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Revamping Blog Information Design And Layout August 20, 2006

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Chris Pearson has recently talked about how the information architecture of blogs is lacking because of the reverse chronological view of posts. This tends to limit the experience of visitors, especially if they have come to your site from its web feed subscription. He suggests that bloggers should consider other blog architectures, to present posts in some other manner than just reverse chronological.

One particular suggestion of Chris’ stuck with me, because it reflects what I, as a former print magazine publisher, would like to do with some of my blogs: highlight my best work, not necessarily my most recent …

Do We Need Multi-Column Layout Web Page Designs? July 8, 2006

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Given how long desktop publishing software has been around, and how powerful it is, have you ever wondered why (X)HTML and CSS have such a hard time producing multiple column web pages? Sure, you can create multiple columns with XHTML tables, but you cannot auto-flow text between columns. Sure, you could try replacing tables with CSS code, but try to properly align a layout with more than three columns with CSS, and you’ll be tearing your hair out. Well, UXD (links below), User eXperienced Design, has an exciting post about the new multi-column feature for CSS 3.0 - something I’ve …

Create Your Own Wordpress Themes + Plugins June 30, 2006

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If you’re a fan of the WordPress blogging platform, you’re probably well aware of the wide range of plugins and page themes that are available - many for free. While this weblog is generally aimed at bloggers/ online writers who want to tweak their existing blog platform setup, occasionally you may want to write your own themes and plugins from scratch. Or not. Here are some of the resources I’ve been using for all the (free) plugins I have planned for you for this year and next. These resources range in target from beginner to advanced WordPress user. (I’ll …

5 Types of Tag Clouds May 2, 2006

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Markus wrote a post over at Performancing about tag clouds and started an interesting discussion. Yours truly added a few comments. At first glance, it may seem that a tag cloud is a tag cloud is a tag cloud, but there are several distinct differences, as far as the source information used to build the clouds is concerned.  I’m summarizing here my conclusion about tag clouds, based on the discussion that Markus started.

Types of tag clouds:

  • Category-based, using the category names that you have defined on your blog platforms.
  • Content-based, using the full text of all your posts to build …

    • CSS Image Display - Tweaking Your WordPress Theme Pt 2 April 13, 2006

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    The title of this post is a bit of a misnomer, as we’re not really tweaking a WordPress theme, per se. The effect we want to achieve is to display an image with a blog post, and have the text flow around part of the perimeter of the image. This effect is actually very easy to achieve using what’s called inline CSS. We insert a style attribute into our <img src="" /> tag to indicate how we want to position an image. A second attribute is used to specify a margin.

    Let’s start by having a first image float to the …

    CSS Paragraph Display - Tweaking Your WordPress Theme Pt 1 April 12, 2006

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    If you’re not happy with the WordPress theme that you currently have, there are a lot of great themes summarized over at BloggingPro. They don’t create the themes; they just point to some nice ones. There are also generic designs over at OSWD, which are also free. The drawback with the latter is that you will have to do some coding to import them into WordPress (or whatever).

    I’ve downloaded a lot of nice themes, all of which I tweak slightly before using. Tweaking the design a bit makes it a touch more unique. The beauty of most WordPress …

    Determining The Author Of The Current Post

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    This post is the precursor to the post I’ve promised that shows how you can tweak your WordPress blog platform to share Google AdSense or Chitika (or what have you). Instead of writing a single, long, complicated post, I thought I’d split the instructions up into two posts. This post shows you how to determine the author of a specific blog entry. If you are going to test the code, you’ll need to create a couple of test users on your WordPress blog, then post at least one entry each.

    While researching the WordPress documentation, I was surprised to find that …

    Sharing Information and Gaining Web Traffic - Two Birds With One Stone March 21, 2006

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    One of the obviously great things about the Internet is that there are unlimited, innovative ways for people to interact with each other. Right now, one of the popular ways is social bookmarking. Social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, and Digg are wildly popular, and could be what a blogger needs to increase their profile and web traffic. Related sites like Newsvine go one step further and include both reader-submitted stories and original newswire content.

    While there are several purposes for social bookmarking sites, sharing stories and gaining traffic are some of the reasons bloggers should look into them. …

    Shoutboxes - More Communication Tools For Your Weblog March 17, 2006

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    Of all the ways you can communicate with your weblog’s visitors, shoutboxes have the potential to be the most interesting. That’s because shoutboxes turn your blog into a chat room of one focused channel.

    Over the past year, I’ve come across one shoutbox after another. Most of the freebies required you to register and then serve up popup or popunder ads after someone used the shoutbox. No good, at least not for me. I despise both types of ads, and wouldn’t wish them on my visitors.

    Now while I’ve come across a few WordPress themes that incorporate a shoutbox, if you don’t …

    Building A Tag Cloud in WordPress March 15, 2006

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    Some weblogs display a feature known as a tag cloud. This consists of the blog’s categories shown in varying font sizes. (See the bottom of the navigation sidebar.) The larger the font used for a specific category, the more posts that category has. Each category in the tag cloud links to a page containing all of the posts falling into the category. [MINOR REVISION: Mar 28/06]

    The idea behind the tag cloud is that it gives visitors a visual cue as to the focus of the weblog. It’s much easier to tell, compared to a list of categories and their post …

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