Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category

RSS Awareness Day: How are SF zines doing?

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Today is RSS Awareness Day. I usu­ally don’t put much stock in these arbi­trary aware­ness days, but RSS has changed the way I think about infor­ma­tion fun­da­men­tally, so I thought I’d talk a lit­tle bit about that today, with a focus on how zines have adopted the tech­nol­ogy, or not.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. In prac­tice, RSS involves a feed and a feed reader. Think of these com­po­nents as like a web­page, and a browser (except that feed read­ers can work in browsers, and feeds syn­di­cate the con­tent of web­sites, but let’s not go there just yet). The feed reader parses the con­tent of RSS feeds and presents them in a for­mat that you and I can read. The RSS feed is gen­er­ally made up of a form of XML, and is a sin­gle file con­tain­ing all the recent updates to a web­site, gen­er­ally the blog stuff. RSS feeds are the under­ly­ing tech­nol­ogy in pod­cast­ing as well.

In sim­ple terms, RSS feeds allow you to aggre­gate con­tent from a bunch of dif­fer­ent web­sites, keep­ing track of new con­tent, with­out hav­ing to visit the web­sites them­selves. There is more that can and will be done with the tech, but right now, this is the pri­mary use.

Why I Love RSS

I have a men­tal ill­ness that man­i­fests itself in an intense fear that some­where, some­thing is hap­pen­ing on the inter­net that is cool, and I am not read­ing about it. My RSS reader is my med­ica­tion, and I take an hourly dose. If not more.

Prior to using feed read­ers, I had a blog roll, and I would man­u­ally click through the links, check­ing each web­site one after another. I’d get to the end of the list and start over again. Ostensibly, my feed reader (Google Reader being my drug of choice) saves me time by col­lect­ing new entries from all these sites, sort­ing them, and allow­ing me to treat them more like email than web­sites. Each post comes in as a sep­a­rate item, and I mark them as read or unread, and can sort them into dif­fer­ent fold­ers for organizing.

Up until a few months ago, I was sub­scribed to nearly 300 feeds on sub­jects rang­ing from biol­ogy to web design. I real­ized that all this infor­ma­tion was over­whelm­ing me, so I stepped it down to half of that. Most of what I removed were sci­ence fic­tion related feeds. I real­ized, at a cer­tain point, that not every­one in the field had some­thing to say about the genre that I was inter­ested in.

Despite the abil­ity to become over­whelmed, I still love RSS because it does pro­vide effi­ciency in some­thing I would be doing anyway–trying to keep track of a mil­lion things. It brings me con­stant sources of new infor­ma­tion, and on a good, day I learn a dozen new things that prove use­ful in the long run. Many of the links that I blog (and that blog­ging fea­ture is cur­rently not work­ing and I do not know why. Paul Raven, could you shoot me an email with your deli­cious set­tings? Somehow, I’ve got mine wrong) come from my feeds.

Speculative Fiction and RSS

One of the last things I did before clos­ing up shop at the Fortean Bureau was to move the site to a con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem and pro­vide an RSS feed. I don’t know if I was the first to do this–probably not–but there’s still spo­radic adop­tion espe­cially among the ‘zines.

Online Zines I read with RSS Feeds

Magazines I read that DO NOT have RSS Feeds that I can find

My point being, if you are an online mag­a­zine pub­lisher in this day and age, you need to adopt RSS as a mar­ket­ing tool if for no other rea­son. RSS reminds me to check these sites. The ones with­out, I am more likely to for­get about, unless, iron­i­cally, some­one else in my feeds men­tions the new con­tent. You don’t even have to syn­di­cate the full text of the short sto­ries for me. Just a title and author (please, please include author in your feed infor­ma­tion. Fantasy doesn’t do this, and I think it’s prob­lem­atic. It looks like the author of every story is “Sean”) is suf­fi­cient to func­tion as a reminder. It’s like a newslet­ter noti­fi­ca­tion, only less obnox­ious (why, I am not sure. I guess because you only ever get RSS from what you set up for, so there’s no such thing as RSS spam).

