Category: Web Design

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Northern Voice Day 2: Keynote with Matt Mullenweg

I’m not going to say a lot as I wait for this keynote to start, but it’s incredibly cool to have Matt Mullenweg here to start the day off at Northern Voice 2008. So much of what I do is WordPress, so it’s pretty freaking neat that the guy who founded the project is speaking today.

Boris and Matt
Photo credit: Duane Storey on Flickr

Interesting notes during the keynote:

  • WP 2.5 to have one click upgrades to plugins. WP 2.6 to hopefully have one click upgrade to core software.
  • Ha! This Matt just mentioned the Matt I mentioned in my last post. They are in a battle for the highest Google ranking for their first name.
  • “Kill the Megabrands”
  • “When you have the taste of freedom, it’s tough to go back.” Basically, no matter what the open source project is, everyone has the ability to contribute to it, knowing how to code or not.
  • Why shouldn’t the government have more open source information? Otherwise, they are just stealing from us and keeping information to themselves.
  • You can listen to his keynote here.
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Cool WordPress plugin: FeedEntryHeader

Feed Sample I got an email from someone who subscribes to my RSS[wiki] feed that noticed something new in their subscription lately, and you might have as well.

The image here is a snippet of how a post of mine looks in Google Reader. Basically, it’s a simple plugin that provides a copyright stamp at the beginning of every post that goes into your RSS feed. There are a few variations of how you can do this with WordPress, but the one I am using is FeedEntryHeader. It puts a copyright, a link to your site, and a link to the original post at the start of all your posts.

Why would you want to do this? Well the fact of the matter is that there are a lot of aggregator sites that like to take the content from your RSS feeds and put them up on their sites as original content. Better yet, there are some sites that will completely credit you for your content but strip away all the embedded links. This plugin at least puts all this information at the top where it’s slightly hard to miss. At the very least, the URL to your original content will show up on those sites that “borrow” your content.

If you use WordPress and care about the things you publish, you should look at using this plugin. It’s more than just getting credit for what you publish. There is also something to be said about other people making money off of the content you generate, and that’s just inconsiderate.

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WordPress site design: elizabethbollwitt.com

elizabethbollwitt.com ElizabethBollwitt.com is a site that I recently designed and launched for my sister and her artistic endeavors as a painter. The site is a few months old, and it’s another site that I’ve been meaning to write about. Every time I attempt to, I found a flaw in the site and wanted to wait until I fixed it.

My sister had a site for a while before I offered my services in terms of design, and I also consulted her on how blogging can help boost her efforts in getting her works, if not name, recognized a little more on the internet. The previous site was built purely on HTML with a 4D WebServer working in the background. Getting into the guts of what that programming can do is powerful, but based on what I’ve learned about WordPress and PHP over the past few years, a switch just seemed to make sense.

The one thing that is difficult about the site is the speed in which it loads. I’m unsure if the site I built has something to do with it, and the server that it resides on is of my doing as well. It’s an Apache server that I configured from the ground up, so there is a chance that I might have setup something wrong in the process. Never doing such things before, it was a tough time getting all the ins and outs of Unix sorted out, but I learned a lot. The connection to the server isn’t the fastest, and it shows when you go to load the site.

The design was intended to be simple but based off the previous design to the site. Being the artist, I let Beth pick out more of those elements while I focused on the function of the site. We are currently using the WP e-Commerce plugin to run the store, and for what it does, it’s a fairly effective element to the site.

The overall goal to the site is to provide a better platform for Beth to display her works online. The purchasing is one thing, but she also does a variety of art shows as well as growing opportunities to display her original paintings in galleries on the east coast of the U.S. With the addition of a blog, visitors to her site can follow along as she creates new works as well as get information about upcoming events where her works can be seen and purchased.

There has already been some small successes in the site in terms of sales and exposure. As with anything you do on the internet, success comes over time, and we’re hoping for the best in 2008.

