Archive for December, 2007
Monday, December 31st, 2007
When I wrote my last post I thought some people might be curious about the tools we are using to run Foliovision. As I started to write a short list it was quickly apparent that this is a subject of its own.
The list will mainly focus on online applications, as they are the primary tools in our kit. Online applications allow people to work from different computers and for new works to get up to speed more quickly. They are also wonderful for remote workers, of which we have always had a few.
What are we now using includes:
Keep reading Web Tools We Use to run Foliovision
By Alec
IT |
Monday, December 31st, 2007
I was looking up information on Canadian accounting software (or more particularly looking for a Mac OS X offline tool for Freshbooks, the amazing online accounting system with which I run Foliovision.com.
I couldn't find a Mac OS X tool for Freshbooks but I did run across a great website which typifies to me many of the things which a weblog should be:
- Personal
- Illustrative (very nice and simple photos on most posts)
- Simple (no annoying javascripts or frilly designs that get in the way of reading and enjoying)
- Helpful (the articles may not be all that frequent but they are all have some thought or use to someone, this is not posting for posting's sake)
duomo milan from ruk.ca
Here is a sample of Peter Rukavina's writing about the dangers of online social networking - a virtual world where only like will meet like:
Keep reading What should a weblog be?
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Saturday, December 29th, 2007
Just when you think you've got technology under control, some small gnat comes along to bit you. I had just added and styled the nice registration form for people interested in Foliopress WYSIWYG and SEO Images to the previous post :
and then I began seeing double. That is to say two me:
dd add signature plugin error
That nice headshot with the articles is created by Alastair Dagon Design's Add Signature Plugin. What's seems to be causing the doublevision is the inclusion of a form inside a post. I tried moving the form into a Sniplet (where it should have been in the first place, quite frankly and reuseable). I've cured a few WordPress malfunctions by pulling code outside a post and into a Sniplet - but that was pre-Foliopress WYSIWYG. Most of the WordPress Editors damage or modify code so a Sniplet can stop them from getting a chance to break code. But this time the Sniplet trick didn't work.
I couldn't find the issue in the plugin itself:
wp-content/plugins/dd-add-sig.php
Nor does the issue seem to be in our template index.php file, although there seems to be room for such an issue there.
Keep reading Trouble with DD Add Signature Plugin
By Alec
WordPress |
Friday, December 28th, 2007
Spent most of the day working on Foliopress WYSIWYG together with Peter Baran.
Our solution for the WordPress WYSIWYG and image handling nightmare is coming along quite brilliantly well. This is what the basic toolbar looks like.
Foliopress WYSIWYG toolbar preview
Foliopress WYSIWYG offers true What You See is What You Get Editing for WordPress.
- It is backwards compatible with legacy code (hello Xstandard/TinyMCE)
- It doesn't break complex forms (hello TinyMCE/Xstandard)
- It doesn't discard whole posts (hello Xstandard)
- It doesn't go haywire and create more and more nested P tags (hello WYSIWYG Pro)
- It doesn't look like hell in the WordPress interface (hello normal FCK)
- It doesn't make uploading images a never ending and hopeless struggle (hello WordPress uploader)
- It doesn't make your clients hopping mad and lead them to breaking everything (Plaintext/RAW html)
- Your drafts look like exactly like your posts will, without having to waste time with a preview function (hello Xstandard)
- You have unlimited standard undo from the keyboard (hello Xstandard)
- Very easy to configure (including site WYSIWYG) (hello Xstandard, TinyMCE, FCK)
In short, Foliopress WYSIWYG is what you always wished the WordPress Editor would do. I'm using it now and can't believe no one created and editor like this earlier.
Keep reading Site Renovation Day
By Alec
WordPress |
Tuesday, December 25th, 2007
Does software crime pay?
On paper, it looks like it does. And very well.
Over at roughlydrafted.com, Daniel Eran Dilger gives a short history of how Microsoft, embraced, extended and extinguished through the eighties and nineties. In the end it turns, out Microsoft has paid more than $4.2 billion in antitrust and patent infringements, not counting the impending EU (European Union) settlement.
