Web design and development musings from a mad man.
For WordPress Day I decided to pull out an old trick of mine. When I first saw the MSNBC redesign I immediately wanted to recreate the sections in a theme. It proved to be a bit more involved than I had first imagined. Look out ahead, heavy php content coming!
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News of Google Ajax Libraries API is spreading fast, and I for one welcome it. Anything I can do to speed up websites and offload files is something I’ll likely take advantage of.
They’ve recently added jQuery, and I’ve started using it with this new design. So far it is working great, but will it last? Anyone who uses Google Analytics knows that at times it can slow your page down. Although Google says this is a faster alternative to using your own server, I think the chance for slow response time is still there.
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Anyone that has ever had to use a U.S. Government website knows that they are horrible. And by horrible I mean awful. And by awful I mean terrible. And by terrible I mean they are abominations of all that is good in the universe and beyond. I have given up hope of these sites joining us in the new millennium but all is not lost.
There are a few sites that take government data and organize it into usable presentable information a non Tom Cruise type being can interpret. But getting this data means manually scraping it, which …well… sucks. I’m not going to spend my time doing it, and I doubt you would either.
Well the smarty pants guys(I’m just jealous) over at Princeton have written a paper suggesting stop the nonsense redesigning of government websites, and deliver the raw data via a structured format like RSS and XML. This would allow much more talented people to grab the data and run with it. I can only imagine the beautifully usable sites that would come from easily obtainable data.
It would be pushing it, really pushing it, but creating an API for certain government websites could open all sorts of avenues. Imagine a well done interface for the DMV, complete with AJAX, smooth gradients, and calming pastel colors. I don’t know if we’ll ever see this type of integration but it is nice to imagine.
Today I have a quick tip for all the WordPress theme developers. I’m actually working on a theme right now and thought I would share a tip that will make your themes much more user friendly.
Often when developing themes for one reason or another you want the end user to give you the ID for a category. This could be so you could call certain categories, or exclude them, or create custom menus etc. In previous WordPress versions Continue Reading
Designing a website is sort of like planning a large event, after a trip down the California coast to two large events I picked up on a few things. Mostly I wanted to complain, but these same complaints can be made of websites, and a few of my designs are guilty of them too.
Bimmerfest, ah how I love thee. Tons of nice BMWs and even more traffic, a lot more traffic. Bimmerfest has been going on a few years now, and there is always a traffic jam. I can excuse the traffic outside the event but it is inside the event that gets my panties in a bunch. Whats this got to do with web design? Continue Reading
My previous post on writing a simple related posts plugin was a popular one, and one reader wanted to take it further for a website he was working on. Well it was painfully obvious that my example was inadequate for doing any sort of fun stuff so I started adding bits and pieces to create a more robust widget. If you haven’t already, you might want to read the first post to get caught up.
This isn’t a true “plugin” in the sense you can activate it in Wordpress, but more of a widget you can plug into your theme. This widget is going to grab posts based on tags and return specific info from the matching posts. This will be a good chance to see some of the guts of Wordpress being used and how you might use them for your own projects.
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Wow I got all sorts of goodies in my RSS reader today!
First up is the release of TimThumb by Tim McDaniels. This was a script created for use in the Mimbo Pro Premium Wordpress and Darren Hoyt and company have released it as open source. I can’t wait to try this out and start incorporating it into my themes. What it does is resize images so the user doesn’t have to anymore, and I think no matter what your level of skill this is much appreciated. Grab the files at Google Code.
The bbPress team has released a new version, which is primarily to update it to work with Wordpress 2.5. There have been a few improvements though.
Check out the release notes for a full list of the changes. I’ve been meaning to get my hands dirty with bbPress and I think now will be the time. Look for some themes and tutorials in the future for bbPress.
My premium Wordpress theme Checkmate is coming along nicely and will be released “soon”. The first release will be the blog only portion. There will be an advanced business version that will function more as a CMS coming out soon after the blog version. I’ll write a more detailed post in the coming days about the features, design, and all the rest of the details.
Last week I wrote a post about what I was doing to speed up my website. While that post is an informative, well-written piece of literary genius, it didn’t go into a whole lot of detail. That detail is in this post, because two posts are better than one. I’ve tweaked, found problems, fixed a few problems, and learned a thing or two. I also learned there is a lot to learn.
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Part two of this article is now up with a lot more tips and tricks on how to speed up your website!
When I first designed curtishenson.com I took into no consideration the speed that it loaded. OK, that isn’t entirely true. I compressed my images…a little, some of my javascript was compressed, and my CSS is compressed(but only because I was trying out the new Blueprint CSS compressor). So when my site actually got content on it, everything started grinding to a halt. I tried speeding it up with WP_Cache, then Super_Cache, then phpSpeedy. But I still had problems. I was planning on starting to advertise more, release a new premium theme and my site really needed to be faster Continue Reading
While re-aligning my website I realized I was writing a lot of redundant code. Some page templates were nearly exactly the same like the category and tags pages, the only difference was one word! Copying and pasting that one template seemed like a big waste of time, and it was.
I read somewhere that good programmers are lazy programmers. Not in the sense that they don’t fix their own code when they find a better way to do it…but that they don’t repeat code, over and over and over again. Not only does it take longer to repeat code, but it is a royal pain when you need to update(like when a CSS framework gets updated and drops a class name…).
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