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Launched a new WordPress site: noboundaries.org

NoBoundaries.org NoBoundaries.org isn’t a new site, nor is this relaunch of this design that new because it was unveiled about a month or so ago. I haven’t gotten around to posting anything about it because I got it put into the public realm while switching to a new day job, so it’s been a hectic last few months in my life.

Speaking of, getting this WordPress design put together was quite the task. NoBoundaries.org is a travelogue by my friend, Andy Stoll. He put his money where his month was and set out on an around the world trip, the intention of seeing as much of it as he can. While in the first legs of the adventure, he contacted me about helping him out with his site. That turned into a redesign, so while in China, we coordinated strictly through email to exchange ideas and critiques as the process went along.

The site is probably not as finished as I might like it to be, but it can get pretty difficult to get the details sorted out when Andy is emailing you from Kazakhstan, when he is able to find some bandwidth to check his email. You also don’t want to make changes that he isn’t overly sure about or informed of, not to mention doing something that will take a lot of explanation through email. Remember, Andy is traveling as I write this, and the last thing I want him to be doing is thinking heavily about his website when he should be cranking out blog posts and videos of his travels.

The one, overall goal of the design was to make it not look like a typical blog. Andy had a lot of great ideas, and I did my best to structure it in the way that he envisioned. Sometimes that is easier said than done, but we came to a common conclusion that what we had was good to go before he ended an extended stay in China. If we had more time, especially before he left on his trip, we might have thought out the site in more detail.

As a side note, I might have pushed a Drupal design for the site if this project would have occurred before his departure from the U.S., but Andy already had a WordPress site established. He wasn’t satisfied with what he had at the time he contacted me, looking to overhaul the theme to his site. Switching him to Drupal would have taken too much to teach when someone is busy trying to travel the world.

If you’d like to see an example of some of the things Andy has been doing on his travels, check out the video below of, “What It’s Like: To Walk Through A House In A Fishing Village In China“.

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Upgraded to WordPress 2.3.1

It’s taken me a while to get this site upgraded to the WordPress 2.3.1, but there are a few other sites that I work with that have been running this latest version. I’ve had some low level interaction with this latest release, and there are a lot of positive things that I’ve experienced. Still, there is one thing that bothers me.

Tags.

Now we exist in a world of tags and categories, and they both do nearly the same thing, at least when they work correctly. Still, it makes my wonder about the whole scheme, more to the effect of what it is that I should or shouldn’t be doing with the way I interact with my WordPress blog.

I’ve read enough to know that the tagging feature was scrapped from the 2.2 release because it was getting rushed, so developers opted to wait until 2.3. Well, it’s here. I’m not so sure that it’s ready to be launched into the grand scheme of things because I really am not sure what I should be doing with tags, even after reading a few things by those close to the development process.

Preferably, I would have liked to see one replaced by the other, if tags are indeed going to replace categories like I read into, in one big sweep. For the most part, I’m going to keep ignoring tags for the time being, but that might screw me over in the future.

When it comes down to it, you shouldn’t have to try so hard to understand it. I switched to WordPress from Blogger because I looked at it, and it made sense. Keep it simple, stupid. That’s how I roll, and now I’m the one left scratching my head over what I should be preparing myself for down the line.

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Giving a presentation at the Vancouver Drupal Meetup

IMG_3792.JPG
Photo credit: uncleweed on Flickr

Last night, I was invited to the monthly Drupal Meetup for October in Gastown. Boris and I have had numerous conversations about various projects that I’ve been working on, and the one that stuck out to him was the site I generated for knox-church.org. I wrote about this project some time ago, and you can read that post here.

The point of having me talk about the site was to talk about the development process of how the site was originally created in WordPress and then ported over into Drupal. As Boris was saying in the meetup, it’s not often that you hear of a site having this done because using Drupal was seen to be easier than WordPress.

