The Re-Re-Launch of PimpMySafari

About a year ago, coinciding with the launch of Safari 5.0, I purchased and relaunched the stagnant PimpMySafari.com. It was an exciting time for the Safari browser, and the website got quite a lot of traffic and interest. Encouraged by this, I continued on with the project with the goal to make the site look great as and to document tips, tricks, news, and information about the Safari browser, extensions, and plugins, for both end users and developers alike.

With the help of a new logo (from Crowdspring.com) and a template designed around it by the talented Leanda Ryan in the UK (hat tip to Brett Terpstra for the referral), we took care of the "looking great" part.

However, after slogging away at it for a few months on the content side, I realized that keeping a Wordpress blog up-to-date with all of the new Safari Extensions (hundreds of them) and other information out in the world wasn't going to be something that was going to be easily done.

The custom Wordpress theme did make extensive use of meta data to store Safari Extension details so the author, URL, icon, and description could be displayed in a consistent manner, but getting those entered in was tedious at best. The pain was too great. Workflow too slow. The effort died off.

Enter Shareist

Another project that we've been working on is a digital content curation publishing platform called Shareist. It works as an alternative to Wordpress, Tumblr, Posterous, etc. as a place for collecting great information from the web in a much more customizable fashion. (We're accepting beta testers. See the Shareist site for more info.)

It's been a long time in the making, but it's finally ready to take a website like this one. With it, in addition to pulling together great articles and blog posts (as well as create posts like this one), I'm able to pull in Safari Extension files, read the information inside, and create a post automatically. So I imported all the wordpress posts into Shareist. The design moved over quite nicely (we lost some of the finer details, I'm sure. Sorry Leanda).

PimpMySafari is back to life.

We're a few weeks in and the site has more than doubled in content, and we haven't even started the project to get every Safari Extension included in the database. That's the next project, and you'll soon see dozens of extensions getting added in.

If you've been sticking with me for the past year (and the former site owner before that), thanks! If you're new, I hope you take a look around.

Extension developers, please drop me a note via the contact form and let me know of your project.