cdcstudios.com | portfolio v7.1

So as I’m frequently in the habit of doing I was perusing my comments to see what people were saying on my site and stumbled across a new comment from a guy (we’ll call him Ignorant Douchebag Spammer or Steve for short) who at first glance appeared to be posting a relevant comment:

Affordable Web Design In the last bit of news I also recently switched to Disqus for my commenting needs. For those not in the know this means I have a few new features for my little spot on the web.

These words seemed to fit into the post I’d made (where I talk about switching over to Disqus) perfectly. It immediately dawned on me the reason it fit so perfectly is that it was a direct quote of my post. Once I realized this I checked on Disqus to see what else this asshat had posted. Comment after comment he’d quoted a short snippet from the blogs he’d commented on. Sort of creative but a really terrible and dangerous methodology to get SEO benefits. Here’s the link to his comment threads on Disqus. Once I’d removed and marked as spam the comment I decided to see what type of guy was behind this. So I popped over to his website and took a look. Let me digress for a moment by giving a few short rules to being a web developer and/or designer:

1. Know what Information Delivery means (Your site shouldn’t look pretty first and give information second unless your site is a photo or illustration portfolio and even that should balance well with the delivery of information).
2. Know what color consistency is (you don’t need to use all 65 million possible colors on your page, really trust me on this).
3. Know how to make your pages consistent (if I click 3 pages on your site at random and none of the color schemes, layouts match…you’re not doing it right).
4. Understand (I mean REALLY understand) how to properly choose and use fonts. A simple rule of thumb is: never use more than 3 fonts on a single website. Using more than that just looks chaotic and is stressful to the eye.
5. Never ever ever ever (really EVER) proclaim yourself as “premiere” or an “expert” on anything when you obviously aren’t. Especially not an SEO expert.

Ok now that we’ve covered those basics let’s get back to the asshat that prompted this post. Now some of you might think that I crafted the above list with Steve (the spamming douchebag) in mind. Not true, that list was given to me by a long time friend 10 years ago when I first got into doing web development. Oddly Steve (the spamming douchebag) managed to break (with great alacrity no less) all 5 rules with just the front page of his site.

1. Rule #1: His site is a (to quote Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead) psychedelic mess.
2. Rule #2: There are at least 4 colors to many (impressive since 3 of those colors are differing shades of blue).
3. Rule #3: How in the heck did he do this? The header, sidebars, content and footer all have widely varying styles (I know it’s sort of amazing really).
4. Rule #4: There are 7 different fonts used on the front page alone. I suppose one could play Devil’s Advocate and say he was trying to show that he could design a page to use different fonts but that Devil’s Advocate wouldn’t really be trying)
5. Rule #5: Steve (the spamming douchebag) calls himself an “SEO Expert” yet his craptastic website has a Google pagerank of 3. That’s like saying George Bush is an expert at being President.

This is perfectly in sync with what I’ve been saying on twitter the last few days. It seems every 4th person that follows me has a job title of “Social Media Consultant” or “SEO Expert”. I remember these days perfectly 8 years ago during the Dot Com bubble. Every asshat with Front Page was suddenly an expert Web Designer yet none of them knew a damned thing. So far I haven’t linked the site that Steve (the spamming douchebag) “designed” because I don’t want to give him the benefits of my Google Ranking, which is hilariously a 4 even though I haven’t done any SEO work on my site EVER (other than running Wordpress and making sure to have a standard compliant site). Speaking of standards compliance Steve’s site gets the fail whale there too.

So here Steve (you spamming douchebag) I’ll link to your site, but first here’s a quick rundown of other folks on the web who blogged about you before me: RipOffReport.com outsourcing fraud listing

If you’re going to say you do something you damn sure need to know how to do it, Steve Shearer doesn’t.

A quick update by the way: It looks like the way Disqus let’s you see all of the comments by a user in a single page means finding spammers out becomes vastly easier (such is the case with Steve (the spamming douchebag)

So since I had planned on having a release date party on November 10th for Wordpress 2.7 but couldn’t due to a delay in the official release I decided to migrate this little piece of the internet I call home to 2.7 beta 2 on November 10th. I’d been playing with the 2.7 beta on my dev server but hadn’t wanted to risk my site on unfinished code.

Let me be the first (or more likely the 166th) to say, Wordpress 2.7 is the new hotness. The new dashboard, the speed, the automatic upgrade being native (yay one less plugin) and being able to add plugins without using ftp is so amazingly handy. The idea that I can add new features to my blog from my iphone now is really useful.

I’ll get to work on a more indepth review later, for now I’m still exploring and checking all of the plugins I’ve written to make sure they don’t have issues with the 2.7 nightly builds.
If you’re interested in making the switch I’d recommend you get the db-manager plugin first to automate your db backups.

In other news, in honor of the switch to 2.7 I also managed to switch from my aging contact form plugin to cforms II which you can see in action over at my contact page.

Late Saturday night I decided it was high time to finally make a webclip icon for cdcstudios. It was a total piece of cake and shortly thereafter I made another one, this time for the folks over at Silicon Florist. For those not in the know, a webclip icon is the iPhone or iPod Touch desktop bookmark icon. They’re really easy to make and quite useful as displayed in the pic above.

With this plugin you can make a custom icon for your wordpress site or your wordpress multiuser site (yep this plugin will allow each individual WPMU blog to have full support for custom webclips). Head to the plugin page to get it or if you have any questions about it.

So at last night’s Beer & Blog I asked Aaron Hockley & a few others to let me know their “5 must have Wordpress Plugins”. I figured since Aaron is a die hard Wordpress user like myself the list would be great and informative. His list was fantastic (led me to a new plugin that I had to have) and so without further ado here are my 5 plugins I install right away when doing a new Wordpress install (I’ve done about 50 total installs).

