I have been blogging for 10 years and produced over 9000 postings, besides that I made some other non blogs and developed some stuff along the way. Along the way this blog became the oldest still running weblog of the Netherlands. This post lays out the exciting road for the next 10 years.

For 10 years this was “the blog without a plan”. It had no niche focus so any marketing on “a blog about everything including what I ate yesterday” is a failure already. Then again, it had 1.3 million page views, but these are primarily based on some lucky shots with some weblog postings. There are many bloggers like me, they write about everything they like and they hate to focus on some niche market merely for profit on any kind of ads. The posts that are well received bring some joy but I would hate to dive into a certain area to only blog about topic X or start up a gazillion new niche weblogs. I just want 1 weblog.

I decided to take a new route, which is probably more than you would think of the idea in the first place. It extends weblogs to a new level and will probably change the concept of weblogs in the next few years. I may be one of the first again to take this new route.

I think every long running weblog will end up there in some years, so read ahead!

1. We blog to bring, subconsciously, order in the object cloud in our head

Many times during the past years the question “why do you blog” came up. It could even be the most asked question in the weblog world. I never had a satisfying answer (“to be part of a world community instead of my local 150 tribe”,”to earn money”, “to relieve some stress”) but in fact the answer was not exactly that.

Some pro bloggers do know why they blog. They have created niche blogs on some topics and try to earn revenue with ads, affiliate programs and so on. They try to become #1 in their niche market based on search engine positions and popularity in the niche communities. Some bloggers only write about a certain topic without revenue thoughts, they merely blog for fame and playing a role in the social community around a certain topic.

Most bloggers however just blog about everything, about the simple things that happen in their life, the new gadget they bought, some tips on what they learned or just some holiday pictures.

So what happens here is that they do blog about topics but these topics differ from post to post. In a sense they slowly, bit by bit, make a sketch of topics they have active in their conceptual framework but you have to read through the lines to pick up the underlying message. They tell a story and some words in the story are the main topics.

In this last case the general outline only becomes apparent with the use of using a taxonomy to make a distinction between posts. We are now all used to tagging and categories and who knows what other kinds of taxonomies for somehow labeling our posts.

This only become apparent when the collection of blog postings is big enough to slowly make these kind of distinctions.

I now have about 9000 postings and are slowly beginning to tag them. This delivers me a tagcloud where I can see where I blog about most and where I do not blog about. This tagcloud however does not have to be line with the things I want to blo about or what I think is important.

Once I do this last step: really make little collections out of the large collection of postings, then I have a list of topics that I apparently have in my mind and which I do want to share.

This list of topics are not just “topics”. They contain something. They contain information I want to share or want to preserve or want to communicate about. They bring order in the chaos of topics in my life.

And that is why we blog. To order information. We use tools like wiki’s and mindmaps to order topics. With weblogs we do exactly the same but in a much more chaotic and subconscious way but which, in time, contains much more possibilites than with a wiki or a mindmap.

With a wiki or a mindmap we sit down and almost visually work, consciously, to orden topics and add information where necessary. With a weblog we just “blog”. And only after some time we shift the blogpostings in some sort of order to have a totally different kind of set of information.

My action for the next years: I now have a collection of 9000 postings which I am slowly tagging. Every time I have a certain tag which contains enough postings and is somehow relevant I will create a new subblog for it and remove these items from the main blog. E.g. I just removed all private postings (which I labeled so far) from the main blog and put them all under http://edward.de.leau.net/about/private.

That is part 1 but that is not everything.

2. We blog to improve on certain topics in our life

Once we have such a subtopics, after finding groupings in the large bag of postings, we bring them in specific department of our site. WordPress does this automatically. You click on a tag and you get a page with only postings about that tag.

However, that there is a page for a certain tag may be so, but it only useful once the Blogger consciously knows that this subdivision is present to elaborate on.

