I’ve been thinking a lot about innovation and actually trying to do some of it myself lately, while developing reBlogger. What just struck me the other day is that most people think about innovation as making more and more stuff. On the web it translates in building more features.

Now, what if we reverse this process? It’s something that’s been done for decades by your high school literature teachers. Remember those essays you wrote and the teacher was just nodding and crossing whole sentences with red pen? “This is unnecessary…”, “make this sentence shorter/simpler…”, “good point, but cut to the chase…” This is also something preached by marketing gurus. These guys can’t stop repeating: Focus! Focus! Focus damn it!

So what I’m suggesting here is, instead of looking at the web application and trying to think what “cool” features could you slap on it, try to see what is really the main thing that application does, than isolate that and remove all the clutter. Think of how someone simplified 90’s style personal website and reduced them to what they really are about : content, regular content. So now we have blogs… Most of you probably still remember Tripod. Remember all that junk you could put on your web site : polls, forums, email forms, the ever popular random images, add to favourites, tell a friend…. So turns out, all people really care about is what you have to say. To be fair, Tripod today is trying to catch up so they offer you to make a website or “tell-all blog” whatever that may be. They don’t brag on the homepage with the huge variety of junk you can use to clutter your personal web site.

So basically, time is money, time is expensive… perhaps people care a lot more about saving themselves 30 mins while working with your application, than they care about the vast number of features. Here is my personal experience : Outlook had TO DO feature longer then I had facial hair, so they should be able and experienced to make a to do app, right? On the other hand I use TADA list… because I don’t need email client, I don’t need a calendar, and I definetly don’t need clippy – or whatever the name was of that annoying cartoon that appeared whenever you turned on office!

In the next few days we will be releasing reBlogger 3.4, which brings fixes to some of the bugs and more importantly the support for different licenses. There will be 5 types of licenses, starting with the personal which will be absolutely FREE.

The coding itself is done, and we are working very hard at parts of the design that we need to put together, so that people have a clue what happens when reBlogger 3.4 is out.

We have also decided to give the reBlogger a bit of an image change, so expect it to be brighter, happier and more alive in future (the design as well as it’s functionality).

So, back to photoshop . Check this blog throughout the week for the actual date of release.

No, it’s not that it’s the first time I’ve stumbled accross Technorati, but as I said I started to use it today. A large chunk of my daily work is tightly connected to blogs, but the previous Technorati design / layout / information display call it whatever you like, always made me nervous. The feeling was quite similar to that one you have if you jaywalk the streets of Istanbul. So many things to look at… It’s 7 am, I’ve just managed to make the first cup of coffee and want to read stuff… I don’t want to think, nor do I want to make decesions.

So anyway, today I wanted to write a post about terrible design, so I went over to technorati to get some inspiration, and found a new design. whoaaaah! Simple, cool, great…

So, few things to learn from this. Technorati did not become any more powerful than it used to be (“currently tracking 49.4 million blogs”), it did not introduce some cool new features (it actually cut some if I remember correctly), it ditched tons of content that used to be there… and got at least one new user, though I presume bunch of people will like it very much.

I know it’s a phrase, but really… keep it simple. People are too tired from their own work, their problems, sleep of deprivation. The last thing they want is to read the manual for your web application or site.

Now, this is something to keep in mind while going back to code some more of reBlogger 4

So, after spending a great deal of time on reBlogger 4 development, it’s time to do a little recap.

When we decided we’ll make this RB 4.0 and use the full potential of asp.net 2.0 we found that it’s hard to make only one little thing and then release it because it needs 20 other things before it to be done. For example if we want people to give ability to drag and drop stuff, we need web parts, if we want web parts, we need .net 2 membership provider and so on…

The ambitious plan to create a social news software that can be modified by almost anyone (with no programming knowledge) proved to be even harder than it sounds…

We had a tons of problems with making themes, web parts, master pages and atlas work together nicely and in a civilized manner. But that’s coming along… and we’ve learned a whole lot about all this stuff.

In case, you’d like to read about our discoveries while developing, please read the codingatlas.wordpress.com

We’ve made bunch of prototype features along the way sitting on our hard drives, so I hope at some point in the time that we’ll become part of reBlogger as well (hover comment system, to name one).

However, I’m proud to announce that we will have an alpha version done in next 10 days, and from then we’ll be stabilising the system.

