Checkout this short video from the nice people at WordPress TV.

I’m excited about the Syntax Highlighting, as well as how easy it looks to be able to add, remove and customise widgets in the sidebar. Drag and drop interfaces make it feel like FUN, when your actually doing WORK.

I’ll be upgrading soon, and you can bet I’ll post all about that too.

The first is an introductory video to Twitter, by Twitter; the other is just plain funny. Props to the folks at Sprint.

I recently completed a website for a local photographer, and I thought it would be a good chance to discuss what I learned, what went wrong, and what I’d do better next time.

What I learned..

This project required a large number of photographs to be displayed in galleries, under a few different categories. The client already had an active Flickr account, with plenty of photos already online. I had recently played around with integrating flickr images on my site, after following an article from CSS-Tricks.com.

This solution wasn’t quite sufficient, as clicking on an image thumbnail would send the user offsite, to Flickr. There probably is a solution like this that allows thumbnails to load larger images from flickr within the page out there somewhere, but rather than reinvent the wheel (and charge the client extra to do so), I went for a solution called flickrSLiDR, a prebuilt service to integrate a Flickr slideshow into a web page.

This solution made things quicker and easier. Ofcourse the downside to using a prebuilt component such as this one, is the limited ability to control the look and feel of the final slideshow (the black background wasn’t optional, and it wasn’t particularly clever at resizing horizontal or vertical images to fit the space, unless the slideshow was square in proportion). Still, the advantages this prebuilt solution offered far outweighed the minor features it lacked, and the client now has a series of robust galleries on their site that they can update themselves, simply by updating their flickr account. A win for everyone, I think.

What went wrong..

I had a few cross browser compatability issues with the Flickr Slideshows. The code that flickrslidr dishes up to embed the slideshow in your page comes in two varieties: an object element, or an iframe element. The Object tag was the ‘Standards Compliance Mode’ option; ofcourse I later realised this was useless, as their are issues with rendering the object element in IE7. A further look at the flickrSLiDR website mentioned the IE issues, and gave a workaround. Long story short, the workaround seemed to solve the ‘object not appearing’ issue, but gave me another issue (the object and the page containing it were forced to display unnecessary scrollbars.) There was a solution to hide the scrollbars if IE7, however this meant that the entire page had no scrollbars (not a problem until someone viewed it on a laptop).

In the end, I went for the option of embedding the slideshow using an iframe. As I was using a DocType of XHTML 1.0 Transitional, this option was accepted, and the site still validated fine. The CSS validated fine as well, which was great. (A lesson learned in standards compliance for me).

What I’d do better next time.

I had some trouble scoping the project at the beginning. It was hard to determine the amount of pages, and development time needed to acheive the FlickrSLiDR solution that I ended up with. I’m sure other people will agree, it’s hard to estimate how long it will take you to do something you’ve never done before. It’s all a valuable learning experience.

I’ve also got some new vector illustrations up on my Illustration page. Managed to use the flickr API to dynamically display images from flickr (again, got the idea from css-tricks.com.)

So I’m pretty happy with that. I’m currently working on a site for a local photographer, and I’m managing to work these two features into her project as well. It’ll make updating images nice and easy for her. I’m thinking of using twitter as a simple way for her to post updates to her front page. I wonder if this will help in SEO (frequently updated content and all). If anyone has any idea, I’d love to know.

I’ve just finished some updates on a clients site: www.jetboatrides.com.au. I’ve updated the contact for, a bit of content, and they’re looking at delivering a short promotional video. I’ll announce it when it’s online.

I’m looking forward to the new year, there are a few projects on the horizon, and I’ll be focusing on web design work full time, which will be an exciting change. I’d be glad to hear from anyone who has a web site project they’d like to discuss. I’d also like to talk with like minded people currently working in the industry / in Geelong, who may be interested in collaborating.

Feel free to check out some of my pages. There’s a website page that has been fleshed out a bit. I need to add heaps more content, but it’s getting there slowly. I’ve been having fun with the CSS sticky footer technique. I had it working properly on each page, but I’ve since added some drop shadow div’s around the main content area, and I think that has thrown it out. I’ll keep perservering.

I might look at integrating a Twitter feed next.

I’m going to keep making posts about my progress in WP. I think it’s a good way to get experience in managing posts, and familiarize myself with the WP backend.

I might try to get one or two people to visit this site too, and post comments so I can learn how to manage and moderate comments etc. I’ve got a bit of freelance work in Wordpress at the moment, which is great. I’ve just invested in a new laptop too, and I’m currently getting it up and running with all the relevant software I’ll need. I’ve found an extension for Dreamweaver called… Themedreamer. It lets you work on WP themes and preview them on your local computer, without having to upload them to a server. It replaces all the php generated content (ie. the Loop the grabs posts from the database) with temporary content (Lorem Ipsum). This means I can make changes to layout, design, etc and see the changes without making the changes to the live site.

I’ve got a few plugins. I’m testing out the All-in-one-SEO plugin. After I write this post, I’ll see if I can find it in google.

Also, I’ve found a couple of great resources that are worth a mention. The vodcasts from CSS-Tricks.com are really interesting. Also, I’ve started using skype as part of my current freelance work. I know Skype isn’t exactly a big secret, but it’s great to finally start using it. Finally, I was put onto twiddla.com the other day. This site allows you to login, invite a friend over the net to log in with you, and lets you both draw in a Windows Paint style online application. It’s great for remote collaborating, but I think it would also be fun to draw funny pictures in it with a friend over the net.

The screencasts from css-tricks.com on ‘Designing for WordPress’ have been very helpful.

I’ve added the Akismet Plugin, which is the main WP plugin for filtering Spam comments. I’ve also added the All-In-One SEO plugin. I haven’t explored it’s features yet; I think it optimizes your post titles, and lets you add meta data to posts, etc.

Will post agian soon with further progress.

Check back soon for more progress..