Urban Vancouver

Design is Philosophy is among the finalists in the Best Blog Design category of the 2008 Weblog Awards. It is an honour to be mentioned among great blogs like such as Verlee’s, Rin-Wendy and OurWorld 2.0 and I wish all the contestants the very best of luck.

Voting begins on Monday and is only open for 5 days so vote early and vote often! And while you’re at it, don’t forget to vote in the other categories as well.

Just before the Holidays this dropped into my inbox. It’s a great deal made even better by the fact that the Microsoft Expression line is already competitively priced. Add to that the great review Expression Web 2 got form PCMag.com and you have the perfect last-minute or belated gift for yourself or the web designer / developer in your life:

For a limited time (exact timeframe is TBD), there is a 50% off discount on Microsoft Expression Studio, Expression Blend and Expression Web through the new Microsoft Online Store. *This is US Only*

http://store.microsoft.com/microsoft/design-developer/category/6
http://store.microsoft.com/microsoft/design/category/601

WordCamp is coming to the wonderful winter wonderland of Whistler on January 24th, 2009 and I’d like to throw my name in the hat of presenters and share some of what I’ve learned working with everyone’s favourite blogging platform WordPress as a full fledged CMS. Now I’m not part of what is considered the Vancouver blogging community and most of these people don’t know who I am or what I do so I figure instead of just sending the pitch off to the great unknown I’ll share it with the good readers of this blog for comments, questions and suggestions.

Alternate title: This is not a blog! Harnessing the Power of WordPress for Non-blog Websites

Alternate alternate title: Letting the Genie Out of the Bottle: WordPress is More than Reverse Chronological Posts

Session length: 30 minutes to 1 hour (1 hour preferred)

It is well established that WordPress is a great blogging platform. But the capabilities of the application go way beyond merely outputting posts or articles in a reversed chronological order: WordPress is in fact a full fledged Content Management System (CMS) that beyond blogging can serve as the basis for pretty much any type of web site imaginable.

By understanding the anatomy of WordPress and how the different pieces go together and interact with each other you can create some truely spectacular sites that look nothing like the classic two-column blogs but still retain all the functionality, ease of use and SEO power that makes the application so popular.

The session will start off with a crash course in WordPress anatomy and how to quickly move beyond the standard templates through some simple theme hacks and CSS. Using the WordPress based sites for Sablok & Sablok and Bellevue Gallery (work in progress) as examples I will demonstrate how to use pages, posts and categories to create strong and functional taxonomies that make for easy navigation as well as management. The session will go on to cover how to use custom templates, conditional custom fields and template tags to create pretty much any layout you can imagine. And to wrap it all up; a brief discussion of why using WordPress as a CMS for “regular” web sites gives the site owner and end user a huge advantage over regular sites and how businesses can increase their web presence and findability by adding a news page or blog to their site and share some of their know-how with the public - for free.

I’ve been designing web sites for close to 10 years now but over the last two years WordPress has become the most imporatnt tool in my web design arsenal. In fact it is now the foundation upon which 80% of my business is built. I’ve learnt most of what I know about the application by reading and listening to the thoughts of others and experimenting with the code and now it’s time I give some of that aquired knowledge back. My blog Design is Philosophy features a series of tutorials and articles on how to customize WordPress to make it do what you want and I’m in the process of developing a free “God Theme” for WordPress that will give the user access to pretty  much everything they need to create web sites using WordPress as the CMS.

A big thanks to the people at Webdesigner Depot for featuring Design is Philosophy in their list of 100 Websites With Outstanding Artistic Design. The props are much appreciated.Take a trip over to the site and check out the other great and unusual designs featured.

The one site missing on the list by the way is Webdesigner Depot itself!

An often overlooked function in the WordPress arsenal is Custom Fields. Overlooked because to most it makes no sense: What do you use a custom field for? And how do you use it? The answers to these questions differ depending on how the WordPress theme has been set up: Custom fields can be used for everything from passing information to plug-ins like Next Gen Gallery to feeding custom areas in the template with information. But it goes way beyond that. Custom Fields can also be used to create advanced layouts and design variances that can be triggered on a page by page or post by post basis. And this tehcnique can be edhanced further by adding conditions to the scripts so that the changes only appear when the field is actually activated.

