Growing up is optional

Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.

Pablo Picasso’s statement (often misquoted as “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.”) is something that I have no problem with. I’m under no illusions about my design skill. I do copy. Being labelled as a ‘bad artist’ by Picasso is a valid criticism. Although I try to copy the inspiration, not the outcome as suggested by Cameron Moll.

If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Unlike Isaac Newton, I’m still climbing up the giants. I’m nowhere near sitting on their shoulders.

So where does this leave me? I’ve never studied design, art or any creative subjects. Unfortunately I’m one of those ‘I know what I like when I see it’ kind of people, but I am trying to learn about good design.

I’ve already decided to stick to the 2 (or 3) column layout. It’s part of meeting expectations: blog users generally expect blogs to be laid-out a certain way. I have nothing innovative that requires me to change it.

Colours are something I’m not very good with. I’ll probably just pick something from the top 10 designers’ colours and base a palette on that. Or maybe one of my photos. Font selection is a mystery to me.

I’ll take my inspiration from the what I see around: online and off. Rough sketches will follow. Critique is appreciated.

A while back I wrote about my #1 Google phrases. Guess what? I’m #1 for the phrase “#1 Google phrases” (I don’t know why I bothered to look). Also, I’ve made page 1 for “coolest websites” (7) and “coolest looking websites” (4).

While it’s not “cool websites” it still brings in a bit of traffic (part of the long tail)

“bmx for everybody” still pulls up this page (and this one at #2). I’m still #1 for Joseph Lindsay, #2 for Joe Lindsay and #2 for specialist generalist and #1 for just like everybody else.

So as Richard asked earlier, what are you number one for?

So far so good. I have installed John Sinteur’s ‘Block-lists anti-spam measures‘.

Not a single spam comment since. Woohoo!

These are the requirements/feature list of the previously mentioned rebuild I have so far, and some reasoning/notes

Comment Preview

There are a few ways to do this. i like the on-the-fly Javascript versions (e.g. //hicksdesign) and also the submitted form preview. The server method can help preven some of the comment spam, but the spammers will quickly figure this out

Search Hilite

A plugin that comes as standard with WordPress, that hilites search terms if the user was referred by a major search engine, or WP’s built in search

Remember Commenter

this is also an out-of-the-box WP feature. I like the way that it’s done at Binary Bonsai and Seriocomic

del.icio.us links

As I have already. I may get it converted to a WP plugin, or not.

Paged categories

The category pages get too long. I want to limit the number of posts per page. I haven’t found anybody that has done this already in WP, so it could be another plugin for me to do.

Live Search

Livesearch uses XMLHttpRequest to send search requests to the server and display result without having to load a new page. This one may not make it to the final version. I like the idea, but I haven’t thoroughly studied the downsides

Text Area Styling

I hate the default monospace font that textareas use

Comment validation

I believe that WP developers are working on this. It’s a nice to have, not a must have.

Some sort of Photo/Gallery interface

I want to build in a facility to easily upload and manage photos. Early thoughts are a plugin that works with flickr, but I may use Singapore

User Icons/Avatars

Like on Zooiblog

Noteworthy Comments

The ability to hilight noteworthy comments. Although I get so few that they are all noteworthy

Related posts

I’ll do some more research, but I think there is already a WP plugin that does this

Spam filtering

There are a few different paths I could go down

Let me know if there are any other features that you would like to see.

I’ve decided to rebuild my blog. I’ve also decided to document it as I go. Whenever I do a site rebuild from scratch I learn some cool stuff as I try to make it do stuff that I haven’t done before. Sometimes I’ll still be using a technique a year later. Other times I’ll look at my code and think ‘What the hell was i thinking?’

The process will take an unknown amount of time, but I’d like to have it done before I get back to work after Christmas. I’ve decided to stick with WordPress as my publishing tool. Normally I would recommend not choosing a specific piece of software until after the requirements are documented, but I just like WordPress. However, it will be modified, both with plugins and my own hacks. The project is going to follow this process:

1. Requirements / Specification
2. Information Architecture
3. Design
4. Build
5. Launch

I’ll post what I’m doing and how it proceeds as it happens. Any feedback is appreciated at any stage

When designing web pages I don’t usually think too much about how they will be accessed. Usually I just assume that users will have a PC with a browser and/or feedreader. However, I gradually beginning to think that the mobile phone is going to become the main way people access the www (note the distinction between www and internet).

There are a few reasons why I think this, the main one being that cellphones are everywhere. I’m not sure of the exact numbers but I’m reasonably sure that cellphones out number PCs.

My thorough research (sometimes I travel home on the train that ends up full of school kids) indicates there are more cellphones per head in a high school classroom that anywhere else in the world. It’s no surprise that telecom wants to build cell towers on school grounds.

Anyway the point of my post is primarily a reminder to myself: pages have to work at 200x200px. The interface is likely to be fewer than 20 buttons.

I’d been thinking for a while about the links interface in WordPress. It wasn’t as flexible as I wanted it to be so I decided to try to write a WordPress plugin using Magpie to use my del.icio.us feed. After a few hours of fudging around with it I was getting somewhere. Then I broke it and couldn’t rollback. (There’s a lesson.) Anyway, rather than carry on with the plugin, I hacked the index file like this (ala Richard Eriksson, via Jon Hicks):

<!-- Joe's Delicios Links -->
<li>Joe's del.icio.us links
<ul>
<?php
require_once ("wp-content/plugins/magpierss-0.61/rss_fetch.inc");
$yummy = fetch_rss("http://del.icio.us/rss/nzjoe");
$maxitems = 10;
$yummyitems = array_slice($yummy->items, 0, $maxitems);
foreach ($yummyitems as $yummyitem) {
	print '<li>';
	print '<a href="';
	print $yummyitem['link'];
	print '"';
	if (isset($yummyitem['description'])) {
		print ' title="';
		print $yummyitem['description'];
		echo htmlentities($yummyitem['description']);
		print '"';
		}
	print'>';
	print $yummyitem['title'];
	echo htmlentities($yummyitem['title']);
	print '</a>';
	print '</li>';
}
?>

not pretty code, but it works. Now I just have to remember to give all of my delicious posts meaningful titles and descriptions.

Of course this could be used for any RSS feed. And you can also give delicious links a specific tag for when you want them appear on your site and point it at the feed for that delicious tag. (e.g http://del.icio.us/rss/myname/mytag)

UPDATE 2: Contact me for the latest version. WP does funny things with the single and double quotes

When it became public that Gmail was introducing POP access I thought it would be fantastic. So once given access I setup Thunderbird as per the instructions and 20MB of messages get downloaded to my inbox. I proceed to sort the sent and received into their appropriate folders. Then I realise: I actually like working in Gmail better than Thunderbird.

It’s not often that I like web apps over their desktop equivalent (although is describing them as equivalent a fair comparison?) I’m can’t explain why; I guess it’s just like not being able to explain why some people prefer chocolate to strawberry. I’m interested to hear what others think.