If you have a blog, you have a feed

As to the rest of us, if you’re using any of the com­mon blog­ging ser­vices, you’re almost cer­tainly serv­ing up a feed some­where. Ask your­self if your design dis­plays the RSS feed promi­nently enough that inter­ested par­ties can sub­scribe. Those of us who use Firefox have it easy. Firefox auto­mat­i­cally detects whether a site has a feed and dis­plays an orange icon in the address bar of the browser, but only if the RSS feed is prop­erly indi­cated in the header of the html doc­u­ment. Some sites have feeds, but fail to put that link in the header tem­plate, so we have to hunt the page for the link. You lose poten­tial read­ers the longer they go with­out find­ing it. And yes, I know that my new design doesn’t have an RSS Link fea­tured promi­nently. I’m ter­ri­ble at tak­ing my own advice, but I am going to offer a very detailed RSS side­bar in the future, allow­ing peo­ple to sub­scribe to par­tic­u­lar types of infor­ma­tion that I write about seper­ately. It’s com­ing soon.

RSS: It’s not just for posts anymore

RSS feeds have gained some inter­est­ing new tools and uses recently. Yahoo Pipes allows any­one to mash up var­i­ous RSS feeds and cre­ate new types of con­tent. Blog man­age­ment sys­tems like WordPress now offer RSS feeds for indi­vid­ual posts, so that you can fol­low the com­ment dis­cus­sions. RSS use is grow­ing. It could stand to be a bit eas­ier, as mash​able​.com wrote recently, but it’s a tech­nol­ogy that is going to stay around for the forsee­able future. It really does save time. If you’re not already using a Reader, I highly sug­gest you con­sider one. And if you’re not pro­vid­ing an RSS feed of your con­tent, you’re miss­ing out on readers.

Related arti­cles

House Warming

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Hello and wel­come to the new Jeremiah Tolbert​.com. Over the com­ing months, as I can spare the time, I will be rolling out new fea­tures. Currently, the port­fo­lio and pho­tog­ra­phy sec­tions need work, and the newslet­ter and the free­lance pages have zero on them. Everything else should be in work­ing order, at least until I decide to try some­thing entirely new and weird.

Please, look around, and let me know what you like, don’t like, what works, and what looks buggy. I value any and all feed­back. If you’re see­ing this on LJ, I would appre­ci­ate you, just this once, com­ing over to the site itself and leav­ing a com­ment. I need to make sure the com­ment sys­tem is work­ing well. Your com­ment might go imme­di­ately into mod­er­a­tion, but that just helps me fig­ure things out if it does.

Thanks for your patience as I work out the kinks and get things run­ning more smoothly. I think you are going to find that I’m tak­ing my blog­ging game to a whole new level with this release.

Testing the Photodropper Tool

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert
geyser/hot springs Yellowstone
Creative Commons License photo credit: ebroskie1234

I’ve added a new plu­gin to the site that should allow me to illus­trate my posts with cre­ative commons-​​licensed images. This is a test of that sys­tem. We’ll see how it works. If it does, I think it will give some nice fla­vor to the site. I’ll have another image-​​based plu­gin to test here in a few min­utes as well.  I’ve also added Thickbox, so click­ing on the image should result in show­ing the larger image.  Heh.  Very cool.

Making FlickrRSS Work for Me

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

My goal with this new site is to not only to design a very clean, beau­ti­ful site, but to also show­case some of the nice effects that are pos­si­ble with javascript libraries like jQuery (and teach myself how to effec­tively use them in the process). Last night, I worked for over 6 hours sim­ply get­ting one small sec­tion of the front page to work the way that I want it to. My rule for myself was sim­ple: I would accept no com­pro­mise from the design that I drew in Photoshop–unless IE 6 and its crappy ren­der­ing forced me to, which it did on the hor­i­zon­tal tab nav­i­ga­tion. Bad browser! BAD! No biscuit.

So, if it’s still work­ing, you should see a big image from flickr. You hover over that image, and you should see the image title and the descrip­tion from flickr slide up onto the image, and if you mouse-​​off, the details will float back down.

The ani­ma­tion and hover effect is cre­ated with jQuery and a plu­gin for jQuery called hov­er­In­tent. I had to add hov­er­In­tent because I wanted a delay between mou­s­ing off the image and the slide-​​down. Doing this part, includ­ing writ­ing the CSS and javascript, was actu­ally only about an hour’s worth of cod­ing at the most, and the only rea­son it took that long was because I screwed up includ­ing the script, and then I wanted that delay and had to go find out how to do that with hoverIntent.

Where things really got sticky was fig­ur­ing out how to get the data from Flickr onto my page.

