UPDATES, June 8:

--The mobile template is now live, and tests great for the palmOne Treo. Please test with other Palms, PocketPCs, Blackberries, PSPs, cellphones, mobiles, Handys and any other device you can think of!

--Date-based archives result template is now live - here are May's results, for example, displayed rather efficiently, with not only the date and title but the 25-word summary as well. Please note that the category- and search-based result templates are still not working correctly, nor is the page for actually displayed archived entries. (Patience, reader, patience.)

--Both RSS feeds are now cutomized and live. Use http://www.jasonpettus.com/blog/index.xml to have summaries of new posts delivered in real time, or http://www.jasonpettus.com/blog/indexfulltext for the full 2,000-word entry. (I'm working right now on getting paragraph breaks to show up correctly in that feed.)

This is the first public test of beta build 0.1 of my new journal page, to replace the one I've had at Geocities for six years now. Before anything else, please realize that some of the links on this page work and some of them don't; the "Jason Pettus Instant Locator (TM)" to your left, for example, is simply a placeholder right now, to test how the final version is going to eventually look. When in doubt, look for links to "nothereyet."

So why finally switch my journal over now, after six years of not doing so? In two words - Palm Treo. Now that I own one, and now that mobile devices with sophisticated browsers are becoming more of the norm, there are more and more tools available for interacting with the internet straight from your device. One piece of freeware I recently found, for example, called U*Blog, lets you compose and post blog entries straight from your Palm device to your website, without needing a browser at all. It works well enough when it comes to such services as Blogger, LiveJournal and Typepad - you can fill in entry bodies and titles, and it will automatically attach the time and date and post it to your blog not even ten seconds after you hit the 'post' button. But since the folks at MovableType seem to arguably be the best company out there as far as sharing their API and developing powerful options, it's with that service that U*Blog really shines - you can add keywords at the same time you're posting an entry, specify a certain category, automatically ping the trackback URLs of websites you reference in that entry, even upload multimedia files.

Only one problem, in that Geocities is not one of the journaling services supported by U*Blog - it's a dead format, in fact, ever since Yahoo opened 360 and started concentrating all their new features (RSS, blog-style updating) into that. (I originally joined Geocities seven years ago, back when it was one of the only places offering free websites and so you still found a lot of legitimate artists there. I often joke that I'm the only person left on Geocities who's not doing either a Britney Spears fansite or porn.) I've known for awhile now that Geocities is in danger of closing within the next couple of years, and that for my own sake I should get it moved over to my main site anyway; owning U*Blog now, though, and knowing that I could be saving myself a lot of effort and money by having my blog running off MovableType and being able to post entries from my Treo, is what finally pushed me over to learning it all.

My site host, Jimi Sweet, runs MovableType (MT) on his servers anyway, so last year graciously installed a user account for my pages as well; part of what's taken me so long to get serious about it, though, is that I was kind of intimidated by having to learn MT from scratch. Now that I've been spending the spring actually learning MT, I've realized that I was right to be hesitant; it really is a quite difficult thing when you're teaching it to yourself from the ground up. And why am I teaching myself MT from the ground up to begin with, you might ask? After all, that's one of the things that makes MT so popular, that it comes with predesigned templates and an automated posting engine for those who don't want to learn any more details. But I come from a programming background, so of course have a natural inclination to know a new system inside and out when I switch over to it. And, of course, as you can see by this particular template, I have certain special issues that I have to worry about with my journal, that I can only deal with by knowing MT from the ground up.

Simply put, my website has always had much more content than the usual personal site - 2,000-word entries, and hundreds of such entries, plus thousands of pages of stuff from my literary career, the poetry and novels and hyperfiction and essays and the like. And as any designer can tell you, it's hard to come up with an intriguing and pleasing design scheme that fits in a lot of content; there's so much information you need to display on each page that there ends up being no white space at all, and lots of columns' worth of material all competing for your attention at the same time. As you can tell, I'm not exactly the biggest fan of the way most blogs appear in browsers, with the entries and the comments and the trackbacks, and the blogroll and the links and the archives and the search bar and the subscriptions, and the "what I'm reading now" and the "what mood I'm in" and the "what's playing on my iPod" and the "items on my Amazon wish list," etc etc etc. Jesus, people; just because you can list things at your website doesn't mean you necessarily should.

Remember, the more crap you add to your page, the more distractions you provide away from the content of your actual entries, which is the main reason you want people to be there. This is especially important in my case, where my blog is written much more in the style of a newspaper column (2,000 words per entry, a self-contained story, which you're only supposed to read one entry per visit), and you have to actually pay attention and face a minimum of distractions to get all the way through it. (It's one of the reasons the mobile version is so popular, I think, because it's usually a good ten- to twenty-minute read for most people out there, much more conducive to small devices you carry like a book than a full computer screen chained to a desktop.) So on the one hand, I have an insane amount of information to get across on this page; on the other hand, I need a lot of blank space, and an unobtrusive design, to keep focus on the main entry as much as possible.

