Plug and play modules with virtually no programming required are very likely the future of application design for the masses. Imagine being able to write your own web-based applications with very little effort. If that sounds like something you’d like to know more about, check back soon as I’ll be creating a lot of mashups of mashups, and even possibly some WordPress plugins that take those web feed-based mashups and display the results in HTML on your blog.

By the way, if you have an interest in RSS/Atom web feeds in general, please go check out my RSS Cases weblog, which is part of Rok Hrastnik’s esteemed Marketing Studies website. Rok is known as “Mr. RSS” in some circles, as he wrote one of the best ebooks around on web feeds and why they’re important to online marketing and general promotion of websites. Read his RSS Diary if you are interested in the marketing side of web feeds.

Web feeds are what drive many (all?) of these new Web 2.0 mashup services, and what will fuel Web 3.0/ Semantic Web .

For a pro account, you get 10 min video, 20 Mb file upload, and 1Gb storage. Everything else is the same. Right now, they have a free 2 month upgrade to the pro account, after which you’ll have to pony up.

The Springdoo tool box has a number of interesting extras. The SpringCast feature lets you post audio and video from your mobile phone to your SpringCast Communicator profile page. PalCasts limit communication between you and your friends. SpringMail buttons are similar to SkypeMe or “Send Me An Odeo” type of buttons. Plant them on your website and link them to your Communicator page, and you have click-to-call voice and messaging (but not actual calls).

Though I can’t see myself using Springdoo a great deal, except maybe to send my grandmother a message once in a while, if you plan to use it regularly, they’ve made it easy to import your contacts from several other email clients, including Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail, AOL, and others.

The SpringCast Communicator is an audio/video panel that’ll probably be of great interest to members of MySpace and other community sites. You can embed it into your web pages, and keep people updated on your goings on. People can respond with audio and video comments. It might be a great way for a band to keep fans updated, and interact with them.

Note: I would have posted an example of the video shoutbox here, but I had some trouble with the HTML not rendering properly. If I get it working later, I’ll update this post.

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 include classified listings and maps, amongst probably hundreds of others. There is even an auction module that lets you embed eBay auction items on your Ning site.

So you could even set up a very customized auction. For example, if you are a classic car reseller, you could set up an auction item over at eBay, then setup a combo of the video and photo modules to show more visual detail for a car, including video close ups. And if you wanted to promote this, you could use social network module, invite other car collectors to join up, and encourage them to invite friends. Just pass out your business card with your Ning URL, and you have a year-round network of car enthusiasts that know each other from car shows.

[Additional sources: Mashable]

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 articles. Alternately, an area emphasizing several recent posts prominently, could be followed vertically by the typical reverse chronological blog format.

Fortunately, a number of blogging platforms are robust enough to be treated as near-full fledged CMSes (Content Management Systems). One such platform is Wordpress. (You can actually pull off what I’m covering below on Blogger, but I’m not sure about other platforms, especially other free platforms.) You actually have a fair bit of flexibility in Wordpress on how you present your content. Basically, any content you have stored in your blog database can be presented in practically any way you want.

I’ve been thinking along Chris’ line of thought for quite some time now, and have filled up two small sketchbooks with theme designs that give blogs more of a magazine feel. But sketching layouts and actually implementing them are two different things. It requires a fair bit of coding effort, and then there’s still the issue of certain browsers (*cough* IE *cough) not yet supporting some of the most basic of CSS (Cascading StyleSheet) features. I gave up nearly before I started.

Fortunately, if you favour the idea of emphasizing  the most important recent articles, like a print magazine, you can read Max Limpag’s post on how to use Wordpress like a magazine. The necessary PHP code is there, and Max even offers a free open source theme, Nautica-magazine, optimized for the purpose. The primary point of information architecture that Max is using is to give each Wordpress post category its own section. Here’s a very attractive example site, which he worked on, using such a layout. There are similar examples linked to from his article. While you’re on his site, also check out his repository of valuable Wordpress code snippets.

That said, the themes on my own blogs are long due for an overhaul. Funny thing is, I want to go back to my original design for my hubsite, Chameleon Integration. It’s five columns, has a main banner, and a minimum of colours that match my custom-designed logo. Though achieving the three middle columns in Wordpress using PHP and CSS just isn’t going to be easy without using tables - something quite a few CSS purists would freak about. But having spent a good portion of my career as a consultant, it’s getting the job done that’s more important. I’ve wasted nearly 10 months trying to come up with a tableless CSS version of my original design, and I doubt it’ll happen with CSS 2.0. So watch for a slow overhaul on my sites. And feel free to comment.

Video shoutboxes let you post your own video clips on your blog. Your visitors can sign in to their own (usually free) account and then post their own video clips. In this post, I’ve used the Abazab video comments shoutbox from FestoonInc.

