Archive for the 'Advice' Category

Integrating Tumblr-like functions into Wordpress

Published
by
Antonio
on March 25, 2008
in Advice and wordpress
. 0 Comments

I’ve always had mixed feelings towards Tumblr. I really like how you can easily post about anything, but then again I think to myself, can’t “Wordpress do this already”?

I’m subscribed to two Tumblr feeds: The first is one by Tom Davis. If you’re into your literature and photography go subscribe! The other is an online sketchbook from Rill Marchant, listing images that inspire her work. I felt that Wordpress could achieve something like this alongside the actual blog. Why would I want to do this, I hear you ask. I have several reasons for this:

  • I want to document my research
    Even though I have Foxmarks installed and also use del.icio.us I still don’t like having millions of bookmarks, so for me this approach of record keeping is better.
  • I don’t want to flood people’s inboxes
    I think there’s an unwritten rule/general blogging etiquette as to how many posts you should make in a day. Even though blogs are personal, when you allow subscriptions (via rss/e-mail) you have to start thinking about your readers. If I made ten posts a day of images I’ve found on t’interwebber that inspire me, without context - i.e. explanation of what they are and why they’re posted - they will hold little value to the reader and I think they’d consider unsubscribing or just not reading anymore. That said, I would still want the reader to be able to peer into how my work evolves.

Right, on with the show!

To start off I wanted to replicate the quick posting option found in Tumblr. Enter the QuickPost plugin. Once activated in Wordpress whenever you find something you want to blog about just press the bookmarklet et voila! One important feature is that you can specify a default category to post to. You’ll see why soon. As I wanted to create a sketchbook I set the default category to ‘Sketchbook‘.

The massive hurdle I had to overcome then was to how to stop post under the Sketchbook category from appearing in the blog and, more importantly, in the RSS feeds. Remember, I don’t want to flood the reader’s inboxes. I tried using the Category Visibility Plugin but I think it was conflicting with some of my installed plugins, so I turned to the Advanced Category Excluder. With this installed I set the Sketchbook category to be displayed only in the Search function. This meant that it, along with its sub categories, was blocked in the main blog and the RSS feeds (comments and posts). Brilliant!

Now that I had Tumblr-like posting and a way to block these posts from the main blog I needed a way to display these posts somewhere else, like on a Page. Odd, I know! I had a look for a plugin to allow posts to be displayed on a Page, but lets just say none of them worked, and, after five hours of search you get a little frustrated. I then knew this would require me to do some actual coding. For anyone else reading this, I wouldn’t recommend searching for a solution in the Wordpress support forum. This sort of question has apparently been asked many times, so just read their solutions.

I created a custom template, copied the code from the page.php file from my current theme and inserted the following code before The Loop:

<?php
query_posts(”cat=156″);
?>

cat=156 refers to the ID number for Sketchbook, which is 156.

If this means nothing to you do what I did and do some research!

So, if you check out the sketchbook you’ll see some test posts. OK, so the page is pretty ugly at the moment, but once I remove the category sidebar it’ll be just what I want it to be. Also, under the single post view you still get links to sketchbook entries. D’oh! I’m sure a bit of coding can sort this out ;-)

In a useful twist there’s still a feed icon next to the Sketchbook category name, so if people really wanted to subscribe they could (although this can’t be monitored using FeedBurner)

I also added the Category Posts Widget to further inform people that I have a sketchbook and that it’s being updated. I also also also also also use Custom Query String Reloaded to limit the amount of entries displayed on the sketchbook page (have yet to see if that will work)

So, in summary by using a few plugins and a very little bit of coding I now have a blog-like sketchbook that I can post to easily that doesn’t interfere with the main blog. Awesome!

Information Overload? Enter BlogRovR

Published
by
Antonio
on March 21, 2008
in Advice and Technology
. 3 Comments

Ever since my computer crashed I’ve been trying to piece back together my online activities when suddenly Irealised that I spent far to much time reading information thrown at me from RSS Feeds, Facebook feeds, Twitter feeds, Thunderbird feeds, and Google Reader Feeds, not to mention following links from blog posts. It’s just all too much!

I spent a few days away from the Internet to try and get back in touch with reality only to be greeted by hundreds of unread feeds and many more e-mails. In my search for a solution I stumbled upon BlogRovR. It’s a nifty little Firefox plugin that displays relevant blog posts from your subscribed feeds based on the site that you’re currently surfing. Sound confusing? Let this ‘ere YouTube vid do the talkin’:

I’ve been using it for a few days and it’s quite alright, though I haven’t completely ditched Thunderbird and here’s why:It works best if you’re subscribed to lots of feeds
The plugin displays the relevant information from feeds that you’re subscribed to. So, if you only read a few very topic specific blogs expect to only get a little bit of information displayed. I think because of when you first sign up to BlogRovR it gives you the option to sign up to up to 80 popular blogs so that you have more chance of finding more information. I’m currently subscribed to 156 blogs and once I get through all of my bookmarks I expect it to grow to 400.

