Defaulting to move onward

I decided to put on the default 2010 theme along with updating to the beta with the sole reason being that I know what I’m like and having this up for a bit will inspire me onto the redesign I’ve been looking to do. What can you expect from the new design? If you look at the sidebar and footer there is a hint at the route I’m going. To the side currently is an RSS of my tumblr blog ‘Espresso’. I am going to basically have a double sided blog here at Diary of a website with both longer posts and also tumblr. Lets face it sometimes life takes over as does work however my tumblr keeps ticking over and I want to now have this as a part of this blog rather than keeping them apart. I do not plan to go 100% tumblr this is just about getting one place for all the content. I will get into the reasons more later this is more of a ‘yes I know you’ve landed on the default theme and this is the reason why post’.

Essays and shots

I really like the idea of long posts but I also like the instant nature of twitter and tumblr. To me it’s the difference between a shot of espresso and a good big mug of coffee – sometimes you want one, sometimes the other. Many times for instance it may have seemed I’ve fallen off the planet because of this fragmented online existence. I want to bring the 2 sides I love together in this one place. So, that’s basically it the notion of essays and shots – that’s what this redesign and change has at the core.

ETA

Plans you set times to for personal work just tend to fail or do in my case at the moment – therefore I am setting one ‘plan’ that by July 1st there will be an original design here as opposed to this default 2010 theme one. I am contemplating a live redesign over a few weeks but will see how that goes – I quite like that idea but I need to get some of the core skeleton in place before doing that. If I do it would be more of a partial live redesign in that sense. One thing I do know is this design is going to be at it’s core very simple I want to get back to the roots of what a blog is for me and to do that I need to strip this all away – this default theme is the start of that process. Tell you what though, rolling a blog back to a default state is oddly refreshing and I’m already starting to see where I want to go clearer than I could with a design sitting on this site.

For me, the ‘zone’ is not a set place I like to vary up even in my own home the actual location of that. I can just as easily get in the ‘zone’ at my desk, on the sofa or even in my bed before I go to sleep at night. What makes me get in this zone though is the key. The actual components are basic:

We all have to start somewhere in this crazy industry. The starting point when looking at WordPress was always the default theme. I think even now fondly of my first stumbles across the code. Whilst your old default wasn’t perfect (nothing is in this crazy world) it was a lead in and the bar was not so high that as a fledgling designer you didn’t end up crying in a corner. Things were there all in the code, you could go deeper if you wanted sure but the default theme lead you by the hand through the first pitfalls and onto standing on your own two feet. It had just the right balance of complexity to give hints to the power of WordPress whilst holding a new person’s hand.

Times change, I get that but it saddens me you seem to be forgetting one of the key benefits that your old theme had to those starting out. When you look at the new default a learner is faced with functions, clauses, loops, a whole barrage of things they won’t know. Sure, if you’ve worked with themes for a while you can handle it – heck you can even eventually find where the comment form is because it sure isn’t in comments.php. That’s not the point though the default isn’t for those that know things it never was – or at least this is the way I feel. It’s my opinion that if you know you either have a custom theme or you would go on to develop your own. Don’t get me wrong in this I love the extra functionality but does it have to be at the expense of the biggest glory that was the old default theme – the fact it brought people into our industry and gave them that initial confidence to grow into amazing theme designers.

I hope you will take this with the kind nature it’s being sent to you, I beg you to think of those starting out in the industry with this theme. Perhaps it’s an oversight you will sort before your final launch – I hope that as you’ve never let me down before with regards to recognising education of new users both front and back end. Just so we’re clear of my good intentions I won’t mention the ugly of your tab experiment in the admin menu.. ok?

All the best
Me

What really gives me the warm fuzzies is how this thing has spiralled from the seed Anton placed on the web. I’ve been a member now for a few weeks and it’s now becoming a little ‘voice’ encouraging me to meet that weekly deadline and blog about something. I’d like to really thank Anton for doing this as it’s great to see blogging coming back when so many of us have fallen by the sideline victims of Twitter and Tumblr instant gratification.

