Who’s In the Mix?

By admin

MIX07 Graphix

I’m packing up and getting ready to head to Las Vegas for Microsoft’s MIX07, dubbed a 72-hour conversation with “some of the most successful and innovative practitioners on the Web”.

This is the first time I’m attending. I’ve been anxiously awaiting this event after hearing about last year’s event. 

Anyone else planning on attending? 

Sessions.edu Blog Post Round Up

By admin

Sessions.edu Blog Header

Here are a few of the posts I made for Sessions.edu’s blog for design students:

What are Microformats
Have you wondered what microformats are, and why we should bother with them?
The Prevalence of Slick JavaScript & Flash effects
With the prevalence of slick JavaScript and Flash effects available at a designer’s fingertips, it can be tempting to inundate a web page with trendy “coolness” at the expense of usability.
Every Element Sends a Message
When designing web sites, it’s important to keep in mind what it is you want to convey.

Front End Developer at Federal Reserve

By admin

The kind folks at the Federal Reserve let me know they are looking for a Web design specialist/CSS guru. If you’re interested in the position, see the position description below:

The Federal Reserve Board (Washington, DC) is looking to hire a front end developer.

Description

Strong technical and analytical skills, web site design and maintenance experience, and basic knowledge of server and network configurations. Highly desirable: Experience with web application development and testing; content management system implementation and/or administration. Experience with CSS, Flash, RSS, User Interface Design and Accessibility.

  • Title: Information Systems Analysts
  • Grade #: 22⁄25
  • Division/Section: Information Technology/Consumer and PubWeb Systems

To Apply

Send a resume or questions to Melissa Perez

Flux, Part 3: The Plugins and Touchups

By admin

Work continued on Flux, my new site design, this past week. There were two main issues I wanted to resolve: extending WordPress and applying some design fixes to common HTML elements like unordered lists. 

WordPress Plugins

Three new plugins are now installed:

  1. Code Auto Escape. WordPress has a nasty habit of not rendering code correctly. Sure, you can try to use HTML entities, but that’s only a bandaid. WordPress gladly converts the HTML entity into the display character. 

    However, if you make revisions to the post, WordPress does not revert back to the HTML entity. This feature is only slightly annoying as I like to, you know, post about Web standards technologies. 

    Thankfully there is the Code Auto Escape plugin. This is a simply awesome plugin from Priyadi Iman Nurcahyo. Using HTML elements like code and pre, WordPress handles the formatting of coding with making a mess of my post. 

    After I installed the plugin, I spent a good while getting this (outdated) post displaying code properly. That felt really good. 

  2. Google Sitemaps. An XML-based sitemap allows Google’s crawlers know of pages within your site that might be new or generated by dynamic content. Odds are Google’s spiders are already aware of your site’s pages, but feeding your own sitemap is a nice added bonus to make sure everything is covered. 

    Arne Brachhold created the Google Sitemap Generator that makes all that messy XML for you — automatically–everytime you add a post or page through WordPress. Set it and forget it.

  3. Subscribe to Comments. Ever post a comment and wish you could be notified when the discussion continues? That’s the way I feel when debating whether Starbuck is the the last of the Final Five (she’s not), whether the Doctor is the last of the Time Lords (he’s not) or whether Snape is friend or a foe (he’s neither). 

    The Subscribe to Comments plug-in does that. There’s even an option to allow readers to subscribe to a post without commenting themselves. However, I feel this isn’t very fair. If you want keep up with the conversation, at the very least, I ask that you throw in your two cents for the privilege.

If anyone has any WordPress plugin recommendations, please let me know via the comments. 

Design Touchups

Some miscellaneous design touchups that happened on the site:

  • Bullet Icons. I have nine bullet icons ready to go for nesting unodered lists.

    I’m not saying I’m going to present you, dear reader, with an unordered list that’s nested nine times. I’m just saying I’m prepared. You can see the first three bullet icons on this post where the lists only go down three levels.

  • Ordered Lists. Nothing too fancy, but I turned the numbering back on as Yahoo!‘s Reset CSS got rid of them altogether. It’s amazing finding what you took for granted after it’s gone.

That’s about it for the design update this week. 

SXSW07: Using RSS for Marketing

By admin

After four years of attending SXSW Interactive, one picks up certain habits or routines. For me, one routine is to shy away from panels or presentations that would tell me what I already know and seek out interesting panel(s) that I wouldn’t normally attend. 

Last year’s Second Life panel blew me away and gave me insight into a different Internet culture that I didn’t know was happening on the Internet. 

This year I ducked into the Using RSS for Marketing panel. I already know what RSS is, but are people really using it for marketing? If so, in what ways?

Of the panels I saw this year (which, granted, weren’t as many as I would have liked) this was the one was the most well-paced, information-packed. 

Below are my notes from the panel. 

