cdcstudios.com | portfolio v8.1

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 I get a lot of requests from friends to reskin this and reskin that. I have no problem with this. I enjoy it and seeing friends smile when they look at their new blog, myspace profile, or just about anything else they ask me to reskin/recolor. Most of the time it’s a relatively quick job without any real issue.

Of course since it says annoyance up at the top of this post obviously there are times when it’s not. Some of you will probrably immediately roll your eyes at this little rant of mine but whatever. Go read /. or fark…

So I’m in awe of some of the open source developers out there and the amazing products they write/code/make/bleed their hearts into. But is it really that hard to take 5 minutes and write out a clean(ish) html page with all the divs/classes/tags in it that calls the same css they have running the layout of the actual app? Getting under the hood of an app is something I obviously love since I spend 50+ hours a week doing exactly that. But when I’m trying to learn the ins and outs of some new RoR or php app I don’t want to have to hunt through 500 files in the includes folder so I can find that view_penguincheese.php is what makes use of the #penguin div. Granted I just want to be able to see a big standalone html file with no php so finding the aforementioned php file isn’t something I necessarily care about (I just wanted to say “penguincheese”)

I understand that the OS movement puts an astounding amount of work into their projects and can’t always be expected to have the same graphic knowledge to compare with their php/asp/mysql/Ruby on Rails/Ajax knowledge. That’s fine. Just make it easier for those of us that do excel at making things pretty make your apps look better. Most of us will do the right thing and upload them to your site so more people can and will use your application because it looks more professional.

All that said (over a year ago when I first started writing this post) I’ll add one last thing: don’t skimp on making things use CSS without making sure it’s sensible. You won’t necessarily always be the developer/designer for something forever and it really makes those who follow in your footsteps admire your work as opposed to thiking you’re likely just drunk.

Oh yeah, I just overhauled the look of my myspace profile and it’s quite a bit nicer looking without all the ugly color combo’s myspace devs liked and most importantly it’s currently glitter graphic free (yay)

So just like last time I did the reboot, I find that every time I arrive at a “final” idea for the graphics I swiftly change over to something else. I suppose second guessing myself in an ever spiraling and timewasting distraction. Just like the last time though I assume when I have 3-4 days left I’ll go into a nightmarish frenzy of css, php and html coding before finishing everything up with 5-7 hours left before midnight.
It’s funny how when I’m working for clients other than myself I have no issue with completeing deadlines weeks in advance, everything flowing smoothly and surely towards the inevitable moment I cry eureka and am finished. When working for myself I can’t help but get frustrated by my own pickiness as a developer, designer and as is often said; I’m my own worst critic.

I’d post up a few of the elements that are mostly finalized but instead I’ll just dual purposely post a quick list of things I’m going to be adding to the redesign (partially to force me to do them and partially to help me remember them as I code):

• Lightbox the design page
• Single story on the front page everything else in the blog section
• Convert the sidebar blogroll into a Digg feed
• Feedburner the rss feeds
• Clean the snot out of the unweildy mess the CSS has become in the year and a half since I launched this look.
• Prepare the forthcoming soon to launch “sales section” where you’ll be able to purchase photoshop brushes, icons and whatever other sexy graphical goodies I’ve made or will make in the future.

Not altogether the most verbose difficult to imagine list that should be a snap to complete in two weeks. Will it happen? I’ll give it a definitive Yup! for now, but perhaps I’ll be singing a painfully different tune come October 31st.

Nice post title eh? Well it’s how I really feel considering I’ve been trying to fix an issue with the way Windows IE renders pages when using the Cleartype engine. Even if Cleartype is on system wide Firefox and Opera don’t bat an eye at it. IE6 and IE7 both render it like this:

Which is obviously not “clear” by any sense of the word. A current workaround involves specifying a background color or image for the element that is rendered horribly like that. That’s all fine and dandy except in situations where the background is using faux columns or is dynamic and uses theme switching. Regardless this is definitely an issue (yet again) of Internet Explorer NOT doing something correctly and it somehow always being up to us (the non billionaire company) the developers to fix or find a workaround.

That is the thing that pisses me off the most. 5 years without any fixes or updates by Microsoft since they beat Netscape. When do we see an update? As soon as they lose marketshare to Firefox suddenly it’s all systems go.
Tragically though while IE’s team has a budget the people who make a living developing sites for it don’t have a budget dedicated to taking the time to figure out how to get past the inconsistancies and bugs in Microsoft’s great idea du jour.

In the hopes that maybe (just maybe not too much hope here) that Microsoft or at least the IE development team might actually examine this problem and do something about it I sent an email to Chris Wilson, Group Program Manager of the Internet Explorer Platform team at Microsoft.

Here is the email I sent:

Hi there,
I was wondering if the IE development team could look at how with cleartype turned on (but not optimized) IE will render pages like this:

http://cdcstudios.com/webpics/cleartypesucks.jpg

(sorry for the filename but I’ve been trying to debug this issue for about 5 straight weeks now) while firefox, safari, opera don’t have this issue even with cleartype on systemwide. While I understand that IE7 is your main focus, this issue exists on IE6 systems as well.

If you or someone on your team could honestly discuss this with me and help find a solution that won’t cause thousands of pages to suddenly look like this resulting in a lot of small businesses needing to pay for fixes to be made to already standards compliant code I’d greatly appreciate it.

