Jason Clarke

Xmas lights at night, originally uploaded by jgclarke.

A shot of our house on Thanksgiving eve, also the first snow of the year. We’ll have more lights to come this weekend. Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours, wherever you are.

WordPress.com, the hosted blog service developed by the WordPress team (the gears running this site), is now out of private beta and is public.

I’ve been using the service for about two weeks now (but I’ve only posted to once so far, to my detriment). My reaction is split down the middle, as I stated in my lone post at jasonclarke.wordpress.com:

1. The blogging interface in hosted WordPress is vastly improved, while looking quite similar (and that’s outstanding from a usability standpoint). Especially appreciated are two key features: the “add category” functionality and the “upload/add images” function.

2. Alternately, two major drawbacks made the WordPress hosted service largely undesirable for me. One was the inability to edit your templates- even font faces and sizes were blocked. The other was the inability to map a domain to the service.

Unfortunately, neither of my major cons have been addressed with the WordPress public launch. But I know that offering customziable templates has to be on their horizon; it’s only a matter of time. One major advtange of the service that I failed to mention in my initial review: the comment spam blocking seems to be around 1 million times better than it is for me on my installed version of WordPress.

For a long time I’ve been drastically private on this site about writing-related matters. While the debate about private vs. public on a blog carries on, I’m in a bit of a writer’s block/rut so I’m taking the easy way and out being slightly transparent in an effort to jab myself with some possible new perspective.

The rut comes in part from waiting, which unless you’re good, can breed self-doubt. I have a short story out to an agent right now, and I’m waiting to hear back from her about whether or not it’s total crap.

If it’s rejected, I’m either going to submit it to Amazon’s Shorts program, or I might just post it here on this site and offer both a free web version, as well as a high-quality download for $1 or something like that. And maybe even a $1 audio book (is storycast - that would be “story” + “podcast” - too annoying of a term?) version, too.

If anybody has any comments, suggestions, feedback about the idea, please by all means share them in the comments.

Also: I’m currently 10-5 in my football pool this week, now waiting on the Monday Night game to start. I picked the Bears again (they won) because I heard Mike Golic saying their defense was underrated a few weeks ago on ESPN’s radio show Mike and Mike in the Morning. That’s part of why I sometimes take a bit of a longer way to work…The football pool.

My review of Measure Map generated two comments. One was by Jeffrey Veen, a partner in Adaptive Path, the consulting firm that built and is launching Measure Map. Rather than reply to Jeff’s comment with my own comment (which would bury the conversation down a layer) or reply to him with an email (which would take the conversation of the public eye), I’m going to respond right here in this post.

Jeff writes:

“[T]here is one feature notably absent from Measure Map that I’ve missed already: the ability to see a list of users browsing your site right now.”

Thanks for the great review, Jason. I’m curious about the feature you describe above, however. Could you say more about it? What would you want to see - a list of IP addresses? And what would that information help you do?

Thanks for taking the time to comment, Jeff! To answer the question, first let me throw a caveat: as I said in my review, I’m talking about a pretty non-essential feature here- a bit of fun is the key. But since Measure Map’s big advantage is that its interface is far superior, why not throw in some fun features to further elighten the user, right?

So my answer. If I were to add a “current visitors” metric to Measure Map as it is now, I’d probably place it directly above the four main graphic headers on the account overvie page. Without hogging too much of that important screen space, I’d suggest:

A smallish, wide but not too tall horizontal graphic indicating, in linear fashion, each current user according to how long they’ve been on the site. This graphic, taken from a stats program I’ve used before called LiveStats, shows what I mean:

Below that graphic, It would also be neat to see a list of the top 5-10 users currently browsing the site, with at the least, the user’s hostname and time spent on the site. Above both the graphic and this list would be a big Measure Map-esque heading: “24 users are browsing your site right now.” And then perhaps below that (instead of the standard “That’s x more than the average day.”), something like: “Current users have spent an average of 24 minutes on your site.”

That’s today’s Measure Map minute. Thanks again to Jeff Veen for responding to my initial review.

Congrats to two of my co-workers, Ron and Jeremy, for becoming Zend Certified PHP developers. They’re now two of less than 300 PHP programmers nationwide with that distinction, and they both work for our company.

I’ve got a new address for my RSS feed:

jasonclarke.org RSS (http://feeds.feedburner.com/JasonClarke)

Please grab this updated feed address if you subscribe to my feed.

Measure Map is a new blog stats (really, analytics) tool developed by usability consulting firm Adaptive Path and currently in private alpha mode for the time being. (Whoah- will alpha become the new beta?)

By entering you email address at the service’s homepage, measuremap.com, you’ll be added to the waiting list to receive an invitation to test out the service. I’ve been lucky enought to receive an invitation, and today I finally opened the email and signed up for the service to track this blog.

My first impressions, after using it for just a few hours, are that it is quite usable and very attractive. Unfortunately, this blog generates such little traffic that I don’t quite have the data set I’d like (or is really necessary) for a proper experimentation. Nonetheless, I can comment on the interface, as sparsely full of data as it is, and what I’ve seen so far I really like.

First, the signup process. (more…)

I’m incredibly honored that Mickey Kaus and Robert Wright, the 3-D, Max Hedrom-esque Blogging Heads, linked to my recent post praising their new videoblogging venture, Bloggingheads.tv.

Mickey’s kausfiles is one of my earliest inspirations towards working and writing on the web (remember when Kaus’ paragraph-style blogroll called Wright’s Non-Zero “fab big think”?). Now it’s a bit funny, and entirely fitting, that while I’ve got my own experiments in videoblogging going on (nothing public yet), inspiration for those trials would come from the same source that led me to blog.

And now that we know they’re furiously searching Technorati for the latest links to bloggingheads.tv, let me just drop one in the suggestion box: Would it be uncool to devote just a minute or two of an upcoming episode to explaining some of the technology used to create their blog-show-whateveritis?

Now that I’m not using post titles all the time, I need to add a permanent link icon to each post. Working on that now…

UPDATE: I added a bolded link labeled…wait for it…”LINK” at the footer of each post. That way, the world still gets a permalink if I don’t title a post.

Finally had a chance to add Measure Map’s code to my blog so I can begin checking out the service. Report to follow…