There is a phrase that there is safety in numbers and Project 52 to me is in part about this. I love how the web can become a catalyst for shared experiences despite the faceless remote nature of it as a technology. People that have never physically met can link up and work towards a goal. To me adventures like Project 52 allow for this. I look forward to being part of it and encourage others to sign up and get involved. There is something about a blog post that other more instant services can’t fulfill and if Project 52 sees a return to this then it can only be a good thing in my book.

Little bit often

If you saw the world as a whole or even the universe it would seem you were so small that you didn’t count. A task is like this. It can seem something will take so long there is no point in dealing with it now. What about breaking it down into manageable chunks – that becomes less daunting. You can easily fit in 10 minutes or smaller chunks to combat the task. An hour long task broken into 10 minutes is just 6 small times you have to deal with. Got to sort through 100gb of images… just break down into 1gb a time and there you go task done.

The Dung Beetle approach to time management

There used to be this advert for Kit Kat (a chocolate bar) which featured a little dung beetle pushing along a large ball and then taking a break from it to have a ‘kit kat’. Some dung beetles roll their name sake into large balls to store for food. They move this balls by slowly progressing along able to move sizes far larger than their size. They take their time and they progress, they get worn out they take a break and start again. Taking this approach to achieving something is a great method of chipping away at a large task. The phrase ‘a little bit often’ really does apply to good project bashing.

How many of us have tried the day a week or half day where we have to focus on things. I know for me this never has worked. The simple fact is you need to be regimented about breaking things down and dealing with it in manageable slices. You eat bite by bite and take that approach with tasks.

Squirreling time

Breaking things down into small pieces means you can dip in and out and before you know it have it done just like the dung beetle. Perhaps though to go with this we should look at another animal and Squirrel away some time. Think of your day and I’m fairly sure you can find at least 30 minutes in any day you’ve wasted. By taking those 30 minutes and committing them to a task you could roll that ball quite a long way.

The thought of starting is stopping

Sometimes just by the thought of starting you instantly enter into the internal dialogue that results in stopping. Why bother? You don’t have time now? Isn’t this dialogue though a problem? Isn’t it taking longer to have that then it would be to achieve a small chunk of the task? We find so many ways of distracting ourselves from just doing.

Out of site is out of mind

If you put it in a list no matter how great that funky all dancing application is you are filing it away and allowing the excuse of ‘out of sight out of mind’ to creep in. To do lists are fine but they are easy to hide away in a really nice shiny application or notebook. One thing I like to do is use the Apple Stickies application. Each time I open my desktop there facing me are the things I have to deal with. I keep stickies specifically for my ‘always mean to’ tasks rather than my daily tasks. Nothing like booting up your computer to see them staring in your face to get you to do something.

Make 2010 the year of the dung beetle

Personally, 2010 is going to be the year I finally put those niggling conversations that stop doing to the side and ‘just act’. It’s more a case of building habits at the start but just like anything the more you do it the more natural it becomes. Time management need not take time and achieving your goals need not take the same amount of planning as a military campaign. Sometimes taking the simplest approach and just acting in the moment is the best one.

So why the change?

As there is official word yet the assumption has to be due to the merge into the core WordPress site. It’s done (I assume) to avoid confusion with users as a WordPress site can of course have multiple users. However, is this really enough of a reason to cause this confusion and if it is is MS even the right name? Is it going to be really multiple sites (across various domains) or is it just going to stay as many blogs under one domain?

Branding 101

Any designer or infact anyone that has gone through any branding training knows of course that identity and consistency are a key. On the surface if you use the short form only one letter has changed but it is an important change. Basically the entire name is changed from user to site thus renaming the actual product if this does go ahead. What if Google suddenly become Woggle or MicroSoft suddenly became MicroHard?

Why care?

