Tag Archives: thoughts

If you consume, you should collate

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I realised this today as somebody said to be ‘What new site are people talking about?’ my mind went blank.

Looking back at my twitter history (mainly links to GIFs and frivolous comments) and delicious (nothing of substance) I turned to my Readability list (just articles).

I’ve done posts in the past (https://paulrandall.com/2010/01/23/condensed-type-1/ and https://paulrandall.com/2012/04/25/linkspiration/) that collate what I have consumed over the week, and I think it is much better way of documenting what is going on, because otherwise I just forget!

I watched a talk by Gavin Strange (@jamfactory) http://vimeo.com/61248847 where he had a page full of things that interested/inpired him recently. Braun watches, old sticker packets and wicked-awesome camera rigs. I’d like to play with creating one of these a week/month as a visual representation for the things that I have consumed.

You can’t force people to use your product

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As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn’t part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy. A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.” Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.

I think this ex-Googler has it spot on: You can’t force people to use your stuff. How many of us have a Google account? And how many times did we use Google Wave, or Google+?

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The Merits of WordPress

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After talking recently about the pros and cons of building your own CMS with a colleague, and especially the time that goes into building one. Is it really worth it?

Now I must state that as primarily a designer, the developer role doesn’t come as easy to me. The main reason I use WordPress on this blog is that is was so quick and easy to set up.

However with speed being a major factor with mobile web, Google rankings and the complexity of WordPress, I’m pretty sure that a billy-basic CMS would load a lot quicker. But do people really care?

Reality probably means that I’ll stick with WordPress, upgrade to v3 and be able to write blog posts like I am now on my iPhone.

So, have you ever written your own CMS, or wanted to, or do you think that off-the-shelf systems are more than capable?