The Website of Kyle Thomas (KyleWith)
Well we all knew it was coming, Steve Jobs has passed away. Why do I care when so much tragedy is on my mind right now? Well that is because Steve Jobs has inspired me and many others.
If you just listen to him speak at any of the events in the last 10 years you’ll get the feeling that he believed in what he was doing. I aim for that, I aim to have 100% faith in what I am doing.
My blog was so 2010. No seriously it was, It was based on the Twenty Ten theme that WordPress uses as its default theme. It was a little more advanced than that though, it was actually using the Genesis framework with a theme that was built around the Twenty Ten theme. I felt it was getting old though, I felt it was limiting what I could do with it. Now most are probably thinking “but Kyle this theme isn’t that much different from the old one” and you would be correct. I still like using the 2-column themes with the header, but now I’m using another theme framework altogether.
I painted my own Canvas sort a speak. Well actually I built this new site off the WooTheme framework Canvas. It is an unbelievably flexible theme and will allow my site or any site to grow. This is not the first time I have used it, so I do have a relatively good understanding as to how it works. So if you buy it through the link above I may get a commission and I could help you set it up. I <3 WordPress.
One of the main reasons I wanted to revamp this blog was because I wanted to optimize it for photos, specifically Flickr photos. The old theme had a limit of 610px wide, which is an odd size for Flickr photos. So now I have made the width of this theme 710px wide, which handles the Flickr size 640px by whatever beautifully. Another big selling point for this theme is it has the ability to have the front page be a Magazine style – like a news website – or company site – with a featured gallery at the top of the page – and also have the ability to have a portfolio built right in. The portfolio being one of the key things I want to work on. Again the idea of the revamp was to focus it more on the subjects I want to showcase, photography being a big one. Although the portfolio feature is not set up yet, it will come soon.
There are still aspects of the site I’m working on and will improve. The sidebar and footers being two parts. I’m not satisfied with the way the sidebar is currently looking, I feel it needs more separation from the blog content. As for the footers – site footer and post footers – I need to 1 add something to them and 2 change them so they don’t look like the default styling. If you happen to notice any imperfection – there will be many – please drop me a line and let me know.
This was 2010 sometime when I was still using the default WordPress theme.
Then in late 2010 I moved over the Genesis framework and the Twenty Deiz theme.
Finally we come to today, something new, something fresh, enjoy.
I can honestly say I feel sick and I’m in shock once again that this has happened to the community I so deeply love. A Twin Otter belonging to a local charter company crashed onto a street (the main street) in Old Town, Yellowknife around 1pm MST this afternoon. I sat down at my computer after lunch and just got engulfed into it. My thoughts go out to everyone affected and this point where we don’t know who might have been on the plane is the worst.
Social Media once again played a huge roll in spreading news (and rumours unfortunately) of this event. It was how I was able to keep up with everything happen, without being there. I want to talk more about how Social Media has impacted this event, but first I want to share with you two charts, then in another post I may go deeper into it.
The first chart we have below is of the Twitter activity of the hashtag #yzf, which is the local Yellowknife tag, from 1pm – 4pm. As you can see the first climb is all the local chatter happening about the event. Then at 2pm (where the orange line is) it was picked up by National news as the word spread.
We then have the keyword or hashtag of Yellowknife. Many people don’t know that #yzf is used as the local tag just use Yellowknife and it being the name of the community it is used in headlines and such. As you can see chatter started happen when the event happened, but no official news was out quite yet, but then at 2pm it his National at which point CBC North already had their story up.
If you’d like to read the story just search “Yellowknife Float Place Crash.” It is another sad day.
Not here though. Yes Facebook has been changing over the last couple days and it will be again tomorrow sometime. I know what you are thinking, of course I do, I’m KyleWith. You’re sick of change, by I say embrace it! Love it.
Anyways, I wrote about what is change on Facebook over on our Motion Media blog. Hit it up and leave a comment on your thoughts.
I have always known people don’t like much change, but I never thought it would be to this extent. No one has died but there’s been some pretty nasty words exchanged. Let me try and explain my thoughts.
I wasn’t sure how I was to write this post, or if I was going to write it at all. I keep saying in my mind saying we should be the bigger person and just ignore all the bad stuff, which we do for the most part and we don’t let it bother us. What I do want to point of this post is just some key points about websites and one specifically.
If you haven’t guessed already this post is about the new energeticcity.ca. Last week we relaunched the site in the new format. I would like to point out here that the new format for energeticcity.ca is the exact same as the recently launched mile0city.ca, which people love.
The above picture is of course the old energeticcity.ca and below is the new one. So let me just compare them for a second. The old energeticcity.ca, to me, has always felt cluttered. I don’t know anything about any of the stories other than the top story. I have to actually click on each story to see the content of it. Now if you look below at the new energeticcity.ca and you actually scrolled through the site you’ll see that you get snippets of each story. And to all those naysayers who say we have now got more ads on the site, I’d like to personally point out that you can see more ads on the old site than can on the new site, above the fold.
While I still do believe there is lots of work to be done to the new energeticcity.ca, I don’t think it is complete garbage, at all. What many people don’t see, which was a big part for us, is how the site is actually built. All the content including images, articles, contributors, etc. are all connected and compiled a large database for easy reference. Did you know we can actually post one-story that get published on both mile0city.ca and energeticcity.ca. While this isn’t a big selling point for the end-user, it cuts down on our workflow time, which in turn will allow us to do more and be more in the community.
The last thing I want to point out about the new energeticcity.ca is the tabs on the homepage. You have All, News & Sports, Groups & Blogs, BC & National News and Weather. Each of these different tabs has different content. One of the things that I’m toying with in my mind, is making the news and sports tab have a list of the latest news stories and cutting out the teasers, but I’m not the decision-maker.
Now I would like to point out two news style websites that get at least 10 times the traffic that energeticcity.ca does. First is the Huffington Post and if you look at their homepage you will notice that there’s not a lot there. There’s no list of news stories and actually has no ads. It’s so basic, you have no idea what other content they have on the website.
Then there is Mashable.com, which is always changing their site. If you look at their homepage you see 4 different ads before you ever see any content. And it is all very scattered, I don’t actually know where to look first. I assume their top story is on the left, but is also so much going on I’m not sure where I should click. The top story is actually similar to the energeticcity.ca one, so we must be doing something right.
I’m not trying to bring emotion into this launch, but I myself am trying to understand why people are so against a layout that is so successful in Dawson Creek. I’m also trying to understand why some reader feel it necessary to send one line emails that say “you really fucked this up.” I’m curious to know how they would feel if I came and told them this about something they put a lot of time into.
What do you think? How do you think we did with energeticcity.ca is comparison to other sites. I’m hoping for constructive responses so we can understand more about how our sites are used.