Today I officially launch my newest domain adamdime.ch, which I will use to support my URL redirections.

URL shortening has become a big business in 2009, primarily because of Twitter‘s 140 character limitation, but shortened URL’s have other applications too such as for use in SMS and email. The most popular URL shorteners to date have been bit.ly, tr.im, cli.gs, shorturl.com, short.ie, tinyurl.com and is.gd.

Whilst URL shorteners cut down web address sizes, they can also be problematic.

For starters, there was a massive problem in June 2009 when cli.gs was hacked and 2.2 million shortened URL’s simultaneously redirected to a newspaper website. Then last week, tr.im announced that it had run out of capital and was shutting down; an action that would have littered the internet with millions of broken links until it was restored yesterday. Both of these issues highlighted two important problems with commercial URL shortening services – their security and their longevity.

In addition to these concerns, masking the identity of URL’s poses a security concern for many internet users. I make it a personal habit of reading the address of any new URL before I click, just in case. If it looks dodgy, I don’t touch it. Whilst I trust my personal contacts on various websites not to exploit URL shorteners, I can’t trust everybody. And therefore, I have some general concern about the URL’s produced by bit.ly et al.

Since I am now using Twitter to some extent and because I am a “do it yourself” sort of bloke when it comes to the internet, I thought I’d set up my own URL shortener. I wanted to choose a name that could be incorporated into a top-level domain and that was memorable. So what better name than my own?

Dot.ch is the domain of Switzerland and anyone can register a web address directly under .ch without using a second-level identifier such as occurs in Australia with .com.au, .id.au, .gov.au et cetera. Plus, registering a .ch domain is surprisingly cheap. Just A$18 in fact.

For the price of a decent restaurant meal, I can now manage my own URL redirects without having to worry about the commercial viability or security of third-party services. With the click of a button, I can turn http://www.flickr.com/photos/adonline/3773979857/ (51 characters) into http://adamdime.ch/4kv6dz (15 characters) for posting on Twitter, use in emails et cetera.

It turns out that many people have decided to take the same “hands on” approach to URL shortening that I did, possibly because of the demise of tr.im. A quick search of the net located dntd.cc by Dented Reality; jusr.us by Justin Russell, and ilv.me by Brent Danley. And corporates now have them too – fli.kr by Flickr and cokeurl.com by Coca-Cola.

So whether this phenomenon is a mere trend or an evolution of the internet, time will tell. But for now at least, I will be putting my own name to URL redirection.

Out of sheer curiosity (and because I can see that it might have some value for me), I have joined the must-have website of 2009 – Twitter.

For now it’s a trial, to see what it is capable of and what it can deliver for me.

Despite the popularity of Twitter, I am not aware of any of my close friends or family posting to the website (yet). Then again, I don’t know anyone who uses RSS either, but I have seen that RSS has massive benefits in increasing website traffic and exposing my work to the right people. So perhaps Twitter might do the same?

Aside from Flickr, I have avoided social networking websites until now. I especially resisted the urge to join MySpace in 2007 and Facebook in 2008, even though everyone else had an account. For me, a website has to be useful and engaging. And since I couldn’t do much more on Facebook than I could do in real life (or via other means on the internet), I decided there was no real value in me joining up.

Twitter has been much-talked about in the Australian media this year, even on the ABC. Curiously, much of the chatter (or should I say twittering?) has been about how no-one really understands what the purpose of the website is (or how it must be used by twits – boom-tish!) And it is true that Twitter’s functionality is very limited because each post is constrained to 140 characters.

Despite this, I want to see whether I can use Twitter to draw a new audience to my blog, and my photography. I have already linked both websites to my Twitter account, which will be updated when these two sites are. But it also will allow me to post short messages that might otherwise be too trivial to bother writing a blog post about.

For instance, if I was travelling and wanted to let everyone know I’d arrived safely, I could easily do so without the need to write a long email or send an SMS. No-one in their right mind would bother posting such trivial information on their blog website. With Twitter, the information could be dispersed easily to my Twitter page from a mobile phone, without me even needing proper internet access. This could be very useful. It would also make it much cheaper than sending text messages to mobile phones.

What also attracts me to Twitter is that it is open.

I resent the fact that I am forced to actively participate  in Facebook et al. Even if I just want to see my friends photos, chat, et cetera, I am not only forced to open an account but start my own site. Twitter doesn’t require others to join to view the posts, and that is how the internet should be. After all, isn’t the sharing of knowledge and information the whole purpose of the internet? Whilst we all share some things privately over the internet (email, private photo albums etc), I see no point in a “lock out” system except to increase revenue to the social networking websites that operate such a system.

