The Science of Web Art, Design and Development

If you believe in blogging at all, then you have to believe that bloggers united for a cause can be a strong driving force to change. The motivation behind Blog action day is that bloggers around the world gather one day a year to discuss subjects that concern all of us as individuals.

On October 15 last year, thousands of bloggers wrote about the environment and targeted an audience of millions. The environment has become a frequent and recurrent subject but the need for a change of conscience and attitude on that field is still huge and what has been done is not yet enough.

This year, Blog Action Day’s subject is poverty, and so far 8,634 Sites already engaged on the cause and will reach an audience of 9,201,889 subscribers.

Why is your post important?

Now, with all the media coverage on the subject, why is your blog post important?

As a blogger, you probably know that relationship between writers and readers in blogs are much more personal than in traditional media and when you write a post on your blog you might be targeting only a few hundred people (or even less) but these few people are listening to you and if there are bloggers among your readers, they’ll be talking to some people who are actually listening to them.

Why is not off-topic on your blog

Poverty, just like environment, is a subject that concerns every single human being and your blog and your business, as tools for your business, networking or your online persona are part of your footprint on the planet. Being a personal or professional blog, either you or your business have an impact on poverty. Either you are helping, creating poverty or doing nothing, which means, at the very least, endorsing the current situation.

To make a long story short, whatever you write about, has an impact on poverty, either positive or negative, and there is at least some point in which you can discuss the subject inside your niche.

What if I’m wrong?

Say I’m wrong. Say that your niche doesn’t have anything to do with poverty at all, it doesn’t help, it doesn’t get in the way and it doesn’t endorse the current poverty. Well, then the non-relationship of your niche with the subject is so unique that it is on itself a subject to write about and I’d be the first one to read your post.

What’s in for me?

Well before being bloggers, entrepreneurs and professionals, we are all human beings and I’d be happy if that were enough reason, but if that’s not, then let’s roll up the sleeves for some simple math.

There are 8,634 blogs registered and a fixed audience of 9,201,889 Readers and the numbers are growing. It is quite likely that this event will have a lot of more traditional media coverage and the networking happening on this event will be massive and you risk end up knowing interesting people you wouldn’t normally meet.

Last week I’ve attended to the 2008 London Edition of FOWA which was quite interesting.

Being the geek I am, I mostly preferred to watch the keynotes on the developer track, rather than the business track, but the good news is that the organizers are publishing the videos of all keynotes for free, so I’m catching up the ones I missed and so can you.

Some of my favourite are

How to build a desktop app from your web app

Jeremy Baines will explain how to take advantage of the knowledge you already have as a web developer to build desktop applications.

How oAuth and portable data can revolutionise your web app

I think it becomes more and more obvious on a daily basis that every site can provide a better service to users if it can identify them, but at this point, this means having an account on every site you get in. Not only this is boring, but is also dangerous. Most people won’t be able to keep one password for each site and, chances are not every site you will register to is completely honest.

What about mashups then? A mashup will only work if it can have access to a few of your web accounts on your behalf.

Enter oAuth! Chris messina will cover the subject of openids and keeping a consistent identity through different sites securely.

And more…

Also very interesting is Kevin Rose talking about The Future of the News and Francisco Tomalsky on Building Desktop Caliber Web Apps with Objective-J and Cappuccino.

As far as I can tell, not all videos have been uploaded yet and one of the ones missing is Yahoo’s own Christian Heillmann talking about Y!OS (Yahoo! Open Strategy), look forward for this one, because Y!OS is changing to reach more developers to use Yahoo!’s APIs.

Is the Zo’C blog dead? I hear you asking.

No. Not at all! But in the last four months or so a series of serious changes in my life have drained most of my energy and I had little choice but to stop writing for a while.

The good news are that the serious changes are mostly (if not all) positive and were actually the realisation of projects I was actually investing in. Some of the major changes are to be living in London now (a longtime project of mine) and working for Yahoo! which is a source of so much web goodness that I can’t but be proud of working on a daily basis with some of the guys and girls who shape the web as we know it and write some of the best web literature around.

It is also (hopefully ;) good news that I’m into blogging as much as I used to be and now, with recharged batteries, I’ll try to share the best bits of what’s going on the piece of the web that surrounds me.

Chris garret has just launched a blogging survey and if you answer it you can win his new book, coauthored with Darren Rowse ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income.

The book alone is a great reason to join us and contribute to the survey, but actually there are better reasons. Blogging is a recent and interdisciplinary profession and not a lot of people understand this professional side.