Allow me to explain that a little better because WordPress is something I am familiar with and use it for this blog on a regular basis. I’d even say that I love WP. I’ve built five sites using WordPress, so it is a CMS that I am comfortable with. It was that reason that, and this would make it six WP sites that I’ve built, I originally chose to have knox-church.org based in WordPress. On top of that, the plan was to build something that would enable church members the ability to interact with the site, adding and removing content as needed.

The site was based primarily on categories and a few, key plugins. The categories made particular posts appear in certain locations in the site, and not choosing these correctly would cause the post to not show up when and where it was intended. The plugins were subtle manipulations of posts, listing certain posts in an event list as well as an automatic deletion plugin to remove the posts once they expired. Both are very cool tools, but those are two extra fields in the post editor that the submitter had to parse through.

Vancouver League of Drupalers October 2007 -Image1010
Photo credit: roland on Flickr

Being contacted about the site after a time of decreased to little activity by church members, they wanted to be retrained on how to add posts to the site. Over time, they forgot the process and were confused by the site after logging into it after an extended period of time away from interacting with it.

It was at this point that I decided, based on things I knew about Drupal, to port the site into the new CMS. There wasn’t a lot of content to contend with, so manual transfer was the path I took. However, I knew that the CCK and Views modules could solve the multi-step process that came from WordPress and, in turn, having to teach that process to users with novice to intermediate understanding of how to interact with a web based CMS.

With the revamped look to the site in Drupal, the Calendar module brought a new level of listing events to the site that wasn’t there previously, but requested. When a user logs into the site now, they are directed to the area of choosing which type of content they wish to create(using the Login Destination module). The only fields they have to worry about are the ones they are presented with, making it a streamlined, simplified process of making sure everything they need is there before they hit the submit button.

Vancouver Drupal Meetup - October 2007 Additionally, step-by-step instructions are at the top of the page to guide them through the process, something much more difficult to do inside of WordPress, and these can be adjusted as need be to better reflect the needs of the users over time. This helps when someone goes for extended periods of time between logging into the site, forgetting how to interact with the editor that is presented in WordPress versus the custom page they are presented with in Drupal. Listing events on the front page, displaying news items, and listing sermons are all things that are coordinated on the back end through the Views module.

When it comes down to it, Drupal was a better route to go for what the church wants and needs. They want to be able to interact with the site and need to have something that can work for them without being overly difficult to use when it comes to their level of understanding. It’s also not as much as the ability for a church to have a website for its current members as it is to have a way of expanding their community and allowing others to find the site to get information about becoming apart of their organization.

I had a lot of fun speaking to everyone about the project and did my best to answer their questions. Not being the Drupal ninja compared to some other folks I know out there, I never felt out of place, and that is a very welcomed feeling. However, I did spike a massive fever when I got home and am still recovering from it today, so let’s hope that isn’t Drupal related.

If you would like to find out more about Drupal user related events going on in Vancouver, check out their page at groups.drupal.org/vancouver or visit groups.drupal.org to find a Drupal community near you.

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Launched a new Drupal site: knox-church.org

knox-church.org I’ve built a Drupal site for a church that contacted me some time ago about building them a website. The goal, originally, was to make something that would help Knox Church to not only publicize events at the church and provide information about it, but staff wanted a way to easily interact with the site. This meant updating it and getting some sort of events calendar on the site.

The initial creation of the site was in WordPress. I did a lot to separate the site into categories that would manipulate how the page was displayed to those who surfed into the site. The only problem was the training that took place to bring the staff up to speed on how the site operates. WordPress is intuitive, but the average, intermediate to beginner user might have a difficult time grasping the technology. The various plugins I found and used for listing events were effective, but there was a lot more to be desired from what was available at that time.

Since building the first site, I’ve been doing more and more development with Drupal, and the potential has really hit me in the past few months. I have to give a lot of credit to some conversations that I’ve had with Boris Mann about a couple of projects, including this one, that I’ve been working on. Being a guy on the forefront of Drupal development on a global scale, he has really helped to give me ideas on the possible things I can do. Getting from point A to about point G or P takes a little work some times, but when you reach Z, it’s like a lightning bolt hitting you in the face. In other words, yes, Drupal has elements in it that makes changing the world quite possible.