Sincerely,

Chris O’Rourke MCSE

http://cdcstudios.com

I Ask that anyone else who feels like this post an email similar to this on their blogs and also send the same email to Mr. Wilson here: CWilso@microsoft.com

For those curious as to what causes this problem it’s an issue with the way the Cleartype engine renders using subpixel text and the way it interacts with opacity settings of text. In the image linked above the text’s opacity is being altered through the use of the moo.fx libraries. The issue has also been reported with a wide variety of other types of scripts, html and css formatting techniques.

Hopefully through enough people reporting this issue and discussing it we can actually make Microsoft try and do their own work for once instead of saddling the design community with the workarounds.

There’s a lot of discussion of the political import of this or that type of art as well as a really lengthy amount of discourse about what is and what isn’t “art”. When it comes to the web there’s a few key differences in what defines them as art and the thin line (that’s really non-existant) differentiating web-art from art. It’s all art some is just customized for digital mediums. This entire post is part of a conversation I had a few months back at the Cathedral forums.

Fine Art

I’d say that fine art galleries such as dlaakso.com for example are minimalist frames to display the artists work, anything else begins to detract from the point of the site which is to further the spread of the art being offered. In the case of the webcomics, there are a few webcomics I’m a diehard fan of either due to word of mouth or friends working on them. Those comics don’t have the commercial appeal that other comics do however they’re still quality from my viewpoint. I wouldn’t consider either to be web art however since they are both offline mediums delivered via the web.

Photography

Looking at the example of photography on the web you can use one of two methods in moving the images into an online environment. One is to simply throw them up in a size saving manner(such as I’ve done with: My photos section ) which is an honest way to show photography skill and the ability of your eye to discern natural artisticness (In my opinion really the skill of a photographer is simply being able to spot beauty where it stands and then frame it rather than truly “creating” art. Not that I’m saying photography isn’t artistic mind you). On the other hand taking images and altering or modifying them to reside in a digital environment (such as taking a photo and changing it in subtle ways to add nuance in order to make it a desktop wallpaper) can be quite impressive as well.

Blogs

I think personally in the case of blogs that while the content matters greatly it’s important that the overall design of the site graphically and layout-wise be synergystic to each other. When something is going to be presented to people it should have similar tendencies. I think the reason blogs are so prevalent is the same reason people write graffiti in national parks. When made to feel utterly tiny and insignificant people have a need to place themselves somewhere in the infinite. I think that being able to read the viewpoints of thousands of others and to a certain extent expand the social aspects of the internet can be quite cathartic when you stumble across a post that is similar to something you’ve experienced. As far as the Reality shows go, I’d actually disagree. I think Reality shows have more in common with fiction than with any sort of biographical work.

The blog world (not going to say blogosphere) is actually in many cases authentic viewpoints vs a carefully edited version of reality on the television. Granted writing in a blog is nice since you can communicate, offer your views in a semi-anonymous environment and edit those views before posting, but I think authors personalities and quirks come out in anything they write causing a certain amount of raw honesty not always shown in reality.

The ability to add interactivity to a personal journal (comment systems, forums, etc) creates an interesting situation. On the one hand it leads to the creation of melodramatic posts but on the other hand you can see a blossoming of new points of view.

To a large extent I really think that art is simply looking at something from a different perspective and showing others how you see, hear, touch, feel and taste something (or any other sense really).

Web Design

Ah at last a subject near and dear to my heart (not that the others weren’t). Web designers come in a few different models before you even aproach the artistic styles. You’ve got your content designers “the overall look is something that will enhance the information on the page”, your artistic designers “screw the content, isn’t the page gorgeous” and the hybrids who understand that the two worlds require each other and must be symbiotic to truly succeed.

Beyond that you can look at what is being done on the web and see that there are many elements of every style ever used in every other medium being changed, manipulated, trashed, worshipped together in new unique ways. As the web design world enters it’s 1st large renaissance. Back in the early days it was a techie playground untouched by marketing or anything remotely commercial. A lot of people wanted to express themselves and discover new ways of doing it. At the time there weren’t many tools other than html which in no way was designed for graphic layout handling. As capitalism pushed it’s way into the web the entire artistic movement was suddenly restricted to a smaller niche. with the advent of cheaper hosting and people familiarizing themselves with the massive different technologies and tools many artistic sites sprang up and now we’re hitting a point where artists have grown up using the internet and are truly leveraging all of the current potential.

The artistic side can be expressed through amazing projects like the CSS Zengarden
where artists are limited to only changing the look/layout but keeping the exact html and content. there are a huge number of sites devoted to helping people to explore and push the envelope of web design and to create something truly unique.

Overall I think art is anything you observe or experience. Some art is personal and other stuff is quite public. Anything that causes an emotional response (of any sort) must be considered art. While I don’t agree with or like certain artistic expressions I understand some works are intended to create a feeling of anger in the audience. A great example would be from an artistic environment near and dear to me: Drum Corps. In 1993 a fantastic (near legendary) corps performed a show written to anger the crowd. Every single facet of the show was breathtaking but many didn’t like it and many didn’t understand it.
The works of Robert Mapplethorpe also caused much debate over their “artistic merit”. Perhaps causing discourse is just as much art as taking a risque photo. Art is something we have all around us. As time passes we are inundated with digital imagery and for most of us the web is something that isn’t a separate part of reality anymore. It’s just a different place to experience the full gamut of existence.

At least that’s my two cents worth (I adjusted how much I wrote to account for inflation).
A collection of some of my favorite artistic places can be found on my links page.

Your thoughts?