On one hand you tell your family you run a blog and they think you have an online journal, on the other hand people that regard a professional side on blogging start “make money online” blogs with strategies that are as good as the ones to get rich by collecting underpants.

Blogging professionaly is neither easy nor a guaranteed road to get rich, and I predict many blogs will shut down in the future and a lot of frustrated will be generated. The best way to avoid this is having a clear picture on your mind before you start and as you go.

Nothing better than a serious survey to help on that. And if nothing of this appeals to you, hey, don’t you want to win the book and learn how to become a 6-figure blogger?

Being the author of the Zo’C Powerblogroll — A Wordpress Plugin intended to transform the bulk blogrolls commonly are into powerful link-love tools — I couldn’t resist to offer Catherine Morley my plugin when I saw her blogroll was, literally, a few hundred links long.

I could tell you myself the story of how this happened, but yesterday I’ve been the featured designer on Designers Who Blog and since Cat decided to tell it in a much funnier way I’d be able to, then you’d better just go there and read it from her.

To me it was already a reason for pride that my plugin was the base for such a giantic and useful blogroll, but, makes me even prouder to be featured shoulder to shoulder in such a front line of great designers in DWB.

And by the way, did I mention how useful her blogroll is? I can’t stress that enough! If you are looking for great design blogs to follow, you should start there.

Having authored a plugin to display sub categories on wordpress, I’m often faced with users that realize they can’t use categories on pages, and they turn to me to explain how can be done. This post is meant to help all these people that want to learn why they can’t use categories on pages and, show you that this doesn’t mean you can’t categorize pages at all.

Pages and subpages

In a conventional CMS, pages within a web site are classified in sections and subsections. Each section tipically contain a description of what the section is about and links to its subsections and pages.

Each CMS has its own way to do it and often its own jargon but, ultimately, it is the same philosophy.

Wordpress is not different in this respect. If you want to use it to run a regular (non-blog) web-site, you can.

Wordpress has a feature called pages, which are very similar to posts in many aspects, but they differ, essentially, in the fact that there is no chronology associated to it, pretty much like traditional web pages.

In order to run a non-blog website with Wordpress, you’ll rely on pages, rather than posts, to publish your content, and this also means that the publish date of this content will be much less important than in a blog, if important at all.

That might be good enough for a small site with half a dozen pages, but what if you have slightly bigger ambitions and you need to categorize your content?

Time for an example

Say you run a cooking site (not blog!) and you need the following pages/sections: Recipes, Desserts, Nutritional facts and an About page.

In Wordpress, the way to do it is to create a page for each one. Each page in Wordpress can have a parent page and all pages can be parents as well. These will be the topmost pages, so they have no parent but some of these pages will also work as sections by being parents of other pages.

For the rest of the content, each time you publish a recipe, you will create a page for it, and you will set the main recipes page as a parent. In this way, all recipes are sub pages of the recipes page, and the recipes page immediately becomes a category, as much as a page.

The same goes for the recipes and nutritional facts, but let’s give a bit of attention to the about page.

Although the about page will be categorized as a root page and be on the same level than the main categories, the about page can merely be a plain a simple page with no children.

Because of the way pages are categorized as sub-pages of other pages, you don’t have to distinguish sections from regular pages. In addition, if one day you want to add sections the the about page (eg, about the authors, our history, etc) you can simply create the pages and set the about page as parent.

Thanks to the ability to create different page templates, you can even style each section or page differently.

Posts and categories

For a person with a background stronger in blogs than in static websites, categories might seem missing for pages on Wordpress, but actually is the other way around. For someone coming from a static sites background, the problem might seem to be quite the opposite.

The only basic difference between pages in static sites and posts in a blog is that posts follow a chronological sequence, while pages just sit there and the sequence in which they were written is not quite important.

Although this is the only remarkable difference, this radically changes the way authors and readers approach to each kind of website, and consequently the features a CMS needs to implement for each one.

For instance, blogs are meant to be followed over time. The latest information is supposed to be the most important at a given time and that is why posts are presented in reverse chronological order. It shouldn’t have to be like this, but is quite convenient.

Now, having said that, this doesn’t imply that older posts aren’t useful, and they should be made available in and presented in an organized way. But because the chronological factor, a blog has a few extra challenges on the organization subject.

