Blue Chi’s

My previous post on my addiction to Twitter attracted a lot of replies, many were written by people who are not Twitter. I have reached this stage where quitting Twitter is NOT an option. I feel that I am part of a community of people I care about and whom I have no other direct regular method of communication with. I am, like the majority of people in my Twitter circle, having a lot of fun on Twitter, I’m meeting new people, learning about new things to do in town and discussing topics through methods that cannot be replicated on any other medium. I just CANNOT QUIT.

What I would like to do is be able to carry on with my life and still have fun on Twitter like everybody else. I have developed a simple strategy to be able to do this. First of all, I decided to CLOSE DOWN TweetDeck when I’m doing something else. It is really not rocket science, but it is IMPOSSIBLE to do anything else when there are 5 new tweet update notifications every 30 seconds. For example, this time I don’t have TweetDeck opened as I’m writing this blog post! See!!!

Second thing, I am going to have a Twitter break each 45 minutes or between switching tasks. This way I will have something to look forward to and will have a systematic method for checking Twitter. In order to time myself I’m using my good old Klok application which I’ve been using for a couple of years now. I cannot live without and I don’t know how I never used it since I got back in town earlier this month. I have Klok installed on my work machine and my computers at home.

I am also starting to get back into a systematic to do list workflow for everything. I have installed a number of iPhone apps and will see which one to go with. Will try using GTD, but not sure if it’ll work.

Finally, I’ve stuck up a new banner in my room to indicate my next goal! I want to receive a 1,000,000 page views a month at the Republic of Code. I’ve been stuck at around 500,000 pageviews a month for a year now and never exceeded. Some of you remember my old banner, which worked. All I need is to have a goal to work towards!

I have already implemented many of these methods today and I managed to respond to all new forum threads, read two chapters in a programming book, AND GO OUT OF THE HOUSE AND BUY A PAIR OF SHOES. I have also chatted with Twitter and had fun with the guys over there. So I think it should work out if I properly focus!

Our recent competition at Republic of Code is about to finish. We received submissions from Sri Lanka, Iran, Jordan, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Czech, the US, and Argentina. It’s funny that we did not receive a single submission from Oman, well, it does make sense that we changed the name of the wesbite after all I guess.

If you are a registered member at Republic of Code please help us select the final winner by voting in the poll. We restricted the ability to vote to member who have been registered for a period of three days or more to stop people from cheating, so if you do not have an existing Republic of Code account then you will not be able to register!

vBulletin is probably the most popular online discussion board software on the Internet. On the Omani internet, it is probably the ONLY discussion board software used at all! We have recently installed version 3.8.0 at Republic of Code and I can’t really say that I like it.

First of all, the difference between 3.8.0 and 3.7.x is not major, social network features are now just more emphasised. The majority of vB new features over the last two years are just making the whole thing seriously over cluttered, there is no way to disable most of the new features and it is really annoying. vBulletin has been trying to become a blogging platform, an online gallery, a CMS, a social network, and I don’t know what else. The majority of these new stupid services are never used the majority of users.

This problem is not new, when was the last time you used the Calendar feature on your forum? When was the last time you or one of your members ever clicked on the built-in FAQ section? Why the hell do we need to have the total number of posts and threads on the side of the forum index?  And now the new “Community” link on the toolbar is just driving me crazy. (You need to log-in to see it)

I know that it is possible to remove all these features by manually editing the templates and removing the links, but that is such a hassle, especially as you might have to update your template manually afterwards each time you upgrade the script. 

If I were to start a new forum I would not pay to use vBulletin, I’m waiting patiently for bbPress to take off, but there doesn’t seem to be any progress with that project. It is such a shame.

That is not to say that there aren’t vB features which I like,  I love their AJAX implementation and how you can edit posts and thread lists on the fly. I generally like their template structure, I like the PM system, and I LOVE THE TAGGING FEATURES. I took a quick look around a number of Omani forums and it does not seem that anybody is using this feature even though it’s been introduced for a about a year now.

Tagging is the best way for organising content and making your threads link to each other in a logical way. I tag every single thread at the Flash Forum to make it easy for members to find threads with similar problems. My stats say that more and more members are clicking on these tag links and are browsing for threads that way.

I do not think that I will be changing vBulletin anytime soon, but I will surely make some many changes to the toolbar and forum index to simplify things and make sure that useless features do not contribute to the clutter.

We decided to start the year 2009 with a major new decision: Change the name of Oman3D into Republic of Code.

Our main issues with the previous name was that it (1) alienated visitors from other countries and traffic coming from Omani was less than 1% of our total traffic (2) it gave the wrong message about what our core competence is, our 3D content makes up less than 15% of our total page views. 

We wanted to get a new domain name that sounded international and was not strictly tied to a single technology, the term republic indicates the unity of people for a common purpose and the term code is a tool that governs how a sytem operates (that could apply to a political system or a computer system).

We thought about the length of our domain name, but we know that the majority of our traffic comes from search engines and referral links and that less than 10% of our members actually type the URL to visit the website we thought that the length of republicofcode.com was not too long. We also compared it to other websites which have long domain names such as smashingmagazine.com, good-tutorials.com, and freelanceswitch.com, both of which are just as long or even longer.

We have reached the famous half a million pageview milestone and the start a new year would be the best time to start with a new name!

Our traffic will drop a little bit because of our the impact of changing the domain on our pagerank, but it is a price we have to pay.