You can add custom fields to any WordPress post or page through the custom fields interface found right underneath the main text area. The custom field contains two elements; a name and a value. These are pretty self explanatory: When the template asks the server for the name, the value is returned. But this also means that unless the template actually asks for the field by name, nothing is returned. An example to show how this works in real life:

A web site for an art gallery requires each artist page to have a series of sub-pages containing an artists statement, bio, CV and image gallery. Although adding an unordered list directly to the text body of the page would work, it would require the addition of style elements and tags - something WordPress doesn’t like very much. Not to mention it’s also cumbersome and messy. A better solution is to place all the style tags in the template and then just feed the menu in the form of a standard unordered list from a custom field, in this case with the name “artistMenu”. Then all that’s left is to get the template to call for the info in the custom field like this:

When the template is opened, the content of the custom field named “artistMenu” is placed as a string inside the artistMenu div. (To understand exactly how the php code works you can read about the get_post_meta template tag in the WordPress Codex.)

The problem with the example above is that even if there is no custom field defined, the div is still placed in the page taking up space. Not a big problem when it’s just a horizontal menu but if you use a custom field to populate something larger, like an image gallery or a text box, it will look weird if the box is left empty. One way of avoiding this is to make two separate templates, one with the custom field code and one without, but that can quickly become complicated. And the whole idea here is to make things simpler, not more complicated. A better way is to make the code and the call for the custom field conditional on whether the custom field has been defined in the first place. This can be done with a simple if statement:

Now for the really cool stuff: Because we can make custom fields conditional, and because we can populate them with pretty much anything, we can use them not only to add images or text but also to add all new design and layout elements. In the site I built for Sablok & Salbok Notaries Public I used this technique to create a header element that only appears if the custom field is populated by an image or text. The actual appearance of the element is controlled by standard CSS. You can see this layout element as the blue horizontal area in the image and on the front page of the site.

In this particular example the custom field can be populated by an image. Rather than forcing the user to input all the image code in the custom field manually I added some extra code in the template that gathers the width and height of the image and creates the proper element code. As a result all the user has to do is provide the URL for the image. There is also an or condition in the if statement so that the custom field code in the template is triggered either when an image field or a text field is defined:

This just dumped into my inbox. Since so many people use Internet Explorer 6 or 7 and it talks about a very bad security issue I thought it important enough to warrant a repost (for the full details visit http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS08-078.mspx.

Basically the bulletin says that if you have automatic updates turned on, your computer will be updated shortly. This may mean your computer will reboot itself. By the way, if you don’t have auto updates turned on, do so right now. It’s not safe otherwise (that goes for Mac users too btw).

This security update resolves a publicly disclosed vulnerability in Internet Explorer. The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights. The security update addresses the vulnerability by modifying the way Internet Explorer validates data binding parameters and handles the error resulting in the exploitable condition.
This security update also addresses the vulnerability first described in Microsoft Security Advisory 961051.

Microsoft recommends customers prepare their systems and networks to apply this security update immediately, to help ensure that their computers are protected from attempted criminal attacks. Please visit http://www.microsoft.com/protect to apply the security update.

Microsoft will host two Webcasts to address customer questions on this Out-of-Band bulletin:

Title: Information About Microsoft December Out-of-Band Security Bulletin
Date: Wednesday, December 17, 2008 1:00 P.M. Pacific Time (U.S. & Canada)
URL: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032399448&Culture=en-US

Title: Information About Microsoft December Out-of-Band Security Bulletin #2
Date: Thursday, December 18, 2008 11:00 A.M. Pacific Time (U.S. & Canada)
URL: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032399449&Culture=en-US

To remain informed about security threats and solutions, please subscribe to the Microsoft Security News Letter

With the release of WordPress 2.7 Coltrane came the introduction of a new template tag called post_class(). Interestingly I have been using a custom template tag by that exact name for a long time in my themes including the free Typograph. That means when users of Typograph upgrade to WordPress 2.7 Coltrane a conflict occurs between the WordPress functions.php file and the Typograph functions.php file because both define the same template tag.

To solve this issue I have released a new version of the Typograph theme customized for WordPress 2.7 Coltrane. It has been submitted to the WordPress Theme Directory pending approval. In the meantime you can download it directly from my server:

I just updated this site to WordPress 2.7, aka “Coltrane”. Turns out there are some rather interesting template tag changes that have caused some weird problems with my theme. I did a quick cleanup to get things sorted out but I’m pretty sure there’s more work to be done to comply with the new world order. So if you come across something that looks off on this site, please drop me a line so I can fix it.