To me the huge draw over the ‘Press Family’ of products is their strong identity despite being an open source project proving that all though many hands can make light work a strong identity can be fostered. I’m often amazed at how many I’d have even assumed wouldn’t have known about it do. WordPress Mu has been a slightly different story more of the cool place those in the know hung out at sometimes (this is in part undermining it’s true reach to illustrate a point). However, it’s been getting known and having a name known is half the battle to getting it to reach critical mass. Sure, having it merged into WordPress core which is what is happening will result in this saturation as it’s now right there but changing the name will negatively impact from other view points.

At this point you may be thinking so what. My point about deluting branding may seem valid, it may seem awkward we’re going through a name change but nothing more. Thing is though this change won’t effect those that at this point even know about it. One of the major ‘points’ for me and in particular the people I’ve encountered outside of the geek bubble that use the ‘Press Family’ products is the ability for you to not have to live in the bubble to know or use them. These are the people who will probably now have a ‘wtf’ moment over the name and even to not dumb them down think it’s an entirely new product. One of the things that really attracts me and others as a designer and as a user is the ease of use and ability to get resources easily to overcome issues. Think about the case of an end user.

David wants to have a set up a multiple user site for his village allowing villagers to get in touch with each other. He finds out he can do it now through WordPress. All is good it works it’s set up but now he wants to after having it up delve a bit more into customisation. He goes to Google enters WordPress Multi-Site and instantly for at least a while the resources he will find will either be less with more referencing WordPress Multi-User and confusing as also he gets entries for WordPress Multi-Site. What is this Multi-User?

Finding information suddenly got harder which is a big bad thing. Think of all the articles out there referencing WordPress Multi-User now either they have to be changed or a certain portion of people will not consider them relevant. One of the great things about the ‘Press Family’ is the ability and encouragement to a certain degree to get your hands a bit dirty no matter what level you are – by making information harder to find this is going to at least for the change over period be a problem.

What’s in a name?

Not only is it going to cause confusion there is the added loss of unique particularly if as with WordPress Multi-User WordPress Multi-Site inevitably shortens down to WordPress MS. MS has 2 connections you can think of straight away: the illness Multiple Sclerosis (as pointed out well in the comments over at WPMU and MicroSoft. Let alone if you reduce that to WPMS being a woman I can’t help thinking it may need chocolate and a wide berth once a month. In one foul swoop this name change if it does happen will remove the actual unique identity of the product – surely that’s not exactly a bright move.

Consistency shouldn’t be a second thought

One of the huge bees in my bonnet with regards to the Press Family has always been consistency. I was glad that this seemed to be at least in naming conventions and identity a winning battle. Occasionally when working on a theme / hook you encounter something that makes you do the quizical face over why that name and not that. On the whole though the consistency is kept and that’s a huge point. If the idea is to make it as big as it can be consistency should be a huge point. By changing the name like this you dilute, you confuse.

Praying for change

My hope is that this won’t happen. It probably will but there we go. If it’s in the code base it’s not set in stone so I can hope for now. It may seem a small point but even if you don’t consider brand consistency ease of information access is a rather significant one. Bottom line anyone with a wpmu domain / working on the range of products will be impacted a lot by the merge into the core – perhaps I was wishing on fairies that the good wasn’t coming with confusion bad. It was always going to be a slightly difficult if exciting birth but this only adds to the complications and problems facing the community at this point. Don’t get me wrong in this article, I’m looking forward to the merge just not sold on the name change.

Let’s break with tradition though and start by looking at the end of the year. I am now working regularly freelancing over at Incsub and can’t express enough my huge smile this gig has given me and I’ve only been at it just over a month so far. I’m in awe to be honest of what they are doing and thrilled to be part of the team. My role so far is focusing mainly on BuddyPress theme design and development.

For a long while I’ve wanted to focus my business majorly on ‘the Press family’ of products (BuddyPress, Wp-Mu, BB-Press and WordPress to be exact) and with me working at Incsub I’m able to do just that. Prior to this I was able to inch it up to a majority percentage of ‘Press Family’ but now it’s complete game on. I’m still going to be doing freelance work just less projects with Incsub filling the majority of my hours. I still can’t quite believe my luck in being asked to join the team and for want of gushing too much about the whole thing I’m making sure the eggs I count are polished and pixel perfect so it continues. I’m loving the new challenges and the team over at Incsub is pure gold with everyone being so damn good at what they do it makes me want to up my game about a billion percent which is something I relish after these years of freelancing. I’m learning so much each day that my mind is spinning in a good way.