Using RSS for Marketing

  • How do you go about explaining RSS to your clients? 
    • It depends on the type of client. 
      • Individuals
      • Tech startups
      • Fortune 500 companies
    • Everyone wants to deliver information to their audience faster
    • A direct information stream that goes to your audience, whether they realize the technology behind it
    • It’s about the benefit for your users and efficiency for your company
    • It doesn’t matter what you call it. Refrain from the “b” word: blog
  • What stopped talking about RSS, but talk about what we can do. 
    • What is the RSS adoption rate?
    • Growth rate is accelerating
    • Don’t have data on what applications people are using for Internet Explorer 7 for Windows
    • People don’t know they are using RSS
    • Our clients getting information in a lot of different ways
    • It’s been mainstream for a while now
    • What we saw last year was a spike from a non-tech sector, the automative sector, mostly hobbyists of cars
    • When Google Reader went live and MS’s IE7, saw a huge spike in usage of the RSS
  • Is the “RSS” term that the average person needs to know? 
    • It’s about subscribing to content
    • Content is coming to us now. RSS is about plumbing. No one has to care
    • It’s a part under the hood of the car that works. No one knows how
    • RSS can almost be an API for anyone’s Web site
  • What are using RSS for? 
    • Use it as a listening tool
    • Real-time gathering of news
    • You can still build a feed, but there’s this big cloud of content 
      • Take a piece of this content from this cloud and put some of it in your Web site
      • It lends credibility to you and your site
      • Host that conversation.
    • Become a thought leader in the topic
    • Ford is creating Web sites for their auto show 
      • They are sending someone to cover what’s happening in the auto industry
    • Use RSS for your news articles 
    • Automatic product feed updates, job listings, marketing surveys
    • Whatever you are doing with your marketing, you need to measure it
    • Having themed content along with JavaScript-powered RSS feeds
    • There are new products coming out that will search within feeds
    • Multiplying your own RSS feeds on your own Web site 
      • There are million tools out there that will take any RSS feed and put it on your site
      • Google is rapidly indexing all feeds
  • What are publishers doing wrong? 
    • They are doing everything right! (Laughter.)
    • Figure out what is the magic number of items in their feed 
      • Data we found is that there isn’t much of a difference between full feeds vs summary feeds
      • Both types of feeds show that people are coming back to your site
      • Don’t be stingy with your content
    • Don’t be too fancy 
      • Secure your feed, if you want. Use HTTP authentication
      • Don’t try a secret URL, since it doesn’t work. Google will find it and index it
    • It’s a widget called “Add This” to subscribe
    • Use auto-discovery and get people using RSS 
      • Having someone subscribing use RSS is more valuable than an email subscriber
    • Start off each headline with your company name, like AP does 
      • If your feed gets syndicated, people will be able to see your company name
    • Don’t get fancy with your formating 
      • Since you don’t know which device your feed will appear: mobile devices, browsers, email applications, etc.
  • Question(s) from the Audience 
    • What kind of publishing schedule should someone have? 
      • If you’re publishing, your schedule should be consistent. Whether it’s once-a-day or once-a-week
      • If you are doing product updates, as least once a month

Any New Surprises?

If you attended SXSW Interactive this year, I would love to hear what panel you fond to be the biggest surprise.

Flux, Part 2: The First Couple of Days After

By admin

After pulling the switch on the design, the general reaction to the design has been positive. Which is really good since I was worried that it might be too purple. At least, I’m out of my “green period”, Porter, right?

Just to document the changes and in case anyone’s interested, here are are a few things I’ve fixed and/or learned about as I’ve been working on the Flux design for the last couple of days:

  • For all that is right in the world, be sure to reset the display of your pages before you start working on production. In talking with Richard Rutter before his Web Typography Sucks panel, we talked briefly about how Web designers have to work within a browser’s pre-defined style sheet and how you don’t get that with print design. (InDesign never opens up and says, “right, let me have a go at your design.”) So, after researching Tantek’s and Yahoo!‘s reseting of CSS, I went with Yahoo!‘s after most of the production work on the template was done. Big mistake, amigo. I’ve been playing bug catcher ever since in hopes I catch most of them and don’t have to do the whole production over.
  • You can really get carried away with floats. Personally, I love shackling elements and probably will be sticking with that method for most of my production work from now on.
  • Positioning elements led me realize that Internet Explorer 6 for Windows does not like nesting two absolutely positioned elements inside a relative positioned element. I got a little arrogant in thinking I could pull this off and not get burned by IE6. Apparently, IE6 blows through the nested absolutely positioned element and sticks with the parent’s elements positioned values. This caused me to do the following…
  • Rework how I display the header for the site. Now when you resize the fonts in your browser, the text in the header moves upward while the text in the rest of the page pushes downward. This is a cool trick Doug Bowman did on Adaptive Path’s site many moons ago and I’ve been itching to incorporate the tecnique into a site ever since.
  • Firebug is outstanding. I had a rogue CSS rule causing 18 pixels of pure madness at the bottom of every paragraph. Took me a while to find it through my traditional means, so I broke out the big guns and nuked the problem in under 120 seconds. Yeah, my workflow just improved.
  • Most of the other changes were backend: Putting what little content I have into PHP includes, wrapping content chunks with DIVs and some minor icon reworking. Mostly, I’m trying to make sense of WordPress’s structure.

The next items on my to do list involve mainly more spring cleaning on the templates. I need to get those cleared before I input the additional content. However, I do have one question I can’t seem to solve to my satisfaction:

Does any one know how to include Gravatar’s into your comments? 

Gravatar lists documentation for a WordPress 1.2 plugin, but I’m running a more advanced version. Any chance the old plugin works for the current version of WordPress? 

I’d like to know if it does so I know how much time I should invest in incorporating the icons into the site design.