Keep reading Price of Antitrust: billion and climbing
By Alec
WordPress |
Friday, December 21st, 2007
We are going to need a forum around here quite soon. From what I can see tech support for serious plugins is so messy in comments. Mark's at 3000 odd for the excellent Subscribe to Comments and our own John Godley is at 301 (ironically enough) for the fine Redirection.
Keep reading Forums and WordPress
By Alec
WordPress |
Sunday, December 16th, 2007
The best single website on the internet is the Wikipedia. There is more useful information and less disinformation there than on any other single substantial site.
No surprise Google puts Wikipedia in the top ten for almost everything.
Somewhat of a surprise then that Google has decided to create a pseudo-Wikipedia by the name of Knol.
Right now, it's an expert authors by invitation affair. But they plan (rather foolishly in my opinion) to open it up to free for fall (think the fall of Squidoo).
We are looking at David vs. Goliath, with Wikipedia in the David corner as the innovator facing off against massive Google. It's Netscape - Internet Explorer all over again, but this time Google is in the black outfit.
Unbelievably enough, despite being first to the party with great technology and a loyal userbase, Netscape eventually lost round one of the internet wars.
I wonder if Wikipedia will do better.
By Alec
SEO |
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007
I've just added a new page to the How to Hack a WordPress Theme for Non-Programmers section.
front end editing for wordpress
The article covers how to get those cool edit buttons on to both pages and posts by changing just a single php file in your template:
Front Editing for WordPress.
By Alec
WordPress |
Sunday, December 9th, 2007
Just discovered an amazing bookmarklet from Aussie company Western Civilization, one of the original creators of CSS editing software.
StyleMaster was always a little bit buggy processor intensive, expensive and complicated for me so I learned how to code CSS from scratch. I still think that's the best way to write CSS.
But the modern web is getting so complicated that we really need a better way to look at web pages to be able to figure out how they are put together.
Well WestCiv has really hit the ball out of the park with this one. They have a cross browser compatible javascript bookmarklet that will let you click and see all the CSS and structure for any element on a page. The bookmarklet, appropriately enough, is called
Xray.
Keep reading Xray Eyes for CSS
By Alec
WordPress |
Sunday, December 9th, 2007
There are a few weblogs where the comments are better than the article.
That's the case with Mike Industries. Mike often writes the most lackadaisical posts (a recent one about lobsters) - generating fantastic comments.
Of more substantial interest was his recent thin recommendation of a financial site.
I liked Brett's succinct version of investment information:
I look forward to following The Kirk Report, because I find the markets entertaining. But, like just about every individual investor, I would very likely be better off financially if I limited myself to other forms of entertainment.
If you really want to get the most out of your personal finances, in terms of investment returns and time spent allocating resources, limit your reading to Warren Buffett’s annual shareholder letter, William Bernstein’s quarterly Efficient Frontier, and each new edition of Burton Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street and Andrew Tobias’s The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need (not that Malkiel or Tobias change their books all that much from edition to edition, but that’s the point).
This is better advice than you might get spending a week online searching for investment information.
Juan Cole's Middle East weblog, while very good, often has comments that are still more incisive than his own commentary.
To get to this point, many of the articles have to be very good to build up a readership capable of creating collective intelligence.
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Sunday, December 9th, 2007
I've spent a lot of the weekend working on a Vancouver real estate website which we converted to WordPress last year.
(Don't feel too sorry for me, the rest of the weekend I spent with my girlfriend.)
There were a bunch of issues in the PHP code which I couldn't solve myself so I had to leave my efforts there for the designer.
I was unable to comment it out with html comments (what I usually do). PHP comments wouldn't work either, so I put some serious research into how to comment PHP properly.
It turns out there is a simple but very effective trick:
<?php /*
comment
*/ ?>
I recommend reading the full article on How to Comment Code in WordPress templates if commenting WordPress templates is something you need it do occasionally. It will save you a lot of time.
I am sure much of this applies to our friends over in Mambo/Joomla and Drupal land.
A tip of the hat to My Digital Life for his article - Comments and Comment Blocks in PHP.
By Alec
WordPress |