So why do I describe 2009 as a wild ride? At the start it all was good freelancing was a bit less due to the downturn and me doing a lot of work for startups/smaller companies. I ticked on though and through the year had a lot of great people I worked with on cool projects. Work wasn’t really the wildest ride for me though I was finding I need to think about where in this crazy world of freelance I was going. I can’t remember where I read about it but I remember reading around Spring about ‘finding your niche’ as a freelancer (there are probably a bucket full of posts about that in a variety of places though. As I now face 2010 I feel focused more than I have for a while now and renewed about what direction I’m going in as a designer and in general life.

As many of you will have noticed the posting on this blog has well for want of a better word been ‘lacking’ in the past year. I’m sure the web is full of ‘I’ll do better / post more’ posts so to try and avoid duplicating that here I’ll just say I’ve got plans for this blog too. With my work focus I want to bring the focus a bit more back to this blog. I have already started working out an actual posting schedule (something that was missing for a while). My commitment is to at least 2 posts a week what forms those will take isn’t decided but expect to see the focus around design still of course but maybe with some Press family focus too as that is firmly in my sights now. I’ve also got plans to get this blog back to it’s roots by drawing on the ‘Diary of a website’ concept a bit more and going through some from design to launch tales of some of my projects. I’ve also got some new projects coming up I’ll let you all in on soon that I’m rather excited about.

So there you have it that was 2009, this is 2010. A big thank you to those of you who stayed about last year and here’s to the next year which I face with a bouncy excitement about.

Download and I hope you enjoy them.

Setting the foundations: Creating some css classes and elements

First off, we want to set up a 2 styles – 1 for hiding an element and 1 for our noscript alternative. We could use display:none but setting it as a style gives us more flexibility.

.hide{
	display: none;
}
#noScript{
	background-color: #eeeeee;
	padding: 10px;
	border: 2px solid #cccccc;
}

I’ve given the noscript element a bit of styling you can of course change this to suit your requirements. As this is a test example I’m going to put everything directly into one page – you should of course have seperate stylesheets and javscript files if using in an actual project. Lets create those css elements now in html.

<div id="noScript">Content when JavaScript isn't enabled</div>
<div id="showScript" class="hide">Content when JavaScript is enabled</div>

As you can see we’ve got a few more things to note here. We’re using ids to uniquely identify these elements. I’ve not set a style for showScript but you can easily or just have it as an empty style simply to be used as a container to show the content if JavaScript is enabled. Note also I’ve added the hide class to the showScript, this ensures to start off you are hiding this element. This is important as the JavaScript will be switching the elements therefore we want by default to show the noScript and hide showScript.

We should now have the basic foundations in our code to move onto adding the JavaScript.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
	"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
 
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
	<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
 
	<title>untitled</title>
	<style type="text/css">
		.hide{
			display: none;
		}
		#noScript{
			background-color: #eeeeee;
			padding: 10px;
			border: 2px solid #cccccc;
		}
	</style>
</head>
<body>
	<div id="noScript">Content when JavaScript isn't enabled</div>
	<div id="showScript" class="hide">Content when JavaScript is enabled</div>
</body>
</html>

Adding the JavaScript

Now we can get down to adding the JavaScript and last element of this technique.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
 	jQuery(document).ready(function($){
    		$('#noScript').addClass('hide');
		$('#showScript').removeClass('hide');
	});
</script>

I’ve linked to google’s jQuery here for this example however of course you can locally link to JQuery. As you can see we’ve got 2 things going on here. As the page loads we add the class hide to noScript and remove the class hide from showScript. This will simply make the content in showScript now visible.

