DesignWell

I read many books from the library. I don’t finished reading many books though. First of all, they are free, since they are from the library, and second my attention span doesn’t last that long. I believe browsing the web daily from age 14 (circa 1996) will do that to someone (read the latest cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, is Google Making Us Stoopid). Most of the books I read come from the magazines I read (The Atlantic, Books & Culture: A Christian Review) or from the podcasts I listen to (Diane Rehm, This Week in Tech).

Either way, I want to share my latest reading endeavors across my blogs. But how? Read more »

As you already know, I post all my non-reply tweets from Twitter on my personal blog with Twitter Tools. I do not display the posts with the Twitter Tools widget, but with SideBlog. With SideBlog you can place all posts from a particular category in the sidebar. I have chosen to show only my “Tweets from Twitter” category. The original output of SideBlog places a title, post content and a permalinked “#” at the end of the post. This wasn’t minimalistic enough, and on top of that with Twitter Tools the first 40 characters of your content is your title, so you are repeating yourself. I don’t care for the pound sign, “#”, either. So I made the following changes to the plug-in. Read more »

If you’ve been around WordPress for more than six months, most of the following plug-ins should be familiar to you. In case you haven’t heard of any them, I highly recommend all of them. I’m not a fan of widgets (too-limiting), since I create websites for a living. I’ve divided them into Anti-Spam, Category/Tag, and Additional Content. If you are not caching your blog, remember, don’t install too many plug-ins. Read more »

No matter how carefully you design your site, visitors will always request a page that is missing, moved, or non-existent (especially if you experiment with your site structure frequently). This past week, I’ve been obsessed with HTTP 404 errors and working on creating a better 404 Not Found page. The default 404 page for WordPress offers the opportunity to search the blog, but you should go another step. Usability is one of (if not the) key trait of a great website. If thought has gone into even your 404 error page, then I’d guess that much thought has been put into your entire site. Read more »

I’ve been familiarizing myself with WordPress 2.5’s new media gallery. If you’ve visited my blog before, you know I don’t upload many images, but I’m hoping to upload many images to my wife, Rachel Steely’s website. I was annoyed to find out that the default image posting size is medium (which is about 300px). On top of that, if you select full size, it doesn’t mean full size. It means your WordPress theme’s column width. So unless you are using Kubrick your media size will not be your column width. Read more »

If you have ever wanted to turn a plain text link, http://www.smjdesign.com, into a “linked” HTML version, http://www.smjdesign.com, you can know. Pass the following function your entire text field and it will find all your links and return tagged HTML.

function replace_plain_text_link($plain_text) {
$url_html = preg_replace(
'/(?<!S)((http(s?):\/\/)|(www.))+([w.1-9\&=#?-~%;]+)/’, ‘<a href=”http$3://$4$5″>http$3://$4$5</a>’, $plain_text);
return ($url_html);
}
echo replace_plain_text_link(”hi this is dummy text before http://www.smjdesign.com hi this is dummy text after”)


Read more »

It’s been a hot debate over what to include in your blog’s RSS recently. I say you should include more than blog posts in your RSS feed IF (and this is a big if) you can editorialize what goes in. The following, explains how to change which tweets from Twitter get posted to your blog and into your RSS feed.

If you use Alex King’s Twitter Tools (version: 1.1b1), you will want to make the following two changes to his code. The first one will make your tweet-post URLs and title more beautiful and SEO friendly by not splitting words at the end. The second one will remove reply tweets (’@username’) from becoming posts in your blog, so that half-conversations do not get recorded. Read more »

On Saturday, February 9 at 11:30 am, I spoke at BarcampIndy 2008 on Graphic Web Design and Cascading Style Sheets. All presentations were broadcast on UStreamTV.

The premise of my presentation was to show an overview of the process between layout in Illustrator and PhotoShop to coding in HTML and CSS. I find that web design is often segmented between the coders and graphic designers. I propose that the best outcome can come from bridging that gap. I do this in my daily workplace and try to show tips and techniques for others to bridge that gap. The time slot was only a half hour, so I could not go into coding detail, but only point to tutorials via links. Read more »

I originally was excited when I saw WebHotOrNot.com (Yes, now you can say I’m a uber-geek). Similar to the photos of people that your friends used in high school, Hot Or Not?, you can rate the graphic design of web pages. Unfortunately, it crops each snapshot of the page off at 768 pixels (I believe).

It depresses me to click through most of these. I average clicking five or so. They are all text/information heavy and 90% look like prepackaged themes of blue, black and white. I realize that I’m posting from a blog with the default WordPress theme, Kubrick, but I’m selling anything. My blogs are still in a personal phase–I don’t even have a domain for each of my blogs except the poetry knook.

bbPress is still under version 1.0 (as of this writing, it’s at 0.8.3.1). You might think forums are dead, why not just Tweet away on a closed group channel or such. Although not the latest thing, forums are foundational. They are the web version of newsgroups and essential for large groups of people. As a lover of WordPress, I can’t wait to see bbPress develop and mature. Looks like others can’t either: Automattic raised $29.5 million in their Series B round of funding.