Here’s why: there are basi­cally two plu­g­ins that you can use with WordPress to talk to Flickr. Unfortunately, nei­ther one did exactly what I wanted. After play­ing with Falbum and FlickrRSS, I decided FlickrRSS was going to be the eas­i­est for me to beat into sub­mis­sion. Important caveat: WordPress runs on PHP. I’ve worked with PHP off and on for the last 8 years, but I have never really learned it. I am NOT a programmer–I am a designer. A pro­gram­mer prob­a­bly could have writ­ten the code to do what I wanted to do here in about an hour. If a client had asked me to do this kind of mod­i­fi­ca­tion, I would have con­tracted out the work to an expert. But I’m cheap and I took it as a learn­ing oppor­tu­nity, so I beat my head on it instead. So, mov­ing on:

The first prob­lem I had was that by default, FlickrRSS could dis­play images, but had no options for dis­play­ing the title of the image and the descrip­tion from flickr. My design plans called for this data. So first, I had to dig around in the Flickr API, look through the dif­fer­ent feed types ‚and look at the source code of my flickr RSS feed to see if it pro­vided what I needed. It did, but unfor­tu­nately, the area of the feed that pro­vided that also pro­vided a damned “JeremyT has posted a photo:” and an img tag includ­ing the image before even run­ning the descrip­tion. This infor­ma­tion needed to be stripped. It was pretty easy for me to fig­ure out how to write the PHP to start dis­play­ing that infor­ma­tion, and even style it. But I needed to fig­ure out how to take that infor­ma­tion and strip out the img tag and the “JeremyT has posted a photo:” string. This took me down the rab­bit hole of PHP func­tions and oper­a­tors and all a bunch of stuff that I under­stand at a basic level due to all the work I’ve put into Actionscript at the day job. Eventually, through Google-​​fu, I found str_​replace, and that worked fine. There’s prob­a­bly a bet­ter func­tion, but I couldn’t find it. I also used strip­tags, and pro­vided a list of tags that were okay. Paragraph, bold, ital­ics, and so on.

I describe it, and it sounds so easy, but the con­stant tweak­ing, the upload­ing and test­ing, then test­ing again–that’s what too so long. And my solu­tion involved hack­ing the code in such a way that my desired effect is going to hap­pen for every image I try and dis­play any­where. I will take advan­tage of this and pro­vide more pop­ups, or I’ll use CSS to hide that infor­ma­tion. I just need to mod­ify some IDs into classes and it’ll be more flexible.

So, one tech­ni­cal hur­dle overcome–three hun­dred to go! God help me, this pro­gram stuff is actu­ally kind of fun. JQuery is espe­cially cool.

New Client Site: Susan Groppi

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

My March project is now live.  There are still a few bugs I need to squash here and there, and I think Susan is still kick­ing the tires a bit, but it’s no longer a secret.  Let me know if you find any prob­lems.
I’m pretty happy with how this one turned out. Be sure to check all the pages. They’re all a lit­tle dif­fer­ent, and the blog is com­pletely dif­fer­ent than the rest.

10 Things Your Website Should Have if You Are An Author

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

1. Your own domain name.

In this day an age, a domain costs almost noth­ing, and host­ing, not much more. I charge $15 a year for a domain and $20 a year for host­ing for my clients, and there might be cheaper (but less feature-​​rich) host­ing avail­able out there. Sff​.net might have been cool a decade ago, but it’s not now. It just looks unpro­fes­sional. Buy a domain, and if you can, make it your full pub­lish­ing name. If you can’t, don’t get too clever, by which I mean don’t pick some­thing you’re going to hate 10 years from now. Domain names can be changed, but you should really try to avoid it, to pre­serve your rat­ings in the search engines.

2. A biog­ra­phy and bib­li­og­ra­phy with lots and lots of links.

If some­one is com­ing to your web­site, it is likely that they want to know who you are, and what else you’ve done. Don’t be stingy here. Don’t pub­li­cize any­thing you’re embar­rassed of, such as that mpreg slash fic that you wrote late one night while drunk, but def­i­nitely include your bib­li­og­ra­phy, and if your story is avail­able online, for free in a webzine or for sale in some form, link to it. If you don’t, you’re miss­ing a chance for a sale to a poten­tial fan.

3. A News Blog with an RSS feed. Or a newslet­ter. Or both.

Note that I said a News Blog. Writer blogs are great enter­tain­ment, but they are noto­ri­ously clut­tered with non­sense quizzes, word counts, whin­ing, and so much other crap that find­ing out when an author you like has a story com­ing out can be harder than it should. Maintain a clean weblog that is sim­ply for announc­ing your sales, appear­ances, and other pro­fes­sional items of inter­est. Don’t use it to post pic­tures of your cats. I’m an RSS feed man myself, and I think they are the future, but per­haps you should do an email mail­ing list as well. Post the same con­tent to both, but make sure it’s clear that they are the same infor­ma­tion, so your fans don’t sign up for both and get irri­tated for receiv­ing dupli­cate information.