We should now have the basic framework to show and hide different content depending on whether JavaScript is enabled or not.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
	"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
 
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
	<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
 
	<title>untitled</title>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript">
	 	jQuery(document).ready(function($){
	    	$('#noScript').addClass('hide');
			$('#showScript').removeClass('hide');
		});
	</script>
	<style type="text/css">
		.hide{
			display: none;
		}
		#noScript{
			background-color: #eeeeee;
			padding: 10px;
			border: 2px solid #cccccc;
		}
	</style>
</head>
<body>
	<div id="noScript">Content when JavaScript isn't enabled</div>
	<div id="showScript" class="hide">Content when JavaScript is enabled</div>
</body>
</html>

Why not use noscript?

The main reason to not use noscript is that using this method we can offer actual alternative functions rather than just saying ‘Please turn on JavaScript’. We can literally put anything in the div noScript. Going this route we can make sure there isn’t just a blank page and some of the functionality is still there that we are delivering via JavaScript such as maybe showing a database result rather than a slideshow of posts in WordPress.

I am aware there may be arguments about doing anything intensive in a hidden div if JavaScript is on for that you’d want to take a more advanced approach involving either variable passing by sessions or other methods – I’m keeping it simple here though as this is about simplicity and working for most cases.

There is a html link for the demo try turning javascript on and off to see what happens. You can also download and use the code as you want. Click to view demo

So there you have it, why use boring noscript messages? Why not liven up your site but actually offering a decent JavaScript off option?

Initially the idea seems sensible, you’re in control of the way your business runs and able to make those decisions in the past that you inherited through business practices written in stone they were that old. In past companies the paper trail of the company has been more akin to snowflakes than requirements. I identified a few areas I thought I could use as my starting blocks to achieving a more ‘green’ approach to my business practice.

The successes and partial successes

Most of these are fairly obvious but I thought I’d write about my experiences here. It’s been months since I actually even had to use a stamp or print anything out. My printer actually sits unplugged in as it’s simply not used anymore.

• Studio heated using wood burner
• Paperless business: this ranges from invoicing through to contracts.
• Paperless accounting.
• Digital resources: rather than printed magazines I’ve turned to use digital versions.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these points and I’ll explain some of the hurdles as there certainly were some and things still aren’t perfect on all fronts.

Natural heating

This perhaps is one of the single best things I could have done beyond most other things. When we moved to our new property we were lucky enough to have in the studio space a wood burner. I can’t sign it’s praises enough both as a green option and life enhancing choice. I think it’s fairly simple to see how it’s ‘greener’ than our oil central heating or even electrical, but the bit I didn’t think about was the actual emotional and inspirational impact of a burning fire in the room. The UK quite frankly is various shades of grey for the winter months and having a wood burning stove in the room really lifts you. It may be monotone outside but I’m snuggly and warm and noticed it really helps inspiration wise. We’re lucky as have a free supply of wood so this could become expensive and have ‘green’ costs in sense of fuel delivery if that option wasn’t there. Another great use for our wood burner is paper isn’t needed to be shredded anymore we just put it on the fire (of course you can’t burn plastics) – something very therapeutic to setting fire to old bills.

Paperless office

It’s now close to over a year since any quote or invoice came from my business in a non PDF format. I encourage clients to not print out however I can’t control what happens their end. This has worked out well for me and is something that quite simply I can’t even think about changing back to.

Paperless contracts sound fairly simple in practice it’s not, the problem though is getting clients to adopt this method too. I spent the first year implementing this frequently sending with the contract emails a little how to for this however it was on the whole ignored. I’ve been considering various services that allow digital signatures however so far yet to explore this to the full focus it really requires.

Paperless accounting

This isn’t specifically something I did as much as a natural thing we all do now. It really kicked in for me about 6 months ago when we didn’t have a car for a month and a bit. The last bit of paper banking was some clients still paying by cheque, as I couldn’t even get to a bank without quite the hike I finally had an excuse to train the last dinosaur client into using BACS payments. I noticed the other day that NatWest now have an iPhone application and I’m hopeful that my bank HSBC won’t be far off as this really is something that would benefit me. Whilst paperless banking works I personally won’t access it unless I own that device and using the browser through the iPhone is a case of too much information on too small a screen with regards to my banking interface. My bank uses a dongle to connect for security so it’s a lot more secure than some I’ve seen, but cautious nature is always best with online banking.

