You may have noticed that Opus was running more slowly than usual over the last day or so. The reason is that someone posted a link to this entry on Reddit, a site where users can post and discuss links to other websites, blog entries—which resulted in traffic to Opus skyrocketing by over 300%. Mind you, I’m not complaining about the extra traffic, and hopefully some of those folks stuck around for awhile to read other articles on Opus, but this poor little website was definitely creeping along there for awhile. However, it looks like the storm has passed for the most part and things should be back to normal.

I have no idea if something like this will happen again, but I’m in the process of revamping Opus’ design and underlying ExpressionEngine structure, with one of the primary areas of focus being overall site performance and efficiency. So hopefully next time—if there is a next time—won’t have quite as big an impact.

I realize that it sometimes might seem a little slow around here, with significant updates and reviews few and far between. I haven’t totally vanished into the ether, I assure you. I have, however, begun to rely a little bit more on Twitter to post quick updates, links, and other bite-sized chunks of goodness. Yes, that’s right: I am tweeting quite a bit these days. And for what it’s worth, I’m also Facebooking to my little heart’s content. I’m trying, however, to keep the two separate.

It seems like all the rage to update your social networks with the exact same batch of info, which feels like overkill to me. Twitter and Facebook are not the same things in my mind, no matter how much they might want me to think otherwise, and as such, I’m using them differently.

Here’s how it basically breaks down: geekier stuff will appear on Twitter and more random and personal stuff will appear on Facebook. There will, of course, be some overlap between the two. And neither one of them will ever replace Opus. This website, in addition to Filmwell, will always remain my primary avenue for online publishing, particularly for longer form content, such as music and movie reviews.

It was recently brought to my attention that folks attempting to access Opus’ articles via the site’s newsfeeds were getting an “Invalid GET data” error instead after clicking on a newsfeed headline. This should be fixed now, but please contact me if you still experience it.

If you’re encountering the same issue with your site, here’s how I fixed it:

1. Log into your FeedBurner account.
2. Select the feed that you need to fix.
3. Click on “Configure Stats” in the left column (under “Services”).
4. Click on “Customize…” under “Track clicks as a traffic source in Google Analytics”.
5. Remove any parentheses, colons, and other non-standard URL characters from the available fields (e.g., “Source”, “Medium”, “Campaign”).
6. Click on the “Close” button.
7. Click on the “Save” button.

Test the results by going to your site’s newsfeed and clicking on any of the newsfeed links. The fix should take place immediately, but your mileage may vary.

This is something that I’ve been sitting on for awhile now, but I might as well release it into the wild and see how it does: I’ve developed a mobile version of Opus that is optimized for cellphones and other mobile devices. Admittedly, the only web-capable mobile device I own is an iPod Touch, so as far as I know, the site looks horrible in other devices. But that’s why I’m putting it out there—I’d love for folks to take a look at it, kick the tires, etc.

This was the first real mobile site that I’ve ever built, and it was a fun challenge and experiment. Mobile site design requires a different way of thinking about site design and organization than “normal” web design and I don’t pretend to be an expert on the topic. But with mobile devices becoming more powerful and sophisticated all the time—I’m pretty blown away by my iPod’s capabilities—mobile web design is something that web developers simply can’t ignore if they desire to stay on the cutting edge of their profession.

As for the technical details on how, exactly, I built the site, I didn’t use ExpressionEngine’s Multiple Site Manager. Rather, I used a technique laid out in this article by Jamie Pittock. It’s a pretty simple and straightforward method, and having gone through it once, I see a lot of potential for other projects.

I realize that this entry’s title is rather melodramatic, but it seems fitting—if only to me—given the recent changes that have taken place to Opus. The most obvious change is, of course, the new design. However, in some ways that change is only tangential and as such, I’ll get to it in a minute. (But you can read about the design right now if you’re feeling impatient.)

A new home

To my mind, the biggest change is that Opus now resides at a new home: http://opus.fm. The reason for the domain change is a rather simple, and in some ways, silly one: I was just tired of people referring to the site as “Opuszine” instead of “Opus”.

It’s easy to conflate a site’s domain name with its actual name, but even so, it never stopped bugging me. It got so bad that, at one point, I wanted to ditch the “Opus” name altogether, but my wife talked me down from that particular ledge. She made a good point that Opus is, for all intents and purposes, my “brand” and that it’d be a shame to throw years of traction and recognition away on a whim.

Even so, I was still toying with the idea of a new domain name. Hence, the move to http://opus.fm. I’m sure that some folks might be upset that I’m using a subpar domain hack, or that I’m not respecting a domain’s regional intentions (”.fm” is for the Federated States of Micronesia)—but you try finding the domain name that you want these days. It was either this or pay some exorbitant squatter’s fee for something more “appropriate”.

