11/04/09
Posted in Blogosphere, Design, Interface, Typography, Usability, Wordpress | 1 Comment » 
Tweet This Post
Finally it’s gone live! The fourth design iteration in my blog.
Basically the highlights are:
- Readability: dark text over white background. Graphics and color gone.
- Helvetica, helvetica, helvetica: as much as I love Lucida Grande I found Helvetica to render pages on IE closer to the original than Lucida (blame the usual MSuspects).
- Large fonts: let’s face it, we don’t read blogs. We read feeds and if by chance we land on a blog we skim over the headlines. So I decided to make them really big to make your life easier
- Twitter and Facebook killed the blogging star? No problem. I integrated both of them in the blog. Twitter on the homepage and both in the lifestream section.
- Tweet this: as a Twitter lover (aren’t we all) I usually tweet blog posts I like. Here it can’t get any easier with the Tweet this post link in the header of each post. Look for the birdie.
- My Web 2.0 persona in my blog: Last.fm, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, my shared items on Google and del.icio.us are all shared in the lifestream section.
- Related posts: under each post you’ll find a list of 3 posts related to the one you’re reading. It’s impressive how the automated selection algorithm gets it right (courtesy of Yet Another Related Posts Plugin).
- Categories and tags navigation: at the bottom of each page you’ll find the blog categories. Not 2.0 enough? Click on tags and a nice tagclould will appear to satisfy the folksonomist in you.
Hope you like it.
28/09/08
Posted in Blogosphere, Interface, Usability, Why didn't I think of that?, Wordpress | No Comments » Tweet This Post
When I read the title “How WordPress Has Changed My Life” by Matt Mullenweg in my reader, I thought I was gonna find a marketing talk about how creating the renowned blogging platform WordPress made Matt a better and richer person. Hoping to learn something for myself I bookmarked it for later review.
But the video has little to do with Matt’s wonderful life. It features Glenda Watson Hyatt, the “left thumb blogger” (she can only type with one thumb) telling a lesson on usability and accessibility.
Read the rest of this entry »
15/07/08
Posted in Apple, Interface, Mobility, Wordpress | 4 Comments » Tweet This Post
Join the advanced features on the iPhone, a fair flat rate data plan and the power of open source and you have Wordpress for iPhone, the first open source native app for the iPhone downloadable from the iTunes App store (which means installable with a single tap).
It supports self hosted blogs as well as the free blogs at WordPress.com
You can see all about it this screencast
Behold! You’re seeing the birth of the true mobile internet.
Stay tuned for the release. In the meantime you can install the iPhone Mobile Admin plugin to your blog and manage it from the iPhone’s browser.
20/07/2008 Update: The iPhone Mobile Admin plugin doesn’t work for WP 2.5 nor WP 2.6. Follow the discussion on Dan Cameron’s blog for more info.
30/05/08
Posted in Interface, Mac OS, Usability, Wordpress | 5 Comments » Tweet This Post
I’m writing this on a lobby before a meeting with a client. Thanks to MarsEdit, a nifty desktop blogging app, I can write this while I’m offline and worry later about publishing this post.
Nothing new actually, as I had been using Ecto previously. But somehow, with the improvements to the Wordpress post editor and with the vision of “doing more with less” I ended up not using it at all. It got fed to AppZapper after a while.
But times change and posting in four different blogs currently, I thought I could use a little help from a desktop app.
With that philosophy in mind I tried to use TextMate, which I already use for programming, as a publishing client. TextMate’s versatility allow for that and much more and is the blogging tool of choice for many bloggers.
My experience with TextMate:
- Configuration is done and kept in a flat txt file
- Posts are not automatically synchronized with those of your database. You just write in a flat txt file that gets uploaded via rpc to your blog.
- No local copy of the posts is kept on your computer unless you save the file as a flat text file
- Categories are not passed down to TextMate from WP so you actually need to remember them and add them as meta information on your, again, flat text file
- I didn’t get any further
TextMate may be the best editor for the Mac OS (despite its funny tab management) but as a desktop publishing app is a nightmare.