1. Akismet - Comment spam filtering for the masses. Comes with every single Wordpress install because it’s by the same wonderful folks at automattic who brought us Wordpress. Currently it’s been responsible for over 23,000 comment spams caught on my blog. I’m in total agreement with Aaron that activating this is the absolute first step in deploying wordpress. Here’s what Akismet.com says about their plugin:

“You have better things to do with your life than deal with the underbelly of the internet. Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again“.

Those last 7 words say alot about their confidence in their product. Are they true? Absolutely.
2. Sociable - A quick easy way to add social media buttons to your posts (or everywhere, easily changed from the settings page, not only that but it does so easily, and beautifully (see it in action at the end of this post and feel free to submit if you like).

I can’t imagine a easier to configure rock solid way to have the social media links I want all in one place.

3. Wp-Super Cache - This little plugin will help protect your blog from the Slashdot/Digg effect of huge amounts of links swamping your server. Here’s the description Wordpress superstar Donncha O Caoimh (the author of this plugin) gave it:

WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.”

So far I haven’t been slammed here but if it happens I can rest easy knowing that the guy who’s done most of the work on WPMU (the multi-user version of Wordpress) built a plugin to protect a blog’s uptime, which is a pretty important thing for those folks for whom blogging is their life & work.

4. WP-DBManager - This is a pretty important one. I’m often forgetful about backing up my wordpress database before tinkering with it and so with one simple plugin I get nightly backups to my gmail account, scheduled optimization maintenance as well as the ability to repair it when ever I run into an early version plugin that may break something.

5. Wordpress.com Stats - This is one that should be installed with every copy of Wordpress. Quick clean easy to read stats that are supported from the Wordpress.com website. Rather than rewrite what the plugin site has to say I’ll let the authors speak for themselves:

“Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Less is more.”

I love it and seeing that gorgeous little flash graph show the number of hits (right in the dashboard) at a glance is as easy as it gets.

6. Fluency Admin - I’m going to cheat and add this one these two to the list (it was a tossup between this one these two and Akismet since technically Akismet is already installed). Much like the author of Fluency says on his blog:

“Despite the huge overhaul that the WordPress admin interface has received its still not quite what I would really like. I had grown quite attached to the Tiger Admin theme by Steve Smith and when I found that it didn't work with WP2.5 I was a little disappointed. But this gave me the opportunity to do something different, my own admin theme. Fluency is the result.”

I loved the Tiger Admin theme and was going to write my own until I discovered Fluency. They made a massive amount of changes to the admin area in Wordpress 2.5 and not all of them seem well thought out or right. In short I hate some of what they’ve done (but that’s a whole other post). This wonderous little plugin changes and reskins the whole backend to make it; clean, simple and flow just like it should.

7. Wphone - I love my iPhone and the ability to surf the net anywhere on it is great. Posting to my blog via my iPhone though had always been a chore. Along came WPhone allows you to use a custom admin interface while interacting with your WordPress install via your phone. It contains two versions of the mobile admin interface, a full iPhone version and a “lite” version suitable for most every cellphone with a built in browser. I just noticed that local plugin author Viperbond007 (who modified rewrote and made usable my own humble CDC Clean Archives plugin into the awesome jQuery based plugin I’m now running here.

Alrighty, that’s my list of must have/can’t live without plugins. I’ll be updating with links to the other folks I invited to share their Top 5 lists with as they post them. Feel free to let me know the ones I don’t know about or somehow overlooked (I’m currently using 13 plugins total and always looking for amazing time saving, information delivery improving plugins).

So noticing that Matt Mullenweg blogged that there was a release candidate for Wordpress 2.5 up I decided to try an upgrade to see what the fuss was all about.

From the official Wordpress blog:

A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times sound interesting? Then WordPress 2.5 might be the release for you. It's been in the oven for a while, and we're finally ready to open the doors a bit to give you a taste.

Pretty big list, but how easy the upgrade? Easy as ever. I did a quick backup at lunch (while sitting in the Roxy no less) including a database backup then deleted the site. Next I opened up Transmit (thanks to Verso for introducing that tasty little app to me). and uploaded the shiny new Wordpress 2.5 and then ran the upgrader. It finished in record time (about 5 seconds less than the last upgrade script I did) which was my first nice reaction. Logging in and seeing the new dashboard was fantastic. Nice neatly divided boxes compartmentalizing each different section. Seeing the stats graph integrated into the dashboard is a masterful idea. The only real wish I had is that they were rearrangeable using AJAX and some css (might be a nice plugin if I can find the time before someone else beats me to it. Speaking of plugins I did finally have to stop using Tiger admin plugin I’ve been using for a couple years. I will definitely miss having the navigation bar on the side instead of the top. Also a nice new feature to play with is the fullscreen editing mode. No other distractions on the page. Just a big huge word fillable area.

So after testing all the rest of my plugins I didn’t see any other problems. I did notice that Gravatar’s had an upgrade notice on the plugins page. I clicked the upgrade now link and after quickly typing in my server info it upgraded perfectly. Ironically I just noticed that I no longer need that plugin since the functionality has been written into the core code. Excellent!

Next up is an attempt at using the new media manager and gallery tool (now added to the neatly upgraded TinyMCE toolbar in the write window). I’m using some old artwork as well as an unused rough draft of the redesign of this site since it was handy.

Pretty easy to add. Select the files you want, click upload and then using some nice ajaxy goodness you can edit the description of each photo and alter the title.

All in all this is an amazing upgrade and quite a nice bit of work both under the hood and on the front. It’s nice that so much from the old “shuttle” concept has finally made it into the code. Looking forward to continuing to experiment with the theme design as well as figuring out what other surprises I might find as I explore the tasty goodness of wordpress’ php.