July 29, 2008
ALA Survey 2008
The second annual A List Apart web design survey is up. If you design sites professionally, please fill it out! No one else is gathering data on our industry.
July 28, 2008
Revisions, part bleh
As usual, the characters are great, but I have failed to bring the conflict. They’re having a cocktail party in my head, looking at me over the rims of their glasses like, “What? We’re not supposed to like each other?”
Annoying, they are.
Contemplating the monkey
I can’t stop thinking about the process that led to a ceramic monkey trash can arriving on the shelves at Target. I mean, let’s take another look at this thing:
Someone designed that. (“What is missing from my monkey trash can? YES. A banana. That’s it. My work here is done.”) And furthermore, someone else approved the design (“Why yes, this is good, there are Americans who will pay money for this.”) and sent it off to a manufacturing division somewhere. And someone in the manufacturing division said, “Plastics will not do justice to this objet d’art. We need to CLASS THIS BITCH UP. Boys, fire up the kiln.”
And you know what? They were all right. There were at least two Americans who were willing to pay money for this, once it went on the clearance rack. And I have the everlasting joy, the deep-seated satisfaction, of knowing that I married one of them. And that? Is priceless.
ETA: Michael informs me that it’s made of plastic after all — which, I’m sorry, demotes the thing to mere kitsch — and that it’s part of a truly horrifying collection.
Learning, and practicing, and confidence
So, Bear’s new column is up at Subterranean. It’s about learning, and learning how to learn. This made me stop and think:
But there’s a corollary. If all you ever attempt is things you can’t do, the result is discouragement. And also, coming back to things you can do, going over them again and again–like playing scales–builds technique and confidence, and helps to internalize them, make them automatic and effortless… so you have more brain power left over for the new, hard thing you are trying to accomplish.
Seriously. I wish that someone, anyone, had put it like that at any point during school or any of the various kinds of lessons I tried and eventually gave up.
A lot of my failures have to do with my own impatience with myself. I try to dash to the next step without having really mastered the previous one, because — the end! It’s there, I can see it, and I want to be there!
... yeah. Gotta remember to slow down sometimes.
July 26, 2008
New WordPress plugin: Post and Page Excerpt Widgets
Post and Page Excerpt Widgets let you display excerpts from posts or pages in the sidebar. For some reason, page excerpts were taken out of WordPress somewhere along the way, so the widget requires the Page Excerpt plugin to handle those. If The Excerpt Reloaded is installed, the widget will use that function; otherwise it’ll do a normal excerpt.
Unlike any other widget I’ve seen, this one allows you to link the widget title. These widgets do support the usual WP ‘more’ links, but in some situations it makes more sense to link the heading than to append a link. Here, you can do either, neither, or both.
This plugin grew out of some of the custom work I did for Justine’s site. We both wanted the sidebar to contain more information than just links in some cases — upcoming events, for example — but there was no good way to do that without a lot of custom code. Then I found Milan Petrovic’s Multi Instance Widget demo and realized that I could merge my work with his and come up with something that would be useful beyond this project.
July 25, 2008
A quick book note
I’ve been in a pissy mood all day for no good reason. Just now I picked up Robin Benway’s Audrey, Wait!, which has been on the TBR pile since I heard it compared to Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist.
Two pages later, I’m in a better mood. Back to the book now.
ETA: Finished. So much love. You go read now!
July 24, 2008
Revision Control for WP
Revision Control for WP — limits or disables the new revision feature in WordPress 2.6.
July 23, 2008
July 22, 2008
Font Conference
Font Conference — Times New Roman presides as the standard fonts debate whether to allow Zapf Dingbats into the club. Hysterical! (via DF)
July 21, 2008
Essential WordPress plugins
I’ve set up a lot of new WordPress sites lately, and I’ve come up with my own homebrew installation package. All but one of these are admin tools; I don’t have a standard list of theme additions because every site is so different.
- Akismet is the only spam blocker I’ve ever needed with WordPress.
- Manageable is very new, but already indispensable. It adds inline editing to the post/page management screens — you double-click a row in the table, and you can edit just about everything but the content.
- Dashboard Widget Manager lets you turn off dashboard widgets you don’t want and add new ones. (Did you know the Dashboard is wigetized as of 2.5? There just isn’t a built-in manager for it yet.) There aren’t many dashboard-specific widgets available, unfortunately. I’ve learned how to write them, though!
- Database Backup because things will always go wrong.
- Search and Replace is very handy when you’re moving a blog from one domain to another. Since WordPress inserts full URLs when you upload media to a post, you end up with a lot of URLs to change.
- Ozh’s Admin Drop-Down Menus let you move around the admin screens SO much faster.
- My Page Order gives you a drag-and-drop interface for rearranging pages.
- No Self Pings prevents WP from pinging itself when you refer to one of your own posts.
- Clean Notifications sends out uncluttered, HTML-formatted notification emails for things like comment approvals and so forth. These message are much easier to scan than the default plain-text messages WP sends out.
- Subscribe to Comments because really, how often do you remember to check that thread you posted to last week?
- (Added later) Category Selector Back to the Sidebar fixes the most egregious usability problem introduced in the WP 2.5 interface, and puts the category checkboxes back above the fold.
For clients’ sites that use a page as the home page (rather than blog posts), I throw in No Place Like Home. In fact, I wrote that for a client whose home page had to have the same name as another page on her site; we both kept forgetting which was which!
What else do you suggest?
July 20, 2008
Free Tor stuff
To celebrate the launch of Tor.com, they’ve reposting the free giveaways they did as teasers. Among other things, that page is a source for some pretty kick-ass iPhone wallpapers.
July 18, 2008
Gah.
It’s 1am. I’ve spent the last seven hours migrating my sites from the old-and-busted server to the new-hotness server. A few things broke, and my email was bouncing for a while there, but everything seems to have stabilized now. Except me. Me, I go fall over.
July 17, 2008
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
Short version: Joss Whedon has a musical web serial; go watch it.
Longer version: this is the video blog of Dr. Horrible (Neil Patrick Harris), a hapless evil genius who’s trying to perfect a freeze ray that will stop time long enough for him to figure out what to say to the pretty girl at the laundromat (Felicia Day). He’s also awaiting the results of his application to a league of evildoers. His escapades are mostly thwarted by Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion), a beefy guy in a tight T-shirt and improbable gloves. This is a musical, so occasionally everyone just breaks into song… as you do when lamenting the imperfections of your freeze ray.
It goes without saying that it’s hilarious, but the music is surprisingly good.
The last act will be posted tomorrow. The whole thing will be available until midnight (not sure what time zone) Sunday, after which you’ll have to get all three parts on iTunes or wait for the DVD. Go forth and watch!