4. A pro­fes­sional design

This isn’t cheap, but if you are a pro­fes­sional author, you owe it to your­self to hire a designer who can build you some­thing nice and main­tain­able. Tony Greer does great work. Tobias Buckell’s web­site is a model exam­ple of this list. I work fairly afford­ably myself, and you may inquire for rates if you’re inter­ested. But seri­ously, your nephew who has a copy of Front Page 2000 isn’t going to be good enough. Spend a lit­tle money on it, and you’re going to have bet­ter results. People buy books based on cov­ers, and they’re going to judge you by how pro­fes­sional and fresh your design is as well.

5. Full sto­ries and/​or nov­els. Possibly excerpts.

Free sam­ples have been used in mar­ket­ing since the inven­tion of cap­i­tal­ism. Writers and other intel­lec­tual prop­erty cre­ators are often ter­ri­fied of this, and admit­tedly, there’s a risk that all your stuff will be stolen and you will be left pen­ni­less. If you’re lucky! Someone who comes to your web­site may not have read any­thing you have writ­ten. Post a story from a year or two. If you’re brave, put it in the Creative Commons as soon as you can. That might limit resale rights, but chalk it up as a mar­ket­ing expense. I’m not going to go into the Creative Commons too much here, as Cory Doctorow does it bet­ter than any­one else. Let me just say that I agree with him, but I under­stand those who don’t, and I don’t think this will make or break you. But try it out, and see what hap­pens. It worked for Peter Watts!

6. A way to buy your work.

Post links to Amazon, Fictionwise, what­ever. Make them promi­nent. If you have work in print for sale, it should be easy for me to buy it. Somebody really has to make this as easy as iTunes. But that’s a topic for another issue. Link, link, and link again.

7. A way to con­tact you.

Boo, spam! Nobody likes spam, but if you don’t have a way for fans or poten­tial pub­lish­ers to con­tact you, you’re miss­ing out on fan mail, hate mail, and pos­si­ble sales. There are javascript tricks you can use, or you can set up a spe­cific email address that you check on a reg­u­lar basis. You really should have this email address be at your domain above, too. Even if it for­wards to your gmail account. It’s a mat­ter of per­cep­tion. If you own a domain, and you should, use it for your email.

8. A Press Kit

I was run­ning out of ideas, so I stole this one from Tobias Buckell’s page. Short story authors prob­a­bly don’t need press kits, but nov­el­ists might. Photos, book cov­ers, and any­thing else that makes a reporter’s job eas­ier when he wants to report on your work is a very good thing.

9. A Goodies Section

I have seri­ous doubts about peo­ple lov­ing books so much that they want desk­top wall­pa­per, icons, and such, but hey, if it doesn’t cost you any­thing to make them or have them made by a designer, why not? Little rewards like this don’t cost much, but they might be just the edge you need to start a buzz about your lat­est work.Think out­side the box here. I’m hes­i­tant to give this idea away, but if your read­er­ship is young and nerdy, con­sider pub­lish­ing D&D gam­ing stats for your char­ac­ters and cre­ations. Make it easy and allow­able for your fans to play in your world. They’re not going to make any money off of it, so don’t worry. It stopped being yours when you pub­lished it.

10. Something nobody else has tried.

See the idea about about D&D stats. Do some­thing like that. Do some­thing wild and new. It’s a tough world out there for writ­ers. There are a lot of us, and I wish I could say that the best writ­ers win. But mar­ket­ing money has a direct effect on sales. If you’re read­ing this and giv­ing it seri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion, then there’s a good chance that your pub­lisher doesn’t have any mar­ket­ing bucks for you. That means you need to take mat­ters into your own hands. A web­site with all the fea­tures I’ve described above costs any­where from $300-$500 from me. It could cost you thou­sands from other, equally qual­i­fied design­ers, but no mat­ter what, if you do it right, and you give it time, you’re going to make your money back. I won’t guar­an­tee it, but it’s bet­ter than noth­ing at all!

