Announcing KellysWorld Relaunch

Letter sent to family and friends announcing the relaunch of KellysWorld. Use commenting to tell me what you think. Letter:

Most of you should know about my website KellysWorld.net. I've had it since October 2002 and started blogging in early 2003.

Recently I switched to a new publishing platform and relaunched the site 2 weeks ago. It's not perfect and it isn't going to win WebSite of the year but it's a decent offering.

The content remains the same but some design and publishing changes give me more control and from just about anywhere in the world.

I've tied my site in with Twitter, micro blogging site, and added some features that weren't available to me before. For example the site can now be translated into any of four langueges instantly. Not terribly useful but one of them is Korean and I have a few Korean friends that check in on ms occassionally.

I'm also looking at the Ability for others to post stories, photos and other items. I have a few options in that area and we shall see.

One really cool benefit of the change is that posts back to day one (2003) are now available for view. It's strange reading stuff I wrote 5 years ago, much of it spure of the moment.

There is a commenting system, but you do have to register to use it. Eventually I may increase security it depends on how much web spam I get. Right now it's wide open.

Photos currently link to my MobileMe photo site and Tracy's. Still thinking about that one. Lots of options.

Site isn't done yet, but i thought I would let you all know of the relaunch. I'm also looking for suggestions.

Just go to www.kellysworld.net.

See you there! Tell me what you think.

Kelly

KellysWorld - Translated

Okay, this is really cool. At least I think so. A new feature of KellysWorld is the ability to translate it into one of a long list of languages. That's right, for those living in say Korea who's English might not be 100% they can read KellysWorld in their native tongue. The power of computers and the web, truly amazing. How do you translate the site? All you do is click on the language of the site and rather quickly a new version of the site pops up properly formatted in the language of choice. For now I've selected Korean, German, French and Spanish; but there is a really long list of choices, but 4 seemed enough for now.

Even if you don't need to read KellysWorld in one of 4 other languages feel free to click on the button and see what happens. I was amazed at how very well it worked, and I'm hard to amaze when it comes to technology.

Decisions, Decisions

As you should already be aware KellysWorld.net has been under major revisions for the past two weeks. Now that I have moved to using WordPress as my site creation tool and I have decided on the basic functionality it falls on me to find that theme or look I want for my site. The current one, as of today, is at this point my favorite. I've tried a few others, but they haven't stuck. Below are images of some of the options, including the current one. Each look requires a little changing of where information is placed so they don't have the same layout; but all carry the same content. Take a look, I would be interested in hearing your thoughts. One thing I did decide on was going with only 5 posts per page instead of 10. I'm not sure readers like to scroll on forever. I could be wrong. Sample Site Images:

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New Features for KW 4.0

I've added some new features to KellysWorld 4.0; along with settling on a new theme for the time being. The changes I believe both put the fun in "functionality." The first new feature is the Video of the Week. The first video is a commercial you just have to see to believe, babys getting their groove on while roller skatting. It's creepy, but fun. Another new feature is a social bookmarking one that you will find at the bottom of ever post, including this one. I've included some of my favorites. Basically, it allows you to take a post and repost it through your favorite social site like FaceBook or Twitter. I've includd e-mail as well. Want to subscribe to my blog feed, that's the individual posts; all you have to do is enter your e-mail address into the box on the right under my welcome message. The feed is provided by FeedBurner, now powered by Google!

Another feature is a direct view into my Twitter feed. Twitter, if you don't know, is a social micro-blogging website. Posts have to be less than 140 characters. It started off as a tool used by only the geekiest of folks (like myself) and is now used by the President of the United States (also a geek), celebrities and even one of our local weather guys. Some days I "twitter" a lot other days none at all. Individual posts are called "tweets."

One of my favorite features is my mobile access. If you use an iPhone, Blackberry or any other web enabled mobile phone then accessing my site is easy and automatic. The iPhone version is really stellar. To see the standard mobile version, scroll down to the bottom of the page and chose "Mobile Version." Don't worry, you can convert back. For the iPhone version, well, you will need to get your hands on an iPhone, iPod Touch or even an Android mobile phone. Them the breaks!