The new reBlogger 4 just got another feature. For those of you familiar with reBlogger you know that all posts are listed in so called PostsListTemplate. In previous versions, to edit the way this template looked like, you needed to open the asp.net source code page and edit that particular section of HTML. For those of you that don’t know what am I talking about, take a look at the SEO Data reBlogger and then at the image bellow.

In order to make it easy for our users to change the format of this particular list, reBlogger 4 has a seven predefined templates that you can choose from your browser while in “edit mode”. No more asp.net code, no html, nothing…

While, we are going to provide a video presentation of this feature quite soon, for now you can see the mock up images of these templates. It is also important to note that these templates only define the layout, while you can turn on or off any particular information inside of the template (e.g. you can decide not to display date when post was published, simply by unticking the “Show Date” checkbox).

So… here is the one sample template, while others you can check out on the PostsList templates in a flickr set.

Template 1 :

We’ve just finalized the theme designes. Now we have 5 themes that will be shipped with reBlogger. Additional themes will be available later and you will be able to download them of reblogger.com

The 4th theme in our set of themes is “Organic theme” :

The last theme and probably one that will be the default theme is “reBlogger theme” :

In one of the next posts will publish the quick video demonstration of how easy it’ll be to change the look and feel of reBlogger in upcoming version 4.

You can view all 5 of reBlogger themes in real size in our “reBlogger 4 themes” set on flickr.com

One of the new features of the new version of reBlogger is the use of themes. Since the themes are the feature appearing in ASP.NET 2, this also means that from reBlogger 4, web server with .NET 2 installed on it
will be a requirement.

reBlogger 4 will be shipped with 5 prepacked themes and in this post I’ll present you with the 3 of them that will surely
be in that package :

1. “Default” theme

2. New York theme3. Web 2.0 theme

Thanks to our customer and beta testers feedback, we’ve been able to identify the crucial goals for reBlogger 4. This post is perhaps coming a bit late, since the development of reBlogger 4 is under it’s way for quite some time, nevertheless I will present you with the features of our upcoming version.

We could divide our development efforts in following areas :

1. simplify customization of reBlogger
2. improve search/filter engine
3. improve and ease certaing administrative tasks
4. add social context to reBlogger

Although, these goals are long run goals, even in reBlogger 4 each of these aspects we’ll be improved.

In order to simplify customization of reBlogger following has been done :

• reblogger has got a toolbar (visible only to logged in administrator, similar to wordpress)
• the look and feel of reBlogger can be changed through themes panel. Themes can be downloaded from our official reblogger.com web site, or developed by our users
• the layout of reBlogger can be changed through the new layout panel, which comes prepackaged with 1,2 and 3 column templates with optional header and footer
• The all new custom content panel allows inserting any kind of html in any given part of reBlogger, therefore making it easy as copy&paste to set your own header, footer, third party gadgets (counters, flickr…) or ads.
• reBlogger has been divided into controls (logical units of functionality), each exposing a vast set of properties (e.g. you can decide do you want to show the date by the post or not). All these properties can be set through your web browser without going into any code

the search/filter engine has been improved in following manner :

• posts are now categorized in topics (previously known as keywords)
• each post can be categorized by positive keyword (previously known as search term) and negative keyword (meaning that post must not contain that keyword in order to be placed in the particular topic)
• the adding, deleting, editing and sorting of topics and keywords has been ajaxified making it much faster and more user friendly than before

improve and ease certain administrative tasks

• added option to add feeds through OPML files
• added option to add list of feeds
• added auto suggest lookup of feeds
• feeds are being added in the background, posts are being fetched in background to allow for smoother experience
• improved and expanded statistical data on the state of reBlogger (size of db, number of posts, trends etc.)

add social context to the reBlogger

In the coming version of reBlogger, we are building digg-style voting for posts/stories. Voting will be done through a smooth atlas interface.

I would like to apologize to all the readers that were reading my 10 day development journal of reBlogger 4 engine. We have decided to move this product to "stalth" mode for the time being. We are doing some very exciting stuff at the moment and don't want to spoil it before it's done. I'll keep writing on this topic and then probably we'll publish it at same point in the future. Thank you for understanding.

Ivan

Ok, after tackling temp tables, nested select statements and what not for paging, finally there is something really nice in Sql Server for paging.

Thanks to new ROW_NUMBER() function paging is piece of cake. Here is a MSDN link with a nice example.