The design you're looking at right now may seem simple, but is actually the result of six months of thinking, and dozens of paper-based sketches. See, I'm one of those dorky Jakob-Nielsen-worshipping usability nutjobs, and it's always of primary importance to me how my site is actually working, and how successfully it's getting to you what you're looking for, even if that comes at sacrificing some flashy bells and whistles at times. I'm one of those people who believes that there are all kinds of small, subtle things that you can do to a website to increase its usability rating - stuff maybe even a lot of people wouldn't consciously notice, or that a lot of people out there even need to take advantage of, but which help nonetheless. One of the things I'm really happy with, for example, is how I'm able to get a lot of information on this page (a 2,000-word essay and another 36 links on top of that, believe it or not) but still manage to maintain a fair amount of white space to the overall design, and a feeling that it's not crowded or overwhelming (in my opinion, anyway - your opinion wanted as well, but more on this later). And again, a lot of this was achieved in my opinion from a combination of fairly subtle things:

--Like I said, since only one entry of mine is supposed to be visible at the page at any given time, and since I'm the only author here, I was able to get rid of a lot of that extraneous crap that usually clutters up the average blog page - the "posted by" line, the name and description of my blog, the time it was posted, etc;

--Since I don't allow comments at my journal, I was able to get rid of the entire comments section that clutters up the usual blog page as well;

--Instead of enclosing my sidebar items in small boxes, making the text seem cluttered, I dragged out the side of the boxes to give them more breathing room;

--I dragged the boxes all the way to the left edge of your browser - in fact, if you notice carefully, all elements of the page besides the main entry (and its date, title and trackbacks) have been dragged all the way to the edge of your browser walls, subtly reinforcing the idea that they are "side" items, literally coming out of the sides of your browser, and should be ignored unless you are looking for something specific;

--I gave the top a lot of room to breathe, almost like a mini-teaser to that day's entry - an introduction, a mini-splash page, whatever you want to call it;

...and there's more about the subtlties of creating white space, but I won't go into every single nitty-gritty detail of the process. Other details worth nothing...

This is my first site design to not use a single table - the entire thing's being laid out using CSS2 protocols. I've been hesitant to use CSS2 tags for awhile now, because there used to be so many browsers that didn't support them; the world has moved on now, though, and from my personal testing I can declare that the CSS2 commands work perfectly well in MSIE5 for Mac, MSIE6 for Windows, Firefox 1 for Windows, Netscape 8 for Windows, Opera for Windows, and Blazer for Palm Treos. And jeez, something like 90 percent of websurfers are now on one of these browsers or newer now, so it looks like CSS layout and the death of tables is here for good.

Instead of absolute numbers, for the first time I am using all relative terms (x-small, small, medium, large, etc) to define my fonts. This seems to be the most elegant way to get the majority of the text to decode to all decent sizes on all platforms in all browsers. Plus, it's a hella lot simpler than looking up a bunch of px sizes and testing them on a jillion computer screens. This is also a much better option for mobile devices trying to parse the site, for those who care about such things (and you should all care about such things, because the future of websurfing is in mobile devices...but I digress).

The vast majority of the content you're looking at has been automatically generated, just like any other MovableType website - I've just reordered a lot of the information from how you typically see it shown on a blog page, emphasized different elements, gotten rid of certain things. Behold the power of MT, which really is customizable all the way down to the root level; if you want to take the time to learn MT as if it were a programming language, you can then do very powerful things with your site as if you were working with a programming language. It's easy to see why MT is becoming such a must-have platform for serious web programmers and content providers. It's what lets me make such an insanely customized page but then just plug it into the process as a template, which will then speak with MT's powerful automation features and spit out whatever particular piece of information you were looking for. And speaking of templates, I'm going to have customized ones as well, for sending an entry to a printer, or for viewing through a mobile device. But they're not created yet.

Yes, the RSS and RSD feeds you see there on the left are live and good as we speak, so feel free to subscribe if you want to follow along. I'm convinced that the future of personal and artistic stuff on the web is in subscriptions, which is why I've been moving over to them myself so much recently - my business blog has a feed, and my log of MovableType resources, and the place on the web where I post photos. Your RSS feed is a customizable template in MT as well, so anyone who wants can actually learn RSS from the ground up and tweak their feed to display special information too, like a logo that appears in RSS readers, or special information about attachments. (RSS is simple super to learn - hence the name "Really Simple Syndication." An hour at a bookstore with the O'Reilly Guide to the subject will teach you every single detail about RSS you need to know in order to customize your feed.) Like, I'm going to make two customized versions of my feed available - one that delivers only the 25-word summaries I write each day to supplement the entry, and another that will deliver the entire 2,000-word entry. (Oh, and U*Blog will even let you post this summary straight to your site from your Palm as well, at the same time it's posting the entry and keywords and category and multimedia files and everything else. Did I mention this is a really kick-ass program?)