5 Things I don’t rec­om­mend doing:

  1. Featuring your photo promi­nently in the design.
  2. Posting your daily word counts and/​or in-​​depth analy­sis of your daily work. This is inter­est­ing to other writ­ers. Probably not so much to fans, unless they want to be a writer too. Keep a sep­a­rate blog for this.
  3. Your rejec­tions. I’ve ranted about this before. Posting about your rejec­tions is some­thing you should stop doing. I can under­stand why you might do it, but keep it pri­vate. You might say some­thing you regret. Editors read web­sites too.
  4. Excerpts of unpub­lished work. Sorry, nobody cares unless you’re super-​​established and semi-​​famous.  That’s not to say you shouldn’t release the whole thing online if you want.
  5. Bad reviews. I’ve not read books because of the bad reviews their own authors have pub­li­cized. If you don’t link them, I won’t hear about them. This is con­tentious, but I just don’t rec­om­mend it personally.

One last thing. I haven’t been fol­low­ing my own advice here, but you can be sure that after this, I will be, both for myself and for any future clients.

The Central Problem with SFWA’s Main Website, And Solutions

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

The Central Problem with SFWA’s Main Website, And Solutions

The cen­tral prob­lem with the func­tion­al­ity of SFWA’s web­site is that it doesn’t know who it is attempt­ing to com­mu­ni­cate with. This is under­stand­able, as there are sev­eral pos­si­ble audi­ences for the SFWA web­site: a poten­tial mem­ber, the mem­ber, and the gen­eral inter­ested pub­lic. You might argue that indus­try members/​publishers/​editors are also another audi­ence, but I would just group them in with the gen­eral public.

A lesser prob­lem is that the site is sim­ply dated in design. A quick look at the html code indi­cates pretty seman­tic mark-​​up, but an odd mix of inline styling and stylesheets. There’s a heavy dose of javascript required for the drop-​​down menus to func­tion, which I think is just fine. The links mostly lack title attrib­utes, which might cause prob­lems down the road with show­ing up prop­erly in search engines, but prob­a­bly not a huge deal there. But the real prob­lem is that it just isn’t very inter­est­ing to look at. This is the group of peo­ple that have inspired more big-​​budget amaz­ing action pic­tures with cool eye candy than any other genre of fic­tion. Their web­site should rep­re­sent this, while still being designed with acces­si­bil­ity in mind, of course. But there is a lot you could do to spice up the look.

The infor­ma­tion and tools are orga­nized in a fairly hap­haz­ard way. Why is the Search tool grouped with with the mem­ber login and con­tact infor­ma­tion? Why does the “Why should I join SFWA?” infor­ma­tion take prece­dence on the front page over the press infor­ma­tion? I would rethink the orga­niz­ing and impor­tance of infor­ma­tion here. The piracy cam­paign stuff? I would remove it entirely. It’s an impor­tant issue prob­a­bly, but does it really deserve such front page real estate? Also, I’m sorry, but web rings went out of style in 1998. This really serves to make the page look dated. Of all the pro­fes­sional writ­ing orga­ni­za­tions I looked at, the only one still fea­tur­ing a web ring is SFWA. That goes for the badge images as well. These are all signs of a designer that hasn’t really kept with the times, and are more indica­tive of a pri­vate web­site than a pro­fes­sional orga­ni­za­tion. If you dis­agree with me, just scroll down to the links entry on this blog from a few days ago and look at the other orga­ni­za­tions. Even the worst of them have this right. SFWA’s web­site should get it right too.

Among other sug­ges­tions I will be detail­ing in the future, I rec­om­mend chunk­ing the nav­i­ga­tional infor­ma­tion together bet­ter. Focus the outward-​​facing web­site for prospec­tive mem­bers and the gen­eral pub­lic and remove all infor­ma­tion for exist­ing mem­bers to the log-​​in sec­tion. Prominently fea­ture a log-​​in screen some­where on the page for mem­bers, but have the site behind that be designed to their needs. It’s a dif­fer­ent project and a dif­fer­ent site.

Also, I highly rec­om­mend using some of the wasted screen space now to include a side­bar that rotates on a ran­dom basis from a list of sub­mit­ted authors. Call this Featured Member and have it include 50 words on an author along­side a nice photo of the author or the cover of their lat­est book.

Junk every­thing in the right col­umn and start over, basi­cally. None of that belongs here. And it’s all ugly and out­dated in look.

So these are just a few of my ini­tial thoughts on the web­site. As I am not a mem­ber, I can’t really speak for the pri­vate mate­ri­als behind the login page, but I think there is plenty of work to be done on the public-​​facing side of things.