the content at all, but rather republishing other’s content. In the blogosphere this can be achieved through republishing other’s feed.

For some, republishing other’s feed is a taboo. Keep reading →

The following are the stats for January 2007:

• Posts: 17 posts for 23 weekdays - 3.5 posts/week
• Visits: 4,382
• Page Views: 6,261
• Average: 1.43 pages/visit

There are only 10 days worth of data in December 2006, from 12/22-12/31:

• Visits: 924
• Page Views: 1,619
• Average: 1.75 pages/visit

If I normalize January to compare against December data, then I have:

• Increase of visits: 158%
• Increase of page views: 128%
• Decreasing of average pages/visit: -0.32 pages/visit

Based on my blog objective for the year, I have achieved #1, #3, and parts of #2 for this month (I was shooting for power(100,1/12)= 147% growth per month).

This means there are still more work to grow traffic:

1. While I have more posts, the posts are not as focused and/or coherent
2. I also did not have as much time to focus on each individual posts as before
3. I have spent the last 8 days working on improving the blog theme, which also take away time from posting

All above means I need to look at a different way of creating compelling content for you. I will discuss my approach in the next article.

After hacking on CSS/PHP non-stop for 8 days, I finally have reached a new look and feel… it is still a bit rough though.

This design is derived from Chris Pearson’s Cutline. It draws heavy inspiration from Copyblogger, WordPress, Anaconda, Silver Lexus, and WordPress II Silver. These designs are all great, and hopefully my mix and match looks okay, too

This experience demonstrates to me how difficult web design can be; if you do not have a knack for web design, this is indeed very challenging. I am grateful for being able to leverage these experts’ work as starting points.

I know there were instants where others did not give proper credit to the designers where they were due. I did not know those exact circumstances (everyone acted appropriately and courageously and the details were removed), but hopefully I AM providing proper credit and not repeating their experiences…

If you are one of the designers and feel that I have not provide the necessary credit, please let me know:

• Cutline - Chris Pearson
• Copyblogger - Chris Pearson/Brian Clark
• Anaconda - Taragona and Simple Thoughts
• Silver Lexus - Highlands by Design
• WordPress II Silver - Patrick Chia

Wordpress has a thriving and awesome community.  There are many freely available, high quality WP themes in the wild, and you can try to customize your blog to your liking by trying out the various WP themes.  The Themes Viewer even has a nifty testrun tool for you to see what the theme looks and feels like on a demo site

Now, if you have customized your blog with plugins and php code changes, then you will lose those changes when you switch to another theme.  Furthermore, there might just be something about the theme that you want to customize, and you do not want to make changes with your readers seeing it happen.  In this case, you need a way to test your themes while your readers see original theme, and the switch only occurs when you are done customizing.  But this is not possible through WP admin panel - once you change theme, it is global.

Of course that is not good…

Someone in the WP community has solved this problem.  Ryan Boren has a Theme Preview Plugin just for this purpose.  All you need is download, install, and activate the plugin, and then you can test out your new theme by appending ?preview_theme=<Theme Name> (use the name you see from the admin panel, but remove the version number… it took me a while to figure this out) at the end of the URL. Done!

This is a nifty tool. The only inconvenience is if you try to navigate the pages (which you will when making extensive customizations), then you would have to manually append the querystring every time you navigate.  So I added the following function to automatically add the query string to the link. It doesn’t yet work for all links (for example, recent comments and the page links), but it suffices for the purpose of navigating pages in the preview theme.

function preview_theme_append_qs($url) {
        global $user_level, $preview_theme_user_level, $preview_theme_query_arg;

        get_currentuserinfo();

        if ($user_level  < $preview_theme_user_level) {
                return $url;
        }

        $theme = $_GET[$preview_theme_query_arg];

        if (empty($theme)) {
                return $url;
        }

        // below is of course, JUST a hack...
        // better to test whether qs exists 
        // but it works 80/20 ;) 
        return $url . "?" . $preview_theme_query_arg . "=" . $theme ;
}

add_filter('post_link', 'preview_theme_append_qs');

Wow - it is almost two months since I put up this site.  It has been very fun, and definitely very time consuming, and something that can easily suck all available time…

Wordpress is great.  I am a very picky software user, and so far it has stood up to my abuse.  The difference I found between Wordpress and Typepad is that Wordpress allows me to go under the abstraction layer and directly edit code as necessary.  On the other hand, while Typepad provides clear and simple interface, it does not allow me to easily find ways of adding additional capabilities, nor does it allow me to do any extension under the hood.

For some people, Typepad definitely works.  And based on what I have seen from some advanced Typepad blogs, I probably did not push as far as I can with Typepad.  But I still like Wordpress’s philosophy better.

Anyhow - it is time to redo the site.  My goal is to add more interactivity to the site and find a better theme, and in the next few days the major theme will switch to setups, hope you enjoy

1) Post one article per weekday (average). Minimum 3 articles per week.

I will continue to post at the current pace (I have 26 posts in 20 weekdays during December). I used to post much slower because my articles take 15 hours or so to write, but during December I experimented with a different way of writing and was able to cut down the hours down to about 3-4 hours per article, which is a much more reasonable time.

Of course - the idea is to keep the posting quality the same if not higher, but only experimentation will tell

Prediction: I believe I can meet this resolution with persistence and routinizing writing. The 3 articles per week minimum gives me time to deal with unexpected or vacations.

2) Increase blog traffic at least 100-fold.

This blog is new (since 12/4 - although there are backdated articles) and hence few people know its existence. I am new to blogging and content-based internet marketing, so there are a lot to learn. Sky is the limit, but I must operate in Ready, Fire, Aim mode to learn to improve my blog’s readership.

Prediction: I have no idea what to predict because I am a newbie in this endeavor, so the good news is there is nowhere to go but up

3) Report my progress once every month.

I will share my progress and learnings at least once every month. The key of the progress report, is of course, traffic generation, because there will be quite a bit of learnings from it.

Prediction: I will meet this resolution as long as I am still operating the blog.

What are your New Year’s resolutions?