Under the hood

Another batch of changes takes place “under the hood”, so to speak. For starters, I’ve completely reorganized the site with a new URL structure; hopefully this will be pretty transparent, thanks to a little bit of “.htaccess” wizardry. Again, this change is more for my benefit than anything else. The new structure more closely matches how I perceive and interact with the site, if only subconsciously.

Some additional “under the hood” changes include:

• Member accounts have been disabled. Which shouldn’t be that big of a deal because I think only two or three people logged into theirs with any regularity. (If you still want a pretty picture to appear next to your comments, you can always sign up for a free gravatar.)
• If you go to a single entry’s page (like this one), you’ll see a “short URL” link in the left column. With the help of Simon Collison’s EE Shortener plugin, I’ve implemented my own short URLs so as to circumvent the potential issues with services such as TinyURL and Is.gd.

Now, about that new design

When looking at the new design, a few things should be obvious. First, it’s a three column layout rather than a one column layout, which is what I’ve been using for Opus’ last few iterations. As much as I like the simplicity of a one column layout, there are some disadvantages to that approach that are solved, more or less, with a multi-column layout.

To achieve the layout in an orderly and precise fashion, I made this design the most grid-intensive one yet. Here’s evidence that grids are good: I think this design came together faster than any other design I’ve done to date. After about two or three hours, I had the basic foundation in place. Sure, there was a lot of tweaking, but I made a conscious effort to not dwell on every little detail, but rather, just go with the flow.

To that end, I used several CSS3 features—such as rounded borders—throughout the design. Not only did this mean less time spent pushing pixels in Photoshop, which meant faster development overall, it also means less images and a faster, more lightweight site. However, some of these features aren’t supported by older browsers—I’m looking at you, IE6—and some of them—like CSS animations—are only supported by Safari.

And FYI, I did very little browser testing for this design. In the interests of rapid development, my focus was on optimizing it for the most recent versions of Safari and Firefox. I did make sure that it didn’t look like total crap in other browsers, but that was about it. Obviously, if this were a client’s site, I’d do more browser testing. But Opus is my site, and frankly, I’m tired of dealing with the deficiencies and failures of crappy browsers. So if you’re using IE6 and something looks off, sorry—Opus looks awesome in Safari.

You’ll also see that I’ve placed several “widgets” in the left column, such as “Recent Music Reviews” and “Recent Movie Reviews”, to try and highlight more of Opus’ content. Another widget—“Hand-Picked Opus”—is an attempt to spotlight older entries that I’m really proud of and don’t want to get lost in the shuffle of 4,000+ entries.

All in all, I’m very pleased with the design—obviously. It allows me to indulge a little and more accurately represent the breadth of Opus’ content without sacrificing much of the simplicity and minimalism that I strive for in any Opus design. I’m sure there will still be some tweaks and adjustments as I settle into it and see how it works “in the wild”, so don’t be surprised if things continue to look a little different for the near future.

I’ve been meaning to write about the “recent” design—it’s been two weeks, already—but you know how it goes. However, there is one thing that I do want to spotlight. It’s not a big thing, and I don’t really know how much value it actually adds to the site, but it was fun to do and there really was no reason not to do it.

I’m referring to member accounts. That’s right, you can now sign up for a (not so) exclusive Opus account. Registration is free (natch), and a few of the benefits include not ever having to enter your information when commenting and subscribing to articles to get updates on new comments, etc.

This was actually more of a learning experience for me, since all of this stuff is supported by ExpressionEngine “out of the box,” and I always look for ways to learn more about my favorite CMS. I’d worked with EE’s member capabilities before, on the latest Twitch redesign, but for Opus, I did a whole lot more customization in order to strip out things I didn’t want and accentuate those things that I did.

So, give it a spin—click here to register—and let me know what you think.

During the recent redesign, I made some modifications to Opus’ newsfeeds. There are now just two newsfeeds: one for entries and one for comments.

The entries newsfeed contains the 20 most recent entries on the site, including blog entries, music reviews, and movie reviews, and all entries are provided in their entirety. Which means that, if you think Opus is an eyesore, you need never look at the site again.

The comments newsfeed contains the 20 most recent comments on the site, so you can keep abreast of any conversations happening on the site. (You can also subscribe to entries and receive e-mail notifications for subsequent comments.)

More info on Opus newsfeeds can be found here.

As you may have noticed, Opus the website has been non-existent while I’ve been working on and implementing the redesign. In order to make sure that things didn’t go public before I was ready to reveal them, and as an experiment, Opus has existed primarily as a newsfeed for the last couple of weeks or so. And while it was frustrating to me that it took so long to get the new design in place, it was also liberating.

With Opus existing only as a newsfeed, it freed me to think less about how the content that I was posting—blog entries, music and movie reviews, etc.—might look, and focus more on just the actual writing itself, on just posting content in general. Sometimes I get so paralyzed with posting, trying to make sure that my content is laid out nice and neat, and as such, I post less, if at all. But with a newsfeed, that’s a total non-issue. All that matters is the content, the actual writing—which is as it should be.