What I now did is to create a specific page for a few first tags to experiment with. This will contain:

• RSS feed specific for the topic: so that a user interested in a topic subscribes to that specific feed and so I can introduce that feed in specific communities around the topic. E.g. make it my footer in forums etc..
• A specific header: to really give a unique look and feel to the subsite
• A link section with outgoing links based on the topic. This is where weblogs are going to make the Internet more transparant: based on the specific pages with links on topics they will all become directories of links and startpages on its own with link collections on different topics the Blogger is blogging on.
• Specific content for the topic
• (not there yet) Links to other Topic pages in other Weblog Portals dealing with the same topic (see chapter 3)
• (not there yet) Specific services I deliver on the topic and which could be shared in the general tag pages cloud over all weblogs.

Part 1 and Part 2 bring me to the third part which delivers the new idea for my weblog and possibly a lot of other weblogs

3. Simple Weblog Tag Archive Pages will become Weblog Topic Objects

If you have any background in the IT you will know that +15 years ago the object orientated development began. The  idea was that a program was not simple a long list of “if then” “while” statements but that one could create objects which contain both data and functionality. OO development has taken a storm. If you develop a program under Windows you just dive in the OO class hierarchy of Windows and work with your objects to develop any program.

About 10 years ago the web services idea began. An object (with data and functionality) could deliver functionality (etc…) over the web.

This is what a tag archive page will lead to:

• the name of the tag archive page is that objects name.
• the url of the weblog is the unique identifier of the provider
• the services include: search for info, rss feed, community services and a lot more the owner will create
• the link directories will be aggregated and scored based on topic over a gazillion sites
• the objects can, in the future, interact with objects that have the same name on other blogs via a diverse set of standardized services ( this does not exist yet, I will invent it and implement it)
• targeted advertising and means of income depending on the popularity of not the weblog but the specific tag page in a community. Maybe even automated advertising via webservices.

If someone just starts blogging he or she has no clue. Only after hundreds of postings he or she will find patterns. He or she may become an expert on certain topics she likes. Unconsciously he or she is finding the topics to start their new business on. This is why people are blogging, unconsciously.

If you look in a sidebar of a weblog you already will find some “stuff”. E.g. “widgets”. In most cases these widgets display something like “my last 10 youtube faved movies” or “50 days before our child gets born” etc… Now visualize that in the future these widgets you will place here will become, partly, services you will provide to others, so not only grab info from somewhere but deliver. Just surfing through thousands of weblogs for only the sidebar content will slowly put some ideas in your mind.

4. The Weblog Topic Objects will interact with Objects within your household

Apart from “communicating” with other sites on the Internet and Weblog readers, the objects a Blogger blogs about will become enstrangled with objects in their household. For instance a weblogger having a page about their vacation pictures will have a direct relation with the same collection of pictures in his or her household.

Software will arise which will enable users to manage these relations between household objects and weblog objects.

It will not only be collection of pictures ofcourse. Internally some household will have an object “bank” with all their personal bank financial information. Externally however, there will be postings about the bank and possible information widgets, community links, and more.

5. The Weblog Topic Objects will become the doorways to external parties to the household

If a certain workflow within a certain company or organization includes communication with a household, then we could try to set up some kind of workflow around objects within each household. That however will be hard to achieve. If we take the millions of weblogs as a starting point for creating these household portals then the interaction could go via a users own public household portal, formally known as weblog.

6. All objects and relations will find its place in a household framework

I have written about this before. But the complex interactions and zillions of objects will need some governance and standardization, this is why I began http://www.householdframework.org (content not visible yet). But it will take some time before the steps before mentioned will slowly be integrated in society.

Conclusion

This weblogposting is my kick-off to the things I am going to do with this weblog in the next years. In some ways it will not be a weblog anymore. It will be an extensive household portal. It will deliver services and will become in any sense much different. But, as I have taken 10 years to have no plan, it will probably take me 10 years to slowly implement the idea, but at least it now has a direction.

Welcome to the future.

I run the latest version of WordPress from svn, currently “WordPress 2.7-hemorrhage revision 9123”. Usually that’s interesting because it allows me to see the latest patches and fixes on the tool. Basically I do not care that it is not “production” since this is just my personal weblog and it’s actually a breeze to just do exactly the things you wouldn’t do when developing a website for a company. Who cares.