You still have to surf the web in order for it to work effectively
This plugin wont replace traditional feed readers. Whereas Thunderbird and the like deliver content direct to you, BlogRovR requires you to be surfing the web before it does anything.

BlogRovR doesn’t automatically display the latest posts
If you want to be displayed information relevant to the page you’re viewing then BlogRovR is great, but if you want the latest headlines stick to your traditional feed reader. But then again, if you use both you can see other posts relevant to the ‘new’ one you’re looking at…

It’s oh so new
I’ve subscribed to lots of comics and Flickr photostreams but so far I’ve not had one of these displayed by BlogRovR. I think this could be to do with a combination of how people tag images and how BlogRovR interprets this. Maybe people need to add better tags and descriptions? We’ll see. Two suggestions for improvement would be:

  • Have an inbuilt search function
  • On the homepage include the ability to put subscribed blogs into categories and then the option to share the list of blogs under category, thereby adding a more social aspect to it.

Summary. Don’t ditch Thunderbird yet. Instead install BlogRovR and unsubscribe from about 300 of the 400 blogs you’re subscribed to.

Feed Me!

Published
by
Antonio
on March 21, 2008
in Advice and Events
. 0 Comments

Last night myself and the guff (that’s gf/girlfriend) went to the Moseley Creative Forum. Although we turned up a little bit late it was great to hear what each member of the panel and the audience had to say.

One particular part of the event that caught my attention was the talk on information and RSS Feeds.

Feed me information

As an artist I’ve found that displaying work in a blog format has really helped me promote my work. Sure, the amount of people that actually subscribe to my posts is relatively small, but those people are always notified when I post new work. For all I know one of the people subscribed to my feed might be my next employer!

For a business I think having an rss feed on your website is essential, especially if you constantly update your website. Paula Tew of Creative Launchpad noted that as a business that has so many other things to do a blog is not really on their priority list. Pete Ashton, who was also on the panel was quick to note that it only takes about 30 minutes to write a post and, to be honest, it’s just like sending out a notification e-mail to everyone.

One of the final points they mentioned regarding RSS Feeds is information overload, and that’s something I’ll touch on in my next post.

In summary I think people who have a business that is constantly evolving should at least use RSS to deliver content to their audience. It’s just easier.

Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes

Published
by
Antonio
on March 3, 2008
in Advice
. 1 Comment

Stef’s blog pointed me in the direction of a very useful article by Jakob Neilsen around the issue of weblog usability I decided to take the test myself. I expected to get a low result as most of this website is still under construction, but either way, it has served as a great guide for me on how to make a successful blog!

Let the test begin!

No Author Biographies
I have one! Well, it’s getting here slowly. I’m also writing an ‘about the blog’ section as it might interest people to know what the blog is about and why it was set up. WIN

No Author Photo
Got that on the about me page with a link to a large photo. WIN

Nondescript Posting Titles
I think I’m a little guilty of this recently. I don’t like using long titles and sometimes it’s a bit hard to think of a relevant short title. FAIL

Links Don’t Say Where They Go
I avoid using “click here” as a link as much as possible, but I am guilty of not using the title tag that much. FAIL

Classic Hits are Buried
I’m a bit unsure if this completely necessary. Sure, it’d be good to have a way to do this manually, say by filtering posts by amount of comments or views, but wouldn’t be a bit contradictory to have a link to the most popular post - even if the post is years old - when I want to encourage readers to read the most current and most relevant posts? Debatable, but by under this test: FAIL

The Calendar is the Only Navigation
I’ve avoided using the categories widget at the moment as I’m still cleaning up category listings. But otherwise, yeah, I think it’s pretty essential to have a better way to navigate a blog. FAIL

Irregular Publishing Frequency
Guilty again. In a post that I’m writing currently I’ll be asking what direction this blog (and indeed whole website) should take. In short I want this blog to be a place to post my own work, finished or unfinished, and also a place to post artwork (video, photography, pictures) that I like and/or inspire me. Until that happens: FAIL

Mixing Topics
I think I’m good at not mixing too many topics. Most of the topics are centered around arts, and even the ones about technology have a arty element to them. WIN

Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss
I’m very careful about what I write on t’internet. I’m sure most of the people who read this will understand when I uze ting5 leik s14ng and wotnot, but otherwise I try to present myself in a professional manner, whilst still letting aspects of my personality, which includes my opinions, come through. WIN

Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service
This is a problem that I think will become a bigger one soon for others. Back when I wrote a post on building a portfolio website I left out the part about having your own domain name. This extract from the article sums it up nicely:

The longer you stay at someone else’s domain name, the higher the cost of going independent. Yes, it’s tempting to start a new weblog on one of the services that offer free accounts. It’s easy, it’s quick, and it’s obviously cheap. But it only costs $8 per year to get your personal domain name and own your own future. As soon as you realize you’re serious about blogging, move it away from a domain name that’s controlled by somebody else. The longer you delay, the more pain you’ll feel when you finally make the move.