If you want to access my Twitter page, go to twitter.com/adamdimech.

Photo-sharing website Flickr has introduced a new and highly-controversial feature; videos.

As of Wednesday, Flickr Pro account holders could upload 90-second video clips to what is currently the world’s most popular photo-sharing site. The controversy that has been generated is considerable.

I am a big fan of Flickr and I credit the website with the massive improvement that I’ve experienced in my photography. From amateurs with mobile phone pics to fully-fledged pros using all sorts of cameras, everyone comes together to appreciate and learn and interact with each other. The sense of community is remarkably strong and mature.

The success of Flickr is attributable to a long-held tradition of high-calibre photographic contributions from people interested in the art, not just the outcome. But if the concerns of many Flickr members are accurate, the introduction of video could bring this to an end.

Within hours of the announcement, two anti-video protest groups were formed; “We Say NO to Videos on Flickr” and “No Video on Flickr“. As I write, the groups have 24,993 and 10,384 members respectively. Many members are concerned that the “rubbish” from YouTube will be migrated to Flickr, thus diluting the purpose and ideals of Flickr as a quality photo-sharing website. For their part, Flickr describe videos as “long photographs” that have a rightful place on the site.

The reasons for the introduction of this feature are complex, but it might have something to do with market share.

Yahoo, the owners of Flickr, have been struggling against Google (owners of YouTube) in recent years and some suggest that the move to add video to Flickr might be a bid by Yahoo to recover market dominance. Of course Yahoo already operate a video-sharing website called Jumpcut, but hardly anyone is familiar with that brand. Flickr at least has a recognition factor, so it probably seemed logical for Yahoo to add the video function. (I’d imagine that if the introduction of videos is successful, that Jumpcut will be merged with Flickr just as Yahoo Photos was in 2007).

Of course the question is will it work? I doubt it. Flickr will not be the next YouTube or even come close.

I am not so keen on Flickr videos because I enjoy the purity of Flickr’s photo-sharing community as it is. Having had a look at some new videos on Flickr, productions such as Jacqueline-W‘s “Kiss” leave me pessimistic about the quality of the videos that will appear (the subject matter is mundane and the technical production is poor).

Yet, Chaddles’ “Melbourne Evening” restored my optimism about the sort of productions that we might be treated to.

As with all these matters, there are extremists who are threatening to cancel their accounts, much as they did when it looked like Microsoft might buy Yahoo. For a select few the sky really is falling in.

But for me, I am just a little disappointed about this decision and hope that it enhances rather than erodes the Flickr experience. I guess only time will tell.

After more than five years, my personal website has had a major design overhaul. Yet coming up with a brand new design from scratch and implementing that design is no easy task. Here’s the story of how it all began.

By late last year, I’d decided that my website (http://www.adonline.id.au) was looking tired. Designed five years ago with minimal adjustment, the website was starting to have the same aesthetic appeal as a bunch of 1960′s cream-brick flats. So it was time for a refurb!

The first questions I had to ask myself related to the purpose of the website and what I wanted it to convey. Blogging and photography are now major components compared to five years ago, and so the new design had to reflect this. And I wanted to re-establish the personal aspect of the website. Aside from its outdated appearance, I felt the old design looked too corporate.

Graphic design is not an easy thing to master. There is a philosophy behind the art, especially in an application like this. How could I create something unique and eye-grabbing and contemporary from scratch? I noticed that two distinct graphic trends have been emerging in Australia that have caught my eye; both on the internet and on television and billboard advertising. These are the “Web 2.0″ look, and the “Grunge” look.

The Web 2.0 look features clean white spaces with lots of those shiny, coloured and glossy buttons and rounded corners galore. Apple probably started this off with their iMac advertising a few years ago but it seems it has infected the web like the Plague, most notably in the blogosphere. This is not a bad thing. In fact, Web 2.0 can be really cheery with its use of bright colours, but I felt that it was still too “corporate” for what I wanted. That said, I did want a design that emphasised the participatory and interactive elements of my website such as RSS feeds and commenting that Web 2.0 sells so well.

The alternative that I was attracted to was almost the complete opposite to Web 2.0 in terms of its presentation, that being the Grunge look.

Grunge design is typically characterised by rough elements, darker colours, and lots of intricate detail right across the browser screen. The Grunge look often incorporates use of classical or Victorian-era elements such as floral swirls and motifs. The style permits much more personalisation than the Web 2.0 look but still allowed some emphasis of the interactive features my site has to offer.

