I also upgraded my photo gallery from Gallery 2 to Zenphoto. Liam ended up having to write a complicated sql statement to convert it, but I’m much, much happier with the new system. I’ve been using zen for a work project and find it to be much easier to work with than Gallery 2.

If you notice anything that doesn’t look right please do let me know. I haven’t tested the new design much in IE 7 and I know it doesn’t work right in 6 (too bad).

(Unfortunately, most shared hosting accounts don’t have ssh access, but hopefully this will be useful for anyone on virtual hosts or dedicated servers who don’t already know how to do this!)

1. SSH into your website. Don’t know how? Try this:
   1. open a terminal
   2. type ssh username@yourwebsite.com
   3. agree to any host authenticity messages
   4. enter your password at the prompt
2. Navigate to your wp-content directory. Depending on your hosting setup the command will look something like this:cd httpdocs/wp-content/plugins/ or cd httpdocs/wp-content/themes/
3. Get the URL for the plugin or theme you want to download. The full url to the zip file. (This makes it really annoying when plugin developers hide the full url!)
4. Type in wget http://linkto.com/theplugin.zip
5. Wait for the plugin to download onto your server
6. Unzip the file by entering unzip theplugin.zip. If you have a .tar.gz file use tar xfc theplugin.tar.gz.

Done! Now you can go into your wordpress admin panel and activate the plugin or theme.

Well, browser manufacturers have caught on to this. Following in Opera’s footsteps, IE and Firefox are now implementing zoom as the default method of resizing text.

If this is the case, then do we still need to code layouts in ems or can we go back to using pixels? I’m currently coding a new layout for this site and I’ve decided to code it in pixels. It’s so much easier not to have to do grid calculation in ems and worry about what the current font size is. My grid unit is 24px. That’s it. Much better.

So, do you think it’s still worth it to code layouts in em’s? The non-zoom font resizing functions are still there. Will people prefer to use them over zooming?

Via Wordpress SEO I discovered the HeadSpace plugin. HeadSpace allows you to specify a custom title format for all wordpress page types. It does lots of other cool stuff with metadata, like:

• auto-suggesting tags
• mass-editing metadata, including title, description, slugs (urls), and tags/keywords
• adding a custom title or description per post
• adding custom css of javascript files depending on the page type or on a per-post basis

Previously I had other plugins to do some of those things so it’s nice to have it all in one. I was a little concerned about bloat or annoying interface extras but I don’t find that to be a problem (yet). Here’s a screenshot of the title tag settings page:

HeadSpace works with modules that you can add to your write page, either hidden behind a link or always appearing. It’s basically an all-in-one metadata customizer and editor.

Here’s a screenshot of how this is implemented on the “write” page:

More screenshots are available from the HeadSpace site.

Customization on title tags could also be done with the SEO Title plugin. This one works a little differently by allowing you to add a custom title tag for individual posts and pages. I don’t think it can change the default format of titles but I haven’t installed it so I’m not sure about that.

If these solutions seem like overkill to you, my old title tag code may work just fine.

Then I read this:

HTML is easy — so easy that even a first-time user can do it. That’s because you don’t have to learn HTML to use it.

Leading word processing applications, such as Microsoft Word and AppleWorks 6, actually generate HTML webpages for you with just a few clicks of a mouse.

Noooooooo….

* link only available while my work computer is on, which is only when I’m at work, or you can try this one.

What else could they do?

1. Provide an language option when purchasing the product and only provide documentation in that language.
2. Skip the paper documentation and provide a little card with a link to the download site. Nobody reads the documentation anyway, might as well save some trees.

And the worst part about it is that the user’s guide is mostly a bunch of bullshit. Thank you for purchasing this product blah blah blah, this is what it’s does, and this is what’s included in the package. Um, I bought the product I think I know what it does!

The connection instructions are on a separate poster with diagrams only, no words at all. I’m not sure which is worse.

The dock was also wrapped in molded syrofoam, unlike the LaCie external hard drive that arrived yesterday (not for me), which had egg carton like cardboard packaging. Boo to Lenovo (although I really like my laptop so I won’t criticize them too much!)

Today sj at 37 signals posted an interesting counterpoint to my position. They don’t create mock-ups because, in short, they feel that it slows things down too much and just doesn’t make sense. I think this really depends on the context. If you’re creating something highly interactive then, sure, maybe it doesn’t make sense to do a static proof. On the other hand, if you’re creating a static web site then maybe creating a visual proof and getting your ideas together first is a good idea.

sj writes:

Photoshop puts the focus on production, not productivity. Photoshop is about building something to look at, but about building something you can use. When you’re just worried about how it’s going to look, you spend too much time on production value. HTML/CSS lets you be productive. You’re constantly moving forward towards something more and more real with every change.

