A Long List of Small Improvements
Following up on what I said in the last post about building this website and platform by implementing small incremental improvements, I wanted to publish a list of what those improvements might be.
I will reference this list each day as I'm choosing what to work on. I suppose you could read it as a todo list but I'm not trying to build a project plan here. I'm just writing out what's on my mind right now in the hopes that it will help me set off in the right direction.
I might update this list over time and when I complete an item, I will probably come back and cross it off and add an implementation date.
Many of these items will definitely not seem like "small increments" but it isn't worth it to try and list out each small increment here. Those features that will take more than a day to implement will be broken down into smaller pieces so that they can be implemented in the same manner as the rest of the site.
Here is the list of what is on my mind right now:
- Data access code improvement (it's all manual hand-written now)
- Architecture improvements at the service/dao boundaries
- Create and render a menu system / global navigation
- Improve responsive / mobile-friendly CSS
- Add tags to blog posts
- View blog posts by tag
- Pagination allowing navigation through posts from the home page
- Blog Post detail page
- Permanent slug URL for each blog post
- Upload images as part of a blog post
- Markdown formatting for content authoring
- RSS feed
- Comments on blog posts (or other content)
- Image galleries
- Create pages for HTML content authoring
- Enable/disable google analytics through admin panel
- Mailing list sign-up feature
- Customizable layout and UI design
- Design a layout and look/feel for mikebledsoe.com
- Set the title of the site
- Set the title of the current page
- Email notifications when new content is published
- Multiple administrators able to post content
- Last updated date showing that blog post / article has been updated since publishing
- User registration
- eCommerce features for selling things like eBooks and classes
- A lending library feature
- Community discussion forums
That's not an exhaustive list but I think it's enough for now.