Blog of the Future: A Different Perspective by a different Robert S.

This vision is without video and you’ll have to trust me, I’m doing you a favor by sparing you from looking at my mug and hopefully sparing you the angst that my fellow Robert S(coble) generates.

In the simplest terms, the blog of the future will make a lot of cool things easily accessible to the average person that currently can only be done by gear heads. On the gear head scale, with Allen Stern being somewhere in the 8 range, I’d rate my present skills at about a 5. I hope to have that bumped up to a 6 by the end of the year.  It takes some work and I’m very rusty.

Back in the simpler times of the early 1990s, I coded my first web page entirely within Windows’ "Notepad" application (in Windows 3.1!).  Obviously the world has changed a lot since then, and I am not a young man so learning new stuff isn’t as easy as it once was.

I’m in the process of launching a website and tried to do it completely via free tools (Wordpress.com, Blogger, etc).  Luckily I had the good fortune to speak with Mr. Stern who advised me that I ought to think one year out.  He nicely suggested that if I didn’t take his advice, I’d come to regret it.  While I was hesitant to attempt learning something new, given Allen’s results when it came to building a successful blog I carefully considered his words.

He recommended that I give Drupal a try.  I didn’t wind up using Drupal, though I did play around with it and think it’s a great platform and I liked many aspects much more than Wordpress (the 2.x variety, not wordpress.com). The primary reason I wound up going with Wordpress (2.x) is that a much larger community is building stuff for it (themes, widgets, plugins, etc).

I’d rate my skills at CSS as "not very good" and so the more stuff out there that I could hopefully modify to taste, the better off I felt I’d be, especially as I’m the site’s webmaster and our software development budget for outside contractors is $0.00.  The propeller on my beanie may be a little rusty, but I do have the beanie and without it, there’s no way to approach fully utilizing the current tools available.  Even Wordpress with all its community support requires the beanie.

This sort of thing is still highly inaccessible for most people and while I understand some companies focusing on web site development like it this way, I believe there has to be some good result just by more people being able to easily craft better looking web sites.  Here, despite whatever jargon, and despite whatever may have been inaccurate and despite his love for Kyte.TV, I’m fully aligned with Robert Scoble.  This stuff is still way harder than it has to be.  Allen, whose propeller spins much more smoothly than my own needs to hire a Drupal guru to make certain modifications.  This makes me feel a little better and a little worse.  Better because the stuff is so complex that sometimes even the gurus need gurus and worse because we have no budget for gurus.

Things that are relatively simple in the computer world are not yet simple in the Web publishing world.  The site I’m affiliated with and the webmaster for, TVbytheNumbers.com is all about presenting data. One of the keys to success on the web is that your stuff needs to look very good. If your content is great, but it looks like hell people will not stick around to realize how great your content is.  As with everything else, appearances do matter a lot.  In the computer world, it’s really easy for me to create a great looking chart or table, copy it, paste it into an e-mail or another document and voila, good looking content.  It should be this easy in the web publishing world, but it’s not. The copy/paste functionality is simply non-existent for formatted tables.

Fortunately for charts, it’s easy to save them as graphic images and have them look good within posts. Still, figuring out that I could change the size of the Wordpress image thumbnail to utilize it better for our purposes required a fair bit of research.  But when it comes to certain data tables, saving them as images doesn’t always look so great.  Drupal may handle this better, and if so, I might have to give it another look, but remember, even Allen needs to hire a guru for Drupal so what hope do I have!?

Fortunately, someone did develop a table plug-in for Wordpress, and it works very well and allows you to import data in from Excel so you don’t have to reenter all the data.  The bad news is that the plug-in only works for posts, not content within sidebar widgets.  As our site focuses on the numbers of TV and is pretty much nothing but numbers, sometimes we need a way to make the numbers –especially the numbers we know people want to see – stand out.

For the sidebar widgets, is it possible to just code tables in raw HTML or CSS? Yes. But given the volume of it, doing all of this manually is a lot of overhead and the type of thing where you increase the odds you’ll make mistakes.  Via various experimenting I tried the following process to handle formatted tables in Widgets without the overhead of manually coding them:

• Format the data however I want in Excel
• Save it as a web page and publish it locally on my desktop
• View the page’s source code and steal it from myself
• Copy this code into the widget on Wordpress

And you know what? It actually works!  My first thought was, "Hey, why can’t I just do that for getting tables into posts as well?"  Sadly, the answer is because it simply will not work!   Even the little things become maddening and this is through no fault of the web publishing tools, this time it’s a "Microsoft sucks" kind of thing.

The data in certain columns in my tables is left justified and appears left justified in Firefox and Safari (looks perfect on the iPhone).  But in Internet Explorer for some reason it tries to center them. Only they’re not quite centered, and as you’d expect from the company who brought you the Zune, it’s a little bit uh..off-center.

While my guess is that on CenterNetworks a substantial portion of the visitors are using Firefox, the universe of people interested in TV metrics is 75% IE (fairly evenly split between IE 6 & IE 7) based on our early data.  While I attempt to resolve this, I am living with the off-centeredness under the theory that a highly stylized table that doesn’t justify everything properly is still more eye-catching than a well aligned simple text list.  The point is there are a lot of maddening aspects to this and inertia being what it is, most people will simply give up.

Things have come a long, long way since my days of coding HTML manually in Notepad and that produced results that didn’t look as good as the most basic blog of today. But as much as things have progressed, there is still a long way to go.

In my vision of the blog of the future, everything will be much simpler.  While I don’t always agree with Scoble, and could pick many nits in his production on the blog of the future, I’m not quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  The baby here is this: good looking, highly functional blogs that are easier to produce.  Scoble is trying to move the needle on that front and in this I support him 100%. I think you should too. Yes, even you Allen!

This article was authored by Robert Seidman, whose career included stops at IBM and Charles Schwab, covered the consumer Internet and online services extensively from 1994 to 2000. In those preblog times, Seidman's Online Insider had a distribution of over 50,000 and was considered a "must read" by many executives at the companies he wrote about. He is co-founder of TVbytheNumbers.com, launching in September.