You can see a sample below. There’s a default video and a couple of short ones I added as a test. If you want to add your own video comments, you just need to sign up for a free Abazab account. (Videos are moderated in my setup.)

There’s no plugin, so Abazab works with pretty much any blogging platform. Here it’s running fine in Wordpress, and the Abazab website mentions MySpace and Xanga. After you sign up, just copy a snippet of HTML code into your web page template where you want to display Abazab, and voila, video commenting is enabled. (I haven’t tested for any other blog platforms, but as long as you have access to your blog template, Abazab should probably work.)

It’s funny. Someone I write for who is half-way across the world just text-Skyped me as I was writing this post. I told him to check out my Abazab shoutbox as we talked. His comment was, “Wow. It’s so hard to keep up with all the changes [in web technology].” Too true. In fact, Grouper is another video commenting service that I’ll be trying out soon, and will probably run a short review for here. And no doubt there are others I haven’t come across yet, or others in being prepared for release.

Kaizen is a Japanese word for a Chinese concept. Essentially, it translates to “improvement by slow, steady degrees.” Application of this concept is the main reason I don’t worry when friends tell my blog designs are ugly. Yeah, I know the stats about how design will make a difference as to whether people will stay on your site or not. However, since a great deal of my traffic (at least on other sites, and not necessarily on this site) is from search engines, visitors are searching for content, not necessarily eye candy.

So I’ve tried to be pragmatic about the whole design thing, which is part of the essence of Kaizen. I only have so much time and absolutely no budget. I’m a disciple of the school of bootstrapping life. As such, I try to start by picking a basic theme and tweak a bit of the CSS (Cascading StyleSheets) code first. Anything design changes that will require adding code or spending time designing and creating graphics has to come later.

However, I do have a design goal in mind for the future, for each of my sites, and I have an implementation plan for each, which I’m working on in small steps. It helps to sketch out a design that you are aiming at. (I prefer my Moleskine-style sketchbooks, but any blank pages will do.)

Corporations may think they need to spend loads of money getting their website visuals done fast, to “get out there”. But for a lowly blogger like myself, the slow, steady Kaizen approach lets me test small changes and easily rollback if necessary.

The original logo was sketched out by me, then reworked by Bill Dubs, my brother’s biz partner for their award-winning “green” ad agency, Dubs & Dash. The spiral represents the tail of a chameleon, the green simply speaks to me personally. The original sketch was actually thought out at great length by me, and I drove Bill crazy to get the colours right. While it may not be apparent to anyone who doesn’t know me, the logo incorporates a lot of my geekiness. The logo represents me, from my perception, but without being in-your-face to anyone else.

However, the finished logo is not currently displayed on any of my sites because of layout reasons. I’m working on a blog network-wide Wordpress theme that incorporates it, but time is at a premium for me, so the new Wordpress theme has been long delayed. As an alternative, I opted to use a favicon on most of sites. My “brand” would thus appear on each site without being intrusive and clashing with current theme colours: .

Notice that the favicon is only 16×16 wide and thus should not be too “busy” in design. What I actually did was take an older version of my logo that I had created in Inkscape (a cool, free SVG/XML-based vector-drawing graphics program on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X), and used a simplified spiral on a flat-toned triangle. The icon gets most of the visual gist of my full logo an remains unique. (At least for now.)

Favicons can be created from pretty much any image, and have an extension of .ICO. (Photoshop supports this extension; other graphics programs might as well.) Not all browsers display the icon properly in the URL area, so if you use one, don’t expect that all of your readers will be able to see it.

Terry Zulit has a bit of a tutorial on how to create and use a favicon.

If you do any sort of web design or even just a bit of blog theme tweaking, you want to know about the new CSS columns feature. Keep in mind though, that even after ten years, some browser companies just cannot seem to follow the standards. So who knows when the majority of browsers will support CSS 3.0 in it’s entirety. CSS 2.0 has been out for several years, and even the new Microsoft IE 7 is reputed to not support it fully.

Because of problems like this, I’ve given up on converting the two small sketchbooks full of blog theme designs. It’s been an utterly frustrating experience trying to convert my pencil sketches into multi-column themese using XHTML and CSS. I don’t want to use tables, but I don’t have the time to employ CSS hacks to my themes to ensure they work in all browsers. I’ve been waiting for CSS 3.0’s multi-column feature for a long time. (Probably since I was a search engine webmaster in 1996.)

But then I got to thinking: making it easy to have multi-column layouts with flowing text between columns might not be such a good thing. At least not if people start designing layouts where columns are longer than one screen. Consider: my laptop browsing experience is far different than that on my 19″ desktop monitor. In fact, one of the comments in the UXD article makes mention of this.