However, in this state of svn I noticed that my tag pages (check the WordPress template hierachy for more information) are not working anymore. They somehow revert to a default page template.

Normally it works like this:

Suppose that I have a tag called “xbox” (which I have applied to all postings about my X-Box 360).

When I then create a php file called “tag-xbox.php” and place this in my template directory, this php page will handle the layout for my tag page on the X-Box. E.g. I could give it a specific side bar, it’s own header, it’s own RSS feed and anything else you can think of.

If this file does not exist WordPress will try to look for “tag.php” and only if that does not exist it will use the default “index.php”.

In the default WordPress installation the first part of the url is “/tag/” followed by the tag, but I changed it in the permalink settings to become “/about/” (because it’s kind of funny to read: “Edward de Leau about xbox” (…):

Well… as you can see on http://edward.de.leau.net/about/xbox it does not work anymore. the tag-xbox.php file is still in my template directory but somehow it’s not being picked up anymore. So I entered a question in the WP Forums, which, in my experience is many times a sort of void box. But who knows who will give an answer to it.

I’m not 100% sure either that it is caused by 2.7 because I did change some things, luckily all my changes are on my home svn server so I can doublecheck those changes.

So let’s get off my lazy b. and (yawn, stretches fingers) dive into the php code again of WordPress to see what has changed.

First things first. Let’s see if someone has already entered an issue about it on trac. Hmm… as far as I can see noone has reported this issue yet.

hypothesis 1: My first guess would be that something has changed in “/include/template-loader.php” and as far as I can see something has changed, but merely the move of one of the checks a few steps down (I love Total Commander…).

So let’s take the lazy route and revert back to the old version, clean the wp-cache and see what happens…nothing… would be too simple..

hypothesis 2: So, maybe something has changed in the “is_tag()” check which is in “query.php” which has changed A LOT. Wow, how beautiful, all these nice informative comments and instaed of “The Big Query” it is now the “WordPress Query API”. Let’s take some time to enjoy the code and then jump to is_tag.

Well.. there were absolutely some interesting things in there to read but as far as I can see the code for the tag check hasn’t been touched.

hypothesis 3: So maybe its the “get_tag_template()” function that has been changed, which is in “/includes/theme.php”.

This has changed also a lot! Apparently the locate_template function now does the hard work of looking for the tag page. Maybe this new function is still incorrect. Let’s be lazy again and just comment this one out and use the old code.

BINGO! Now my tag pages appear again:

Now let’s see if we can write a patch for it and submit it to WP 2.7 before they release it…

Since they are still testing it, it is more or less a unit test result. Let’s see if I can find out what is wrong with the new function:

   1: /**

   2:  * Returns the name of the highest priority template file that exists

   3:  * 

   4:  * Searches in the STYLESHEETPATH before TEMPLATEPATH so that themes which

   5:  * inherit from a parent theme can just overload one file.

   6:  * @since 2.7

   7:  *

   8:  * @param array $template_names Array of template files to search for in priority order

   9:  * @param bool $load If true the template file will be loaded if it is found.

  10:  * @return string The template filename if one is located.

  11:  */

  12: function locate_template($template_names, $load = false) {

  13:     if (!is_array($template_names))

  14:         return '';

  15:     $located = '';

  16:     foreach($template_names as $template_name) {

  17:         if ( file_exists(STYLESHEETPATH . '/' . $template_name)) {

  18:             $located = STYLESHEETPATH . '/' . $template_name;

  19:             break;

  20:         } else if ( file_exists(TEMPLATEPATH . '/' . $template_name) ) {

  21:             $located = TEMPLATEPATH . '/' . $template_name;

  22:             break;

  23:         }

  24:     }

  25:     if ($load && '' != $located)

  26:         load_template($located);

  27:     return $located;

  28: } 

update (see issue #7685)

Westi writes:

“Nothing is wrong with locate_template.  The fact is that the code in 2.6.x allows for textual tag templates 2.7 for some reason expects them to be numeric tag ids. The change is in get_tag_template() which now wraps an absint around the result of get_query_var ”