Well, in this case, it’s going to make it easier for Knox Church staff to interact with the site, not to mention an actual events calendar, which is incredibly cool. There is even iCal integration and a slew of other things that I can do that I don’t know about or how to do, but it’s all possible. It’s just a matter of having the time to sort it out.

What I do know is starting to not only make a lot of sense, but it’s going to streamline interaction for those on the site. As events come up, they can be added from any computer from anywhere and at anytime. As information changes, it can be edited and kept up to date on the website. That goes a long way when you make a typo on the church bulletin that forces everyone to show up at the wrong place and/or the wrong time, not to mention an easy way to post cancellations of events.

There is still a learning process to undertake with the staff. You can build all you want and have lots of cool things, but it’s the content that’s key. This is the next step, and the excitement is starting from those who know about the impending transition to a new content management system.

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WP-Cache plugin to help boost page loading time

I’ve installed the WP-Cache NoSymLink plugin to my site for a little experimentation. The goal of this is to cut down on the amount of time it takes to load the various pages and posts within my site, and this plugin is a tweaked version of the original WP-Cache plugin.

If you have a WordPress site that attracts a lot of traffic, this will help speed up page loading by a few seconds. What it does is takes some of the load off your server in terms of generating pages on the fly. With every, single post that you read on any WordPress site, the server it sits on pulls information from a handful of data sources to present you a web page on your browser.

Instead of dragging down server performance and making you wait for all this information to load from a database, the cache stores this data on a temporary basis to get the page to show up on your browser faster. This is really helpful if you have a site with a lot of traffic or host your WordPress blog on a server with a slow connection to the outside world.

Can’t say that I have the worst server or the number of readers that heeds the need for such a plugin, but I’ve noticed a little bit more speed to the load time on my site.

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Crossroads and WordTwit plugins for WordPress

Duane has been cooking up some interesting plugins for WordPress lately. I thought I would install them on my blog and try them out.

WordTwit is the first one, and this is a good one for you Twitter users out there with a WordPress website. Basically, it makes twitter updates for every blog post you make. That way tweets are sent out automatically to alert your followers on Twitter about new blog posts. This post will be my first trial, but I think this is much better than doing it manually.

The other plugin is Crossroads. If you like the Flickr and WordPress like I do, then you should really check this out. It allows you to post an entire set within a blog post as you see below.

This is an old photo set of mine, but it helps demonstrate the function of this plugin. Really useful instead of pointing people to Flickr to see the rest of your pictures for something that you have a bunch of pics about. And let’s be honest, people love looking at pictures just like many folks read the newspaper for the funny pages.

Visit both of the links for those plugins to find out more.

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Missing out on WordCamp

Rebecca and I tried to develop some sort of insane plan to attend WordCamp in San Francisco this weekend. Alas, the income is overshadowed by the expense of such adventures, and there is a wealth of information being shared that I would like to have been apart of.

WordCamp is a 2-day conference for WordPress users and developers. The first day will focus on how to be a better blogger, the second on the development and future of WordPress.

When?
7/21-7/22, 2007
Where?
Swedish American Hall, San Francisco CA – Google Map
Cost?
Twenty-five dollars, with scholarships available.
Why?
To get WordPress users together, learn from each other, figure out the future of publishing on the web, and have a good time. [wordcamp]

Nonetheless, The WordCamp Report is the site to keep up to date with what’s going on at WordCamp over the duration of the event, especially for non-attendees like me. I also heard on The WordPress Podcast that they will be checking in from time to time with updates from the conference, if not giving a nice wrap up in a later episode.

Would have been neat to meet the likes of Matt Mullenweg or Dave Weiner. John Biehler is running amok down there, so I’m sure he’ll have plenty of pictures and things to say about it.

Update: Starting to see a lot of pictures from the event come through on Flickr here.