This will be the first time people will be able to trackback to my personal journal, so it'll be interesting I think to see how many people take advantage of it. This is also the first time I've had the power to assign categories and keywords, of course, or to have a search function just for my site; I'm excited about them all, of course, and hope that it makes interacting with this site a little less painful.

So what's next? Three things on the horizon:

1) I want to get the mobile and print templates finished and up live to the site. These are much easier to program than this main desktop template, so should be up before too long.

2) I'm then going to teach myself how to create drop-down menus using CSS and maybe dHTML, so that the options in the black bar above will display submenus for those on desktops ("Books," for example, would drop down to "Poetry," "Essays," "Novels," "Photography," "Erotica" and "Travel.") But since it'd be powered by CSS and dHTML, any older or less-powerful browsers (say, in mobile devices for example) would still get the plain menu you currently see above, and could still click that "Books" link and get taken to the "Books" section. Usability, man! You should always be striving for a basic, plain form of your site to be able to open elegantly in every device on the planet; only when you have this should you start thinking about adding bells and whistles.

3) Then the more difficult challenge, to get the Jason Pettus Instant Locator (JPIL) up and going. This was inspired by some of the social-networking services I belong to, like Dodgeball and Yahoo 360; many of these services offer a way to send out SMS-style messages (that is, 255 characters or less) to let your network of friends know what you're up to, which they can opt to have delivered via web page, email, SMS to their cellphone, etc. The idea is great, I think, and especially as I start getting out more in my life this year, and attending more live events in preparation for starting to talk about my arts center. The problem, of course, is that all these social-networking places are proprietary and don't speak with each other, and of course there's a ton of readers who don't belong to any social-networking services to begin with. So I thought, "You know, with everything I'm learning about MovableType these days, I bet I could actually jerryrig some sort of instant-message system like this together - where not only is a message being displayed on the page, but people could subscribe to it if they wanted, and read in their RSS reader, or have delivered via email, or even have sent to their phone if they're a local friend. It'd be a social-networking site but just for me, and readers wouldn't have to belong to anything else if they just wanted to get messages from me."

Here's how I think it's going to work. First, I create a new blog from the same user account where this blog is coming from; that new blog will be the JPIL. That way I can post new updates to it straight from U*Blog on my Palm, just like my other blogs, making it accessible pretty much anywhere I am, 24 hours a day. The secret to understanding the JPIL, though, is understanding that there will never be an actual page on the web to see this blog - it exists only to broadcast a rich RSS feed that other applications will use in different ways. So for example, I'm pretty sure there's a way to display the RSS information from another person's blog on the page of your own blog - that's how certain sites are able to automatically show headlines from other, more well-known sites. So I set that up with the JPIL feed, so that its contents are getting pushed to that yellow box on the left of this page where you currently see the sample text. Then I also publish the RSS feed publicly, for anyone who would rather get the updates through their own RSS reader along with all their other feeds.

Then after that I take advantage of yet another service MT provides, which is an automatic mailing list for any blog it's maintaining for you. Like, there will be one here eventually (I haven't configured it yet), where you can add your email address if you want, and every two or three days when there's a new entry, you'll get an email containing only the summary of that entry, and a reminder that it's now up. (I in particular am a much bigger user of RSS, but I understand that a lot of people still like using email to get reminded of site updates. That's why I'm going to include the option.) But see, there's a little runaround to this whole process as well, which I'm surprised more people don't take advantage of - namely, almost all cellphone companies include an email "avatar" that corresponds with a phone's SMS address. So for example, I'm a T-Mobile customer, and our SMS's email avatar is "yourphonenumber@tmomail.net." So if I sign up for the mailing list with this address instead of a normal email one, those summaries will actually get sent to my phone as an instant message, with me always having the option of going back to the website and opting out again whenever I want.

So that's what you'll be able to do with the JPIL - since it's a blog like any other MT blog, it will have a mailing list as well, but local friends will be able to subscribe to it via SMS and have messages sent to their cellphone in real time when my local plans change. This will be fun to experiment with, I think, having this little ticker of my personal life going on in the corner of the page, with all these different options for having it delivered. Eventually, of course, I could see such a thing bypassing all the social-networking sites altogether and making them all obsolete. Imagine if you will, if Blogger and Typepad and others made such an Instant Locator an easy-to-manage automatic option with every new account. Then you could publish it at your blog page like everything else, and when your friends came along they could subscribe to it via SMS. That way you'd be getting the instant updates of just your personal friends, without having to join any extra service, and with the option of unsubscribing or adding new ILs one individual at a time. It'd be like a social-networking site with something as pervasive as RSS powering it all.

Anyway, if I can get the JPIL to eventually work the way I'm describing, I'll definitely write a step-by-step guide for creating your own, and not only post it for free but donate it to SixApart's Pronet as well, and see if I can't get some more serious discussion about it going with MT programmers much, much better than I.

So, that's everything for now. The trackback information below is real and live, so try it out from your own blog if you feel like it. Subscribe now to receive notices of further developments.