Posts Tagged ‘WordPress’

Why WordPress is the Perfect Platform For Author Sites

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I get a lot of requests for help with WordPress lately (which I am happy to answer), and I’m mak­ing a good chunk of my money through my knowl­edge of the con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem.  I thought today I’d give you some back­ground on why I’ve made WordPress my go-​​to plat­form when design­ing author websites.

Broad Support and User Base

WordPress has one of the largest user bases of any con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem.  Why is this a good thing?  Well, it means that there’s a lot of com­mu­nity sup­port.  It means that if there’s a fea­ture you want, there’s a good chance some­one has already devel­oped it as a plug-​​in (there are tens of thou­sands of plug-​​ins for WordPress).  If you run into a bug or other prob­lem, there’s a good chance that you can find some­one else who has already expe­ri­enced this prob­lem with a Google Search.  This all trans­lates into fewer hours and more fea­tures for your author web­site.  You get more for less.

What this also means is that rather than hav­ing to go out and buy expen­sive books to learn how to design WordPress sites, I have been able to learn every­thing I know from read­ing online.  So I have less up-​​front invest­ment (although still quite a bit of invest­ment in mas­ter­ing parts of it). Those sav­ings get passed on to clients, ultimately.

Great Back-​​end Usability

The back-​​end of a site is the part that only the site author sees.  It’s where you go to man­age your con­tent, write new blog posts, and so on.  Because your read­ers never see this part of your soft­ware, you might be tempted to be sat­is­fied with any old thing–that is, if you’re already a com­puter expert, and don’t have any trou­ble learn­ing new inter­faces.  Not all inter­faces are cre­ated equal.  Now, WordPress hasn’t always had a nice, user-​​friendly back-​​end, but these days, it’s quite sim­ple and beau­ti­ful.  I enjoy spend­ing time inside of the WordPress soft­ware, con­fig­ur­ing things, and a good por­tion of my enjoy­ment is due to that.

And chances are, you’ve already used WordPress.  A lot of authors have already used sites like WordPress​.com to set up blogs in the past.  So this means you spend less time learn­ing an inter­face, and more time work­ing on your writing.

Power Theme System

WordPress allows you to con­fig­ure and lay out your site any way you want, and it does it through a straight­for­ward theme engine with well doc­u­mented tem­plate tags.   Through a com­bi­na­tion of plu­g­ins, theme writ­ing, HTML, CSS, and judi­cious JavaScript, there hasn’t been a design con­cept I have come across that can’t be imple­mented in some fash­ion with the sys­tem.  And using a good blank theme as a start­ing base, you can have a theme up and run­ning from an HTML pro­to­type very quickly.  You dream it up, and I build it.  It’s as easy as that.

A CMS, Not Just a Blog

Some peo­ple make the mis­take of think­ing that WordPress is just for blogs.  That’s only a small part of what WordPress can do these days.  With a few basic plu­g­ins, you can build just about any kind of Content Management System fea­ture you might want.  And most impor­tantly to authors, it gives you a user-​​friendly way of man­ag­ing and edit­ing that con­tent.   Rather than hav­ing to spend money down the road pay­ing your web­mas­ter to update your site, you can do it your­self through the back-​​end.  It’s a win-​​win for you and your webmaster.

Conclusion

So those are just a few of the rea­sons I use WordPress.  I was very hes­i­tant to adopt it early on because I had read a lot of neg­a­tives, but each one of those neg­a­tives has been addressed by the devel­op­ment team.  Eventually, it made less sense to stick with an old warhorse like Movable Type and to move on and work with the younger, more dynamic WordPress.  Since I made the move, I haven’t looked back.

If you are an author, pub­lisher, or small busi­ness look­ing for a site built on WordPress, don’t hes­i­tate to con­tact me via Clockpunk Studios, my design com­pany.  I am avail­able to take new work on start­ing in early September.    I have a wide range of prices I can offer you, to fit many bud­gets.  We can build your dream site, or we can get you started with some­thing basic at your own domain very quickly, and add to that later.  So don’t assume you can’t afford it.  You might be sur­prised how cheaply you can get up and run­ning with your own WordPress-​​backed site.

New Client Site: JAPitts​.net

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

J.A. Pitts is an upcom­ing author with Tor Books. The first book in Pitts’ series will hit book­shelves in sum­mer of 2010. Black Blade Blues is an urban fan­tasy about a black­smith in Portland who smiths by day and moon­lights as a prop mas­ter in the inde­pen­dent movie scene by night. Pretty soon, the black­smith finds out that a sword she owns may be a very impor­tant sword of myth and leg­end. Then all hell breaks loose. Also, dragons.

The idea with this design was to evoke the feel of the book, which has the black­smithing ele­ments, as well as a Norse mythol­ogy ele­ment. The scarred wood is rem­i­nis­cent of a well-​​used work­bench, and the mast­head includes the sword and a blacksmith’s ham­mer, mak­ing the con­nec­tion very implicit.

If you are inter­ested in dis­cussing free­lance work with me, con­tact me through the Clockpunk Studios site. Or drop me an email. I’m always look­ing for more projects.

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.