CodeProfessor

Roll Your Own Social-Photo-Video-Sharing Site With Ning October 7, 2006

I’ve written about Ning in the past. The general ideas is briliant: create a few plug’n'play building blocks, invite deveopers to join for free and let them create their own mashup of functionality. True modular web service creation, with reduced development time - sometimes all it takes is 5-15 minutes to put something together.

Well they’ve added a few more modules that you can use to build your own photo-sharing or video-sharing site. There’s also a module for creating a social network. So you can combine these and older modules to come up with some fairly interesting combinations. Older modules …

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 …

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 …

Another Tag Graph Example June 15, 2006

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This is a really short post. I came across another variation on a tag graph at Ohmpage., but it’s called a Content Taxonomy there. Just scroll down to the bottom right of any page on the site. Tag graphs, as you’ll recall, are a variation on tag clouds.

If you view the source code, you’ll see that it’s built up using CSS styles and variable percent widths instead of hard pixel widths. Pretty ingenious. There are a number of ways you could pull it off using CSS and Javascript, but pure CSS makes it simple. Here is an example …

Too Much Information - Busy Blogs June 2, 2006

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Nick over at Performancing made the comment that he’d recently visited a site that had way too much information obscuring what he was really trying to find: a contact email for the author. He explained the features he found that really didn’t interest him.

It made think for a second and I realized that this blog you are reading is a prime example of busy-ness. I’ve used it as a showcase for so many blog features that it’s ended up as a dog’s breakfsat. In fact, while it is a showcase for various features, it’s a prime example of what …

Tag Graphs - An Alternative To Tag Clouds May 26, 2006

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45 Royale, a web design firm, has a feature in their “notebook” that makes me ask why didn’t I think of that? Instead of a tag cloud, they use something called a tag graph. A little bit of thought, and I realized they’re not hard to create in PHP and a bit of CSS. [This post is a general discussion. I’ll come up with exact code for WordPress in another post.]

The tag graph is near the bottom right of their notebook page. If you do a “view source” on the pag, you can see that two …