At that point I left the “do more with less” philosophy to embrace the “do the right thing with the right tool”, which brought me back to Ecto, a nice app that worked extremely fine for me a couple of years ago. But when you use a Mac for a while you start to get very picky about the design of the user interface and functionality of the apps.
You want apps that are laid out nicely, have an internal and external user interface coherence, that are not too much bloated with features and excel at doing the essential. Ecto sure does a lot of stuff but the app somehow doesn’t look and feel right on Leopard.
So I decided to try MarsEdit, a blogging client extremely similar to Leopard’s Mail that also follows the one window approach.
My Experience with MarsEdit:
- Setting up the blogs was as easy as feeding MarsEdit the URLs and entering ID and password. No need to know where the xmlrpc file sits
- I automatically downloaded my 10 last posts and all my available categories
- No learning curve. Posting is as easy as sending a mail
- A live preview that shows you the final render of the post as you type. No need to reload constantly
- Ability to use TextMate (or any) as your favorite external editor
- Blog this! Bookmarklet on your browser
- Flickr integration. Enter you FlickrID and password, authorize the app, and all your pics are ready to be blogged
- Upload files with just drag and drop on your post
- Easily republish same content to another blog
- Spellcheck as you type
- Applescript support
- Works with WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, Drupal, and Vox
- Growl! integration
I use MarsEdit to post to:
ganyet.com
iosephdurgell.org
RAC1.org/elmon
wearemortensen.com/blog
21/12/07
Posted in Design, Programming, Typography, Web 2.0, Wordpress | 3 Comments » Tweet This Post
An excellent pick of resources for web designers. Blogs, tutorials, fonts, themes, stock photos, CSS templates and many more for you to choose from. Not the usual free-for-all crappy stuff you find around.
Head to forwebdesigners.com (the name says it all, doesn’t it?) and start browsing and downloading.
A word of advice: you can spend so much time browsing cool stuff that you may end up doing nothing. But you probably know the feeling if you’re reading this.
07/11/07
Posted in Apple, Wordpress | 5 Comments » Tweet This Post
Just installed the iPhone Mobile Admin for Wordpress, activated it and accessed the interface from the iPhone’s Safari.
A clean iPhone Wp Admin comes up and I start typing (tapping actually).
I guess that if I keep postin this way I’ll became a power virtual keyboard user.
06/11/07
Posted in Blogosphere, Design, Wordpress | 5 Comments » Tweet This Post
As usual I got fed up with my blog design and functionalities and as usual I can’t do anything else until I completely redesign it. It’s quite absorbing to the point that I can barely blog on the old one when I’m working in the new design.
This time I’ve gone for a much simpler design sticking to one column layout ditching the side navigation bar.
Another new concept on the blog is the aggregation of some of the many platforms where I publish contents: twitter, del.icio.us and the public part of my Google news reader.
Whether it’s a post written specifically for the blog, a bookmark on del.icio.us, a tweet or a shared article in Google reader, they all are treated equal: the latest one becomes the latest post and takes the place at the top of the page (even a small tweet). Sources outside Wordpress are syndicated automagically using the Feed Wordpress plugin (not perfect though as it produces more often than not duplicate entries).
A lot of time has been invested in Information Architecture and graphic design. At a latter stage I also integrated some of the jQuery framework capabilities. I’m afrait that I just scratched the surface but it’s clear to me that jQuery is really powerful and well architectured framework. In future projects I’ll keep it in mind as early as design time as it can really influence the interface and thus the Information Architecture.
As we all know we don’t live in a perfect world. If we did we’d all be using Firefox (or any W3C compliant web browser). The last days have been invested wasted in tweaking and hacking the CSS for Internet Explorer 6 and trying to work some magic out of the hideous browser. All credit goes to Rudewoikz.
All in all a very happy new start for an ordinary blogger.
Final note: Please make life easier by using Firefox!