I’ve seen a lot of portfolio websites that use a combination of free services, such as blogger/wordpress, deviantart/portfolios.com and even ones that use facebook/myspace with photo hosting websites such as flickr/photobucket. I’m guilty of using all of those services but one thing I am sure to do is to have them all point back to this website. If you’re serious about your artwork either build yourself a website from scratch or use a CMS (I use Wordpress and Gallery2). The important thing is that you have your own domain name. WIN

So, 5 out of 10. Not bad, not great. Time to rectify methinks.

Building a portfolio website

Published
by
Antonio
on January 15, 2008
in Advice
. 7 Comments

For those of you that don’t know (probably everyone!) I’m enrolled on course called Flying Start, which is a training scheme for local artists and workshop delivery. Most of the advice we get is on promoting ourselves and, aside from word of mouth, I think one of the best marketing materials is a regularly updated website. When I mention that my degree revolved somewhat around web design I suddenly get people on the course asking me either a) if I can design their website for them or b) if I can advise them on how to get their work online. Well, instead of listing off the stream of programs and techniques that I use, which occasionally goes over the top of their heads, I shall instead offer my advice here!

My First bit of advice is to just start with a pen and paper. Srsly! Plan out how you want your pages to look, what you want them to do and even get the crayons out and colour stuff in. Also, think about the purpose of your website. There’s no point of having a games section on your website if you just want to display your portfolio. Doing this will really help steer the design of the website in the right direction. It’s a lot more productive than looking at a computer screen and expecting the design ides to jump out at you and build itself.

Once you’ve designed your website on paper, unless you’re going to pay someone to do it, I think doing a bit of background reading on coding and web technology is essential. I don’t expect someone who just wants to display their portfolio, which, in the case of many of my colleagues, consists of images and stills from movies, to learn the ins and outs of PHP, CSS, MySql and HTML. I just think it’ll help to know some of it so that a) you know what you can achieve with the technology and b) editing it yourself will become easier.

Now comes the decider. You know what you want you website to do, but do you build it from scratch yourself or use a CMS? For those that don’t know, a Content Management System (CMS) is, as Wikipedia defines:

…a system used to manage the content of a Web site.

To put it in layman’s terms, all you really have to do is add the text to a blog post, add the image to a gallery or upload a video and the CMS takes care of everything else. On my website I have used two CMS’s. Wordpress and Gallery2 (both free). Wordpress manages the blog and other static pages and Gallery 2 manages my portfolio pages. I didn’t have to do any coding (that is, unless I want to edit the look of it. More on that later)

I recommend using a combination of Wordpress and Gallery2 as:

  • They’re free
  • You can get a lot of support from the support fora on both websites
  • You can customise it easily by either editing yourself or downloading themes (which themselves usually have some level of customisation)

However, they aren’t specifically tailored to portfolio websites. I’ve seen some great things done to Wordpress to get it working as an excellent portfolio website, but if you want something out of the box that’ll give you a simple but effect portfolio website I recommend Indexhibit.

It seems like this is a relatively new CMS, but it’s quickly gaining popularity amongst artists. I like how simple and no nonsense it is, but after taking a look at around ten of the example websites this format layout format soon becomes very repetitive and, well, boring. Still, it is effective in what it does and as it grows in popularity I’m sure it’ll gain more features for customisation.

So, now that you’ve chosen your CMS, uploaded it via FTP (more on that later) and installed it you decide that you don’t like the look of it and only want to tweak the theme slightly. That’s where you need to get your hands dirty and actually do some coding! Don’t worry, it’s not as hard as it sounds. For this part people usually assume you need Dreamweaver. Wrong! Dreamweaver is great at what it does, but I think it’s more for power users and people wanting to become pro web designers. If you have it use it, but if you don’t, you don’t need to use it for this simple task.

For this task I recommend that you download and install Firefox, not just because it’s free, but because it has many tools to aid in web development, such as Firebug. What this handy little thing can do is allow you to inspect every object on screen and edit the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) (the file that controls the formatting and layout of a page) in real-time. I then usually open the CSS file in a webpage editor, like Notepad++, make the necessary changes et voila! Trust me, it’s easy. Once you have Firebug installed, open up the interface (usually by pressing F12 in Firefox) and then press the inspect button. Hover over any object then try and edit its properties. There you go, you just edited your webpage!

Oh, and one bit I have left until last is hosting. That’s mainly because, to be quite honest, I don’t know who to recommend. A lot of people say a lot of different web hosts are better than the others. Just to remind you, a web host is something that allows you to upload your website from your computer to the internet. Read more on Wikipedia. My completely uneducated advice on this matter (having only ever use two hosts) is that you can expect to pay about £40 upwards a year for a relatively good host. If I’m wrong, then I’m wrong. Do your research! Once you have your host you can upload your files from you computer to your host via FTP. For that I recommend FileZilla. It’s free!

Oh, and on a side note, all the software mentioned here is free, and in most cases open source ;-)

So, hopefully that was of great help to you. If you can recommend anything other than what I have here please do!