Still, if used properly, the CSS 3.0 column feature is going to be a boon to website and weblog page layouts, provided it is used to make short columns, where you can see the entire height in a fully-opened browser.

There’s no ETA for browsers supporting the CSS 3.0 standard, so your options are limited right now: tables or CSS. As mentioned above and in the article, for now, without tables, forget about designs with more than 3 columns.

If you want to see an example 4-column table-based layout, visit my hubsite’s old homepage. That was before I turned the site into a weblog. The old site was hand-coded and hand-managed, which meant I rarely added new content back then. If you like what you see, you’re more than welcome to copy my XHTML and tweak it for your use. Just make sure you replace my logos and Google Adsense and Chitika ad codes.

By the way, if you’re looking for a fast-prototyping tool to design custom Wordpress themes, you should check out Fresh Pursuit’s Canvas plugin. I’ve downloaded but haven’t had time to try it out.

However, it gives you their free Kiwi theme, or you can use one of the Wordpress basic themes. What happens is that once the Canvas plugin is activated, you can create a custom theme by dragging and dropping components from an Ajaxified list. You can even create Canvas “plugins”. (These are not Wordpress plugins in the standard sense, but plugins that are hooked into Canvas.)

I’ll try to cover Canvas in more depth some time in the future, once I’ve had a chance to play with it and maybe create a few plugins. In the meantime, check out Liz’s Frosted Mini-Wheats Design post at Successful Blog.

Sources: UXD [via TechMount], FreshPursuits - Canvas plugin.

Devlounge has a great post, Customizing WordPress: Advanced, which as the title implies, is for the advanced WordPress user. This article is not so much about improving your theme, per se, but what information is being displayed on your pages. There are other articles on the site - all worth reading. The article in question does require you to understand some PHP programming.

If you need something a bit less advanced, the WordPress Codex has The Loop In Action. It amounts to a very introductory article on how to use the WordPress main “Loop”. The loop is how you retrieve recent posts and display them via your theme template. In other words, if you ever want to create your own theme, you need to understand the loop. The PHP coding is light; it mostly uses WordPress function calls, which are explained.

Liz also has a link at Successful Blog to Cre8d-Design’s Blog Design 101 - Creating Your Own WordPress Theme. The latter post has some tips I(and links to other articles) on how you can adapt the default WordPress theme to your own design.

Or if you don’t have the time, patience, or skills to create your own theme, Liz has a link to Emily Robbins’ list of links to 875 free Wordpress themes. [Emily’s list of links is actually now to 960+ themes, for both Wordpress 1.5 and 2.0.]

If you are even more daring and want to write your own WordPress plugin, to make your blog do new tricks, there are a number of tutorials available. You can start from the horse’s mouth with the WordPress tutorials Writing A Plugin and the Plugin API.

Randy Peterman’s Pordcast also has some tips in Writing a WordPress Plugin - Part I and Part II. However, this is aimed at WordPress 1.2, so you may need to use this with caution. A more recent tutorial, Customizing WordPress Plugins, is available at Dev Lounge.

If you do decide to design your own WordPress themes and write a few plugins, here are some suggestions, gleaned from my own recent experiences.

When designing themes, sketch out on paper all of the different layouts that you would like. Make sure that if your main page is going to look different or contain different information than your “post” (permalink”) and “page” pages, that you sketch out the differences. I can’t stress this enough.

The act of sketching on paper (not a computer) also stimulates creativity, and you may come up with several new designs that were lurking in your mind. Some of these may even be better than your original.

I have two small sketchbooks (3″x4″ and 4″x6″) that I carry around to record ideas. I’ve lost count, but I probably have a good 40-odd theme designs that I haven’t even had time yet to implement. Someday, when I have time, I’ll code them up and release them here.

My long experience as a programmer tells me that having a visual cue before hand goes a long way towards accomplishing your programming goals. And while designing a blog theme may be a design task, the actual implementation involves coding - in this case using PHP and WordPress function calls.

By the way, I like to use what are called either non-repro(duction) blue or non-photo blue pencils to do my initial theme sketches. When I’ve finalized my sketch, I’ll redo the important lines using pencil, pen+ink, and/or coloured ink as appropriate.

When creating plugins, make a list of information that the end user (you and any other blogger that downloads your plugin) will provide, and a list of the information that will be displayed in the WordPress control panel. Sketch out any (HTML) data entry forms required. Sketch out how information will be displayed. How will information be passed around? Do you need to store any information in the blog’s database? If so, write up a list of information to be stored, and get someone who knows mySQL coding to help you.

Planning is crucial to good programming, even if it’s just “light” coding for blog platforms. You’d be surprised to know how many so-called professional programmers do not plan properly and thus end up doubling or tripling their code development time. Real programmers do plan; real blog theme + plugin designers should too