According to Dictionary.com, the word “blog” is defined as

an online diary; a personal chronological log of thoughts published on a Web page;

This is but one of several definitions but they all contain the same basic elements; words like “personal”, “chronological”, “thoughts” and “diary”. But if you look around the web today or look at the blogs you normally follow, whether they be programming blogs like this one, gossip blogs, tech blogs or political blogs, I am sure you will agree that this classic definition doesn’t fit the bill. To take it to the extreme: How is The Huffington Post - widely lauded as being the best political blog for years running - a “personal chronological log of thoughts” or an “online diary”? Even sites with a strong personal element like Vancouver’s own Miss604 are hard to place under this description. In fact most well read “blogs” are more akin to online magazines than the definition they take their name from.

And that, my friends, strikes at the very heart of today’s question: Does the classic definition of the word “blog” actually fit the understanding of the word any more? Or has the blog evolved into something all together different that no longer fits within its definition? And more importantly, has a divide opened in the use and understanding of the word “blog” in which the internet literati on the one hand and the “commoner” on the other are in fact talking about or envisioning two entirely different things when they use it?

It is my contention that the term “blog” has in fact become a divided one whose meaning and subjective understanding differs so widely depending on the user and interpreter that communication between people placed on opposite sides of the divide for all intents and purposes is meaningless.

This all ties in to how we as humans interpret and understand words. If I say a word like “cat” or “coffee” to another person I am not merely referring to a physical representation of that animal or object, and neither is the understanding of the word by the listener a manifestation of the same. When a word is uttered, written or otherwise communicated, it is laden with understanding based on past history. For example, when I say the word “cat” without referring to a specific one, an image of a poofy orange and yellow cat with thick warm fur fills my mind. But to you it may be a skinny and ugly gray cat with sharp claws that smells. And based on these preconceptions our thoughts and understandings of the word can be widely different. Which is why we react differently to the same situation - we relate the current situation or communication to past events stored in our minds and make snap judgements based on them.

As is the case with the word “blog”. When I say “blog” a myriad of thoughts come to mind, mostly relating to social networking, information sharing, new media, news and current information. But that is because I can be counted in the loose group often referred to as the “internet literati” and because I work with blogs for a living. For the uninnitiated, the commoners, the ones outside of the blogosphere, the word “blog” more often than not has some very different connotations. In fact, to many a blog is little more than a virtual soap box for a vocal majority to share their rants and raves about things that to the common man or woman on the street seem irrelevant and uninteresting.

And that’s a serious problem: Whereas the uninnitiated loose definition of a blog does in fact fit the “classic” definition cited above, when we, the innitiated, and media in general refer to “blogs” and “the blogosphere” we are in fact talking about something else.

What they are referring to is a segmet of blogs that actually provide quality content on a constant basis - web sites that provide a platform for social, political and technological discussion, learning and advancement. Because although it is true that on the whole the majority of blogs out there today fit firmly in the category of “rants and raves about the morbidly irrelevant” there are sites dumped into this category that are relevant, important and informational.

The problem is that because these sites are all thrown together in one big group and there is no real demarkation between the classically defined blogs and those that provide relevant information, linguistically or otherwise, the uninnitiated are likely to write all blogs, regardless of actual value, off as irrelevant. And by doing so they are shutting out a massive and growing source of important information.

As a result, depending on the classification of the person you are talking to, telling them that you are a blogger or asking them to visit your blog can have very different results: While a member of the internet literati will understand that you probably have something of value on offer, an uninnitiated person will likely equate your statement to a confession that you are putting your diary, random photos or links to videos of people doing stupid things online. And they will judge you based on this first impression. Which is relevant because the majority of these “uninnitiated” are the people currently in power, whether it be your employer, your client or your local, municipal, provincial or federal elected representative.

What is needed is a clear demarkation between the classic blog and the one that goes beyond simply providing spurious content to provide actual valued material. In other words we need a new word.

I am curious to know what people in general think of when they hear or use the word “blog”. What is your understanding of that word and what kind of web site do you think of when you use it? Please post your thoughts in the comments below; I am very interested in hearing what you have to say.