The biggest fight for me with regards to online banking was statements. It took months to despite ticking the ‘do not send’ box get my bank to stop sending me statements – they still do on my ISA. My mind boggles how hard this process was for me and I can only hope that I just was a slip through the net on this and that everyone trying to take a paperless approach to banking doesn’t have to go through this hoop.

Digital resources and magazines

There was a time each month I’d end up adding 4-6 small trees to my already large wood collection of magazines. I still have a few shelves of these but for a while now unless it’s got a digital version I simply don’t get that magazine. It really was brought home to me our last move when I had 3 boxes just of magazines. Digital magazines are far easier to search, get information and even grab articles from so aside from the ‘green’ element really are a far superior method for me. Downside is Ikea maybe won’t get me buying a new bookcase this year. I also now tend to use far more blogs and my RSS feeder subscriptions probably count for 50% of my new information that in past I would have got from magazines only 2-3 years ago.

The failures

One major area so far I’ve failed in is moving from moleskins to a digital sketch book. It simply hasn’t worked for me so far and I always fall back on using the moleskin. It’s one area I’m really keen to progress with. I use a digital scrapbook so I’m slowly getting there. At this point I’m convinced it’s more of habit than anything else. There is something about sitting mapping out stuff and sketching in the moleskin. Perhaps it’s just I’ve not found the right tool for it digitally, however I don’t think that’s quite it. To move onto a purely digital process for my projects this really is the last major stepping stone I need to get over.

The must do betters

I have aside from the note failures 2 key areas I want to focus on in 2010. For me, this ‘green’ approach is one that should evolve and has taken time. I find change rests far easier with me if I adopt it piece by piece rather than going insane right at the start. Quite frankly time also hasn’t allowed for everything to be implemented at once.

• Goal to have all books digital
• Goal to ditch all old notebooks and folders

Out with the physical library in with the digital book age

This perhaps is one of the biggest hurdles and will reap the biggest effect on my life. As I write this to my right are two long bookcases, to my left and behind me is another large modular bookcase. It’s my goal to if possible by the end of 2010 or if not as soon as I can, to have every book I own and will own from that point purely in a digital format. The kindle is now available in the UK but I’m still undecided on which option I will go for regarding the device that will serve these books. I also have to research into getting some back copies of some treasured if a little old books. I do however look forward to the day I can either get rid of the bookcases or at least not feel quite like I should open for business as a library.

Ditch the notebooks take two: dealing with the back log

This point links into the massive failure to cut the umbilical cord of the moleskin from my life. Whilst by my nature I am not really a hoarder with regards to notes and information I am queen of the ‘don’t throw away in case’. I must have been a squirrel in my past life the way I clutch onto notebooks. I have almost every note taken during any course I have ever taken – to illustrate the absurdity of this I last took a course nearly a decade ago. I have shelves and books full of these antiquated notes. From my long past writing days I have about 3 incomplete novels and enough poems to make a poet drown, all stored on shelves and in boxes having not seen the light of day for years apart from being moved from one house to another. I plan to slowly type up or scan (not decided which is best method to do yet) so at least I can have digital copies that can collect virtual dust. A probably more merciless person would say ‘throw out’ but part of me clings to those first pieces of code I wrote during my Software Engineering days. This is probably the part of me that if allowed to would enjoy a romantic comedy. It’s going to be more of a project than the great scanning of photographs of 2007 I undertook but one I think will be really worthwhile.

I am aware that most of the going green I have done is small in it’s nature. This however is also about digitising my life fully and started when I decided to have a mass scanning in of all my photographs – I no longer have any photo albums that are not digital and only a few photos in frames in the house. It’s a process I’m constantly looking at tweaking and for better methods.