Getting inspiration for design can sometimes be challenging. It is easy to go to your favorite CSS gallery or design site and get some ideas, but more often than not this leads to boring designs. Sometimes getting a fresh creative idea takes some digging in some unusual dirt. Read more…
Sometimes the easiest things are potentially the most useful. Derek at 5ThirtyOne has written a tutorial on creating a custom database error page. Apparently this feature is now hard-coded into wordpress 2.3.2 and above, making this super easy.
The gist of it is, create a xhtml file called db-error.php and stick in the /wp-content/ directory. Don’t forget to include all the styles(or full path to external sheet) as this is used when your database is not functioning…hence database error. It really is that simple. Check 5ThiryOne for a complete walk through.
Combine Derek’s tutorial with something like these and you can be one of the cool kids even when your database server dies!
On a side note… if you are interested in watching companies take shape or interested about the process check the blog at NextUpdate. They are going to blogging about their startup which provides bug and issue tracking software.
As you can probably tell from the design of the site, I like retro dirty grungy looking things. But no photography subject can grab me like big old unused industrial settings. I love the look of giant machines and vast wide open spaces, rust and just plain old metal.
I have just ran across a great blog called Industrial Decay that features the best from this flickr group every week. Industrial photos are good for than just looking at, they can give you a ton of inspiration for your designs. The look and feel, shapes, colors, size relationships can all be used in designs. Granted they probably won’t help you design that web 2.0 glossy look(try exotic animals for that) but they could get you to break out of a design rut. In any case it is good to get away from all the CSS galleries every once in awhile.
Post photo by nuts muc check his flickr account for more stunning work.
WordPress is often called an almost infinitely extensible content management system, and two new themes are really proving that true. Theme authors are really pushing the limits, from full news and magazine sites to a contact manager.
WordPress as a contact manager? Apparently the folks down at The Design Canopy answered yes to that question. They just released WP Contact Manager, a really nice contact manager built on wordpress and a few plugins.
What could be better than a contact manager? I’m glad I asked. Prologue is what is better. Prologue is a new theme from the creators of wordpress themselves. The theme works just like Twitter. I can see why companies would want something like prologue, the first thing that comes to mind is privacy. Prologue can be password protected and would be great for internal communications.
I never would have thought of wordpress as a contact manager or Twitter substitute, but then again not many people thought wordpress could power a magazine website. I can’t wait to see what the future will be bring.
Usability guru Jakob Nielson just posted a new article about the state of user skills. It is a pretty interesting read if you develop websites. The gist of the article is people are getting better at using the web. But, and there is always a but, they aren’t as skilled as most web designers and developers think they are.
As an artsy fartsy designer guy I often forget about basic usability guidelines. The article was a reminder to me that not everyone is a web designer! Shocking I know. Not everyone can immediately Read more…
A while ago I saw this post on Mark Boulton’s blog about the new(at the time) beta of the BBC website. If you haven’t seen the beta check it out, its great for a laugh. It looks like the equivalent of giving a two year old a crayon, but instead of the crayon being sky blue its web 2.old. Read more…
I don’t think people realize just how many splogs there are, or even what a splog is. Splogs scrape content from other blogs( usually through RSS) and post it as their own(usually), loading it up with ads for a quick buck.
From maxpower.ca:
The total number of blogs out there passed 50 million a month ago. 175,000 new blogs are created every day. There about 5.3 million blog postings per day, seventy percent of which are actually ’spam’ from a splog. In other words, seventy percent of all blog postings are spam (State of The Blogosphere, 2006)
But these splogs are quickly set up and likewise can be easily detected using wordpress plugins. There are two popular plugins that combat splogs and scrapping RSS in very different ways: AntiLeech and Digital Fingerprint. Read more…
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