• Usually, much more content is created for a blog than for a static site
• With the continuous addition of new content, classifications can grow obsolete pretty quicly
• New sections may be needed and accommodate them must be made easy
• Posts might belong to more than one section as time goes by

Regarding a section of pages as a page on itself does make sense, but a post section being regarded as a post makes no sense at all. I explain:

A post is characterized as such by its chronological aspect while categories’ creation date on themselves usually have no importance at all. Hence, there is no sense in regarding a category as a post. Actually, if you come to think of it, this paragraph is almost unnecessary as this though is pretty much counter-intuitive.

Enter categories!

Categories are simply a name you can create and you can relate posts with, pretty much as parent pages.

And similarities don’t stop there. A category might have a parent category, just like pages.

Also, you might not be aware, but Wordpress allow you to create different pages for displaying each category, so if you have a limited number of them or if you want to highlight some, you can actually style a template that work as parent page in most aspects. But this is out of the scope of this post and in material for a future discussion.

My good friend Michel Martine has written Jazz Blogging – It’s the Notes You Don’t Play an excellent post in which he fiercely defends a blog post shouldn’t be perfect and shouldn’t try to be, because one of the key features of a blog is conversation and space should be left to the reader to join the discussion.

I agree with him but only in part.

read full post…

There has been much discussion lately about twitter, how to use it and heavy criticism, so I’d share my view on twitter and tell you how I use mine.

The year of 1997 was the one I took the deep plunge on the internet and, among other things I started to use the IRC chat system heavily.

One of my favorite places was the #photoshop channel on Undernet, where Photoshop techniques and design in general were discussed all day long. I usually got there first thing in the morning and kept logged until I went back home, and checked it and participated every now and then during the day.

(Maybe IRC is too old-school for many poeple – so a quick explanation would be that is more or less like what was known like chat rooms, but wasn’t normally performed on the web, you’d use a specific client instead. Details on Wikipedia)

What did I got from it? I had the chance to:

• Ask experts and learned a lot, since I was a newbie
• Explain things that I had already mastered to newbies
• Be exposed to the work of experts
• Show my work and have opinions on it
• Just talk to nice people

That was the base for my first personal site on that very year which was, as expected, a gallery of images and tutorials on Photoshop ;)

By that time chat rooms mushroomed all around and most people I heard were using them to chat with girls or guys and learning how to transform that into friendship/sex/engagement/whatever.

That might be also a nice purpose on itself, if you come to think of it, and some got what they wanted, but most of these people were just wasting their time at large, IMO.

How about Twitter?

Times have changed, and today, if we were to use IRC like I did back then you’d be participating in a thousand IRC channels and will be impossible to follow.

Personally, I see twitter more or less like a chat room aggregator where every user is a chatroom and your time line is your reader.

In twitter you can,

• Ask experts and learn a lot
• Explain things you have already mastered
• Be exposer to good material through links
• Show your work and get exposed
• Just talk to nice people

And because IRC worked so well for me back then, I pretty much have the same position about it.

Again, this is not how I think Twitter should be used, this is just how I use it.

Twitter can also make you waste a lot of time as much as it allows you to build campaigns for strategic growth of your site and many other things, Just like IRC and Chat rooms before. I think what you get largely depends on you alone, who do you follow and what do you share.

I followed Lorelle’s advice advice and added a category based archive on Zo’C’s archive page, and now I’m going to tell you how to create yours.

At the end of this post, you’ll find the complete code in a single piece.

Step 1: Create the template file and find the content area

The first thing to do is create a new template page for your theme. The easiest way to do it is by duplicating your default page template which is the file “page.php”. Login via FTP, SSH or your favorite method an copy that file to “category_archive.php” and start editing.

Edit your file so at the very beginning it has the following lines, they are responsible for telling Wordpress this is a template page and its name.

<?php
/*
Template Name: CategoryArchive
*/
?>

The reason why we copied the default page instead of starting from the scratch is that any theme has is peculiarities (footer, sidebar, header, this and that) and we want to preserve them all, we just want to change the content. So, now, you must find the content.

read full post…

Since Sharon has shared the view from her office I decided to do the same. (In form of a slideshow: click any image on this post to see it). Luckily, being a free-lance, office means wherever I can bring my notebook to.

Today, I woke up and it was snowing. After a winter with almost no snow, it was nice to see it on the third day of spring and wanted to share some of pictures.

I’m lucky to have a beautiful view from the alps from my window so I actually like to work at home, but when whether allows I also work in the park, in the lake or I could even work in the mountain, but that would be too much effort. Generally when I go to the mountain is just for the view and the exercise.

Yep, I’m working on sunday, but I’m lucky to work with this view!

How about your view? Were do you like to work, or where you’d like to?

Update: Since the light is wonderful this evening, I’ve added some new pictures!

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