Finally you will find what's called a Tag Cloud at the bottom of the page. Most posts on this site and most others use categories and tags to help categorize their hundred or even thousands of posts. By clicking on any category or tag, you are automatically taken to a page with posts that only match that category or tag. I had this on KellysWorld 3.0, but the tags didn't all make the transition. I'm not done re-tagging, but I've done over 50% of the posts so far.

Enjoy the new features and please, feel free to leave me comments. You will have to register with the site to leave comments (that too is a new feature) but it's easy to register.

Changing Themes

If you have checked out the site over the past few days you may have noticed it hasn't looked the same twice. I'm trying to find the right look and feature sets. There are so many themes to look at, but what I am finding is that to tweak their look I have to mess with code and I don't want to have to do that. So the search continues. I'm mostly looking at free themes but there should be "professional" themes as well; i.e. a theme I buy. I did that before and used it for two years and the designer helped me tweak it to make it my own. I hope to find something like that again. So stay tuned for more changes.

Here we go again

Trying to import blog entries... but not working too well...

Mobile Kellysworld

It looks as though I have a mobile version of KellysWorld working. Another great reason I made the move to WordPress. All I did was install a plugin and turn it on. It works great on an iPhone, but should work equally well on most other mobile phones. Your phone should be auto re-directed to the proper page. It should be noted that I wrote this post on an iPhone using the WordPress App. Very Cool!!

UPDATE: If you use an iPhone or iPod Touch you will see an even smarter mobile interface that should work fast and make excellent use of the touch interface. Same should be true of Android phones too.

KellysWorld 2009

Well, you might have noticed rather quickly that KellysWorld looks a little different; okay, it looks a lot different. You might be asking why? Well, I've made another switch in how I create my website. Yes, for those of you that have followed KellysWorld since I started it back in 2003 you have seen several revisions of the site. This though is the biggest switch in several years.

In 2003 I began my website using Blogger, a website dedicated to just creating websites for anyone with the time and inclination. You might remember I called it KellysWorld Times. While I loved how easy it was to use Blogger, I didn't have a great deal of control over the site. I decided I could do it better on my own and moved to using FrontPage. A move that turned out to be painful; but in the end KellysWorld took shape with my own graphics and basic layout. While I learned how to deal with the limitations of FrontPage, I yearned for something more.

I found it in a Mac application called RapidWeaver. It made FrontPage seem like creating a website with a chisel and a rock. Only problem was RapidWeaver didn't work on a PC, only on a Mac. I eventually solved that little problem by moving back to favorite Operating System Max OS and never looking back. Interestingly, the switch to Mac would have a cascading effect still felt today in my home; but I digress. The switch to RapidWeaver gave me a great deal of power over my website and the templates I could use were amazing. While the site would undergo various changes over the past few years, none were major. I was happy with what I had and busy enough that change didn't seem all that important.

Something was missing though, the ability to edit pages when I wasn't near my beloved Mac. Using website creation software that was tied to a single device took away some of my mobility; mobility I hadn't enjoyed since I moved from Blogger back in 2004. In the past year the ability to post on the go has become something more and more people can do and want to do. There is also the lack of integration with Twitter, a service I used regularly.

For the past several weeks I have been looking at other options. One of them is a service called WordPress. This service is different than Blogger, but still very similar. Blogger is owned by Google (now) and is hosted by them. You can get your Bogger site onto your own domain, but the data officially resides with Google. WordPress took a different approach, it's a service you install on your own server so the program and all the data is hosted by the owner of the website. It's also open source.

That's been true for a while, what's changed is that there is an iPhone App that works rather well and I can integrate with Twitter in a two-way fashion. I can have post from KellysWorld appear on Twitter and I can have posts from Twitter appear on KellysWorld. Someone can follow either and still see the updates and posts.

For you the reader it isn't a big deal, for me it's a big deal in that my 140 character posts will appear on KellysWorld and I can post to KellysWorld using my iPhone. So if I'm board in a line or waiting for a movie, I can post something more than 140 characters and do so directly to my own website.

Does this mean KellysWorld will see more posts than before? Well, short ones yes... long ones, probably not. My website is changing, not my schedule.