kuniform

As part of the redesign of kuniform.org, I am updating the navigation and flow of the blog and the site, adding lots of little touches to support community features. This has led me on a journey through the Wordpress plugin directory for resources and I’d like to share the initial list of plugins and my impressions of them with you.

• SilentBits’ SEO Plugins for Wordpress has a great list of search engine optimization plugins that add sweet semantic touches such as a customized title tag for the document and meta description meta keywords for each post, using data from that post. I’m not sure this one will work out for my whole site without customization, but if your site is entirely managed via WordPress, this nifty site map plugin may work for you. It covers both pages and posts you’ve created in WordPress.


• I am ditching the notion of archive links. Nobody has a reason to follow them, and nobody does. Instead, I will be adding related and popular links. For the related posts, I am using WASABI’s WordPress Related Entries 2.0, called “invaluable” by PingMag, dontcha know?


• To link to the most popular entries on the site, I am going to try out Alex King’s Popularity Contest.


• For responding accurately to Google search results, which is one of the primary means the site is found, I’ll try out theundersigned.com’s Landing Sites 1.3


• I already am using Akismet for spam filtering, Social Bookmarks for letting people link to my pithy articles, and Bill Rawlinson’s FeedList for integrating my del.icio.us bookmarks into the site.

That PingMag article has lots of other interesting plugins, listed too. After I launch the redesign I’ll share my war stories on which plugins worked for me and how I got them integrated. Once I know I’ll be using them, I’ll end up donating to each of the authors above for their efforts in creating and supporting these applications.

He’s a bit cheesy, but full of good tips on conversion (100 and 1 of them to be precise).

Mac Heist Bundle is featuring some really good software, and the authors are donating money to charity. On the topic of apps, Aptana is a recent entry into the web IDE market. I may check this out while on vacation. On the topics of Macs, I’ve had the misfortune of having to visit this page.

Joel contextualizes some of the simplicity kool-aid being distributed Jim Jones-style by local gurus 37signals. I’m tired and crabby today, so I’ll summarize thusly: 37signals: simple and elegant is good, like a hammer or a screwdriver. Don Norman, as quoted by Joel, and Joel himself: more features = more money because the product can then appeal to more people. Joel ties simplicity to a particular arc in a product’s lifecycle, or evaluates it as a feature in and of itself that is prioritized against all others. Food for thought.

Kim Goodwin of Cooper has a great article entitled Taking Personas Too Far that is worth the read. She gives a good high level overview of the research efforts, data points, persona format and communication techniques while reviewing some of the strangeness that has developed in industry around personas. Some examples include creating living rooms for personas or having someone pose as the persona.

Activities like these smack of people unfamiliar with the process of software design and the purpose of personas busying themselves to mollify executives freaked out at the touchy feely design activities going on around them. Why do I say that? In 1999, I often slept on the couch of a teenage persona who’s room we’d created in an effort to sell our client’s startup dream to potential investors. Few things are as surreal as seeing a teenage girl’s bedroom as recreated by the efforts of a bunch of Ivy League MBAs.