Reasons why I like graphic mock-ups:

1. It helps to enhance creativity. I can play with a variety of ideas without committing to anything. I can quickly throw some things together (some colours, a grid, some shapes, a typeface) and get an impression of what the site will feel like.
2. Everything is more coherent. I’ve developed pages in the past that were added to iteratively over time. One thing gets added, then another, then something gets taken away. It always feels less coherent than something that had a graphic proof to work from.
3. It’s faster and easier to arrange page elements without constantly having to fuss with CSS. This is why I like vector programs for my mock-ups. Easy to draw boxes and push them around.
4. The design isn’t dictated by what’s easier to do in HTML/CSS.
5. Details are good. Good design is in the details. How big should the margins be? Should these rounded corners be 4px or 6px? Will this little gradient enhance the design? That’s certainly not the first thing I do but I do build those things in before the proof is finished.
6. Tools are available to apply and adjust grids. I know there are some browser plugins available to do some gridding but graphic design programs were built with this in mind.
7. You know what you need to build. sj says that a mock-up is wasted time because you have to build things twice. But how do you know what to build? I think if I were to start without a mock-up I would spend as much time or more writing and re-writing CSS. Sounds frustrating.

Some of the downsides mentioned in the 37 Signals post and the commenters aren’t all that serious. I dont’ know about you, but I understand that the real version isn’t going to look exactly like the mock-up. Sure, the fonts are going to look a bit different, some elements may need to be changed based on CSS limitations. That’s okay. It’s a mock-up, not a contract.

This blog may be the only site I’ve ever done without a graphic proof, at least since my very early days and that was only because I had a solid mental picture of what I wanted it to look like and I knew the layout would be simple. But then again, maybe I could have come up with something better if I did.

What about you? Do you feel that graphic mock-ups are important? Do you always do them or do you work directly in HTML/CSS right away? Can you think of any other benefits of creating mock-ups?

People aren’t going to learn if you just give them the answers. This happens all the time in the forums –people post a question and someone comes along and gives them the code to paste in. That solves the problem but the poster doesn’t learn anything in the process.

With coding questions in particular I’ll often give people most of the answer, even writing out a step-by-step tutorial, but I won’t post the full code or a link to a working page. This way the user has to put things together themselves and figure out how things work. There was a really great post at Creating Passionate Users called “Cognitive Seduction and the “peekaboo” law”:

In learning, the more you fill things in and hold the learner’s hand, the less their brain will engage. If they don’t need to fire a single neuron to walk through the tutorial, lesson, lecture, etc., they’re getting a shallow, surface-level, non-memorable exposure of “covered” material, but… what’s the point?

(I totally love that blog. So sad that she’s no longer posting. It’s a must read if you’re interested in education and/or software development or something in between).

With the tutorial in question I came out with some samples of the code I would need to do something similar to what I really want to do. It doesn’t help me understand what those variables are doing and how I can use them in different ways. Not a tutorial.

See, it’s a short post for once. Aren’t you happy?

The new design is surely nicer looking than the old (although I didn’t really have a problem with the old design). They’ve made quite a few interface changes – some good, some not so good. Read on to see some screenshots and analysis of the new interface.

I must preface this by saying that I haven’t had a chance to read much about the new design - there may be some rationale for a lot of these changes that I don’t know about. I also don’t participate at the Wordpress forums. Of the old Wordpress admin panel, Happy cog says:

“There was a randomness and unpredictability to everything from the location of key functions to the number of items in the navigation menu.”

I don’t feel that the new interface is much of an improvement in this regard. In fact, I find some elements to be even more random and unpredictable than before. I gather that they were trying to keep the peripheral tasks out of the way, but what they’ve ended up doing is mixing different types of tasks and moving some things too far from where you need them.

Note: Screenshots of the old Wordpress interface are available here (those are from a slightly older version but you’ll get the gist). In this post all screenshots link to the full versions.

The header

This is the new Wordpress header:

Notice how they’ve split up the navigation links into 2 main places with some secondary links at the very top (They all used to be in one long list). My biggest problem with this is that the design link is in with the content editing links and not with the administration. As we’ll see below, the designers seem to think that Wordpress users change their themes a lot. I don’t.

The dashboard link has also been moved way up to the top corner where you can barely even see it. The dashboard is an important page, the link to it should be more prominent.

The dashboard

The new dashboard layout is one of the most celebrated changes in Wordpress 2.5. The old dashboard had a brief welcome bit with some quick links to common tasks and a sidebar with links to your latest incoming links, comments and posts. The bulk of the page was made up of recent news from the Wordpress development blog. Not the greatest use of space.

The new dashboard has improved the information provided but I still think it could be better. Take the top section under the orange header:

One of my big annoyances with this page is the way they’ve done the incoming links box:

Almost everything about this is wrong:

• The list does not include the title of the post being linked.
• The link is on the word “saying”, not the post tile. We know now to avoid “click here” links, right? This is the same thing.
• The quoted text is the opening line of the post, not the reference to your post.

You can edit this box but that only allows you to change the number of items shown and the post date (which was not displayed by default, if I remember correctly). For me the option to show the date doesn’t actually work.

The incoming links box should:

• display the title of the linking post.
• display the date of the linking post.
• display the author/site title of the linking post.
• if possible, display the context of the link to your site.
• link the title to the referrring page