Grunge met all my criteria; it was interactive, contemporary but personal. Of course settling on a design style and then developing it into a website are two different matters and Grunge is a real challenge in that regard.

The Web 2.0 look is relatively easy to implement within the restrictions of tables-based HTML. Grunge, on the other hand poses massive problems with its graphics-intensive style and angled elements. I had to plan the new site very carefully to consider these factors.

The practical elements of the website are as critical as the aesthetic. I chose Grunge in the knowledge that some users with slow dial-up accounts would have to wait quite some time to see the content (up to 50 seconds). I decided that broadband is the way of the future, and at some point one has to accept that some people will drop off the wagon as technology changes. Most other corporate websites would be horribly slow for dial-up users by now, so what difference would my site make?

I created the basic graphical interface with Ulead PhotoImpact which is basically the same as Adobe Photoshop, but cheaper. Using layers, I was able to play with the graphic elements and try different colours and combinations before finalising the design. I then had to chop my graphic into tiny little pieces to create the website.

This whole process took weeks in between everything else in my life. I had planned to have the new look implemented by Christmas 2007, but as always a redesign of my website is a relatively low priority in the grand scheme of things.

Once the design was completed and the web templates created, I had to transfer all the old content across to the new design, and make sure there were no remnants of the old website remaining. This included customising Error 404 pages and the like. Pages that contain dynamic content (such as search engine results) were especially difficult in this regard.

But by yesterday evening, all had been finalised and the site was ready to go!

I am happy with the new design. Whilst it is a major departure from the previous, I feel it is a significant improvement and better reflects the aims and scope of the site. Most importantly, I hope the design lasts a few years so that I don’t need to go through this whole process again too quickly!

Welcome to The Grapevine, the new name for my blog, formerly called The News Desk. You can now access my blog directly from blog.adonline.id.au and if you do, you’ll very quickly notice many exciting new features, as promised.

I have spent any spare time these past few weeks slowly migrating four years of blog posts from CuteNews to WordPress, which is the software underpinning the blog. Despite the tedious work in setting this up, I am so far very happy with the outcome.

Why the change?

WordPress has much better back-end support than CuteNews, so posting articles is considerably easier for me compared to when I was using CuteNews.

Furthermore, WordPress permits much greater functionality, such as incorporating comments from users. I had been using CuteNews since 2003, but I was never able to get the comments feature to work properly, nor did the RSS feeds cope with the mod_rewrite function used to simplify the URLs. In the end, it was all becoming a bit of a mess. With the rise of RSS technology, change just became inevitable.

One of the best features of WordPress is it’s use of a MySQL database that underpins The Grapevine, making the website much richer for end-users.

The evolution: How did we get to this?

I started “blogging” not long after I established my website a.d.online back in 1998. Of course it was not called blogging then, but just “publishing” I guess. I had a section on my website called the Political Eye where I posted occasional rants on political matters. Everything was hand-coded in HTML as that was all I had access to. That unsustainable concept eventually fell in a heap and so in 2003 the News Desk was born, with a much broader scope than the Political Eye ever had.

The old News Desk represented my first foray into PHP. Fast forward to 2007 and most of my website now incorporates PHP to some degree, either as includes in HTML coding or as the basis of the website (such as is the case for Photologium.com). In 2003, PHP was a major advance for me but now MySQL databasing represents the new frontier in 2007/8.

Similar to the Political Eye, the confines of the News Desk eventually became an issue. Initially I was keen just to publish articles with minimal feedback. If a reader wanted to comment, he or she could email me. But now I write on such broad matters, and the internet has evolved such that I want this to be interactive. And in recognition of that, I am now formally calling this a “blog”. (The News Desk was always described as “not quite a blog but close enough”). People don’t want to compose an email just to say “I agree/disagree with your article” when a quick comment will do.

WordPress was the obvious choice with its popularity and massive functionality.

In particular, I have to acknowledge the use of these especially useful features (amongst many):

• Mike Smullin’s Ajax Comments,
• John Godley’s Filled In, permitting CAPTCHA support on comments,
• Matt Mullenweg’s Akismet, and
• Jamis Charles’ invaluable code permitting headlines to be shown on my main website (which uses a different domain).

I hope you enjoy The Grapevine. I believe the new name represents a new era.

The next task is to modernise the design of my main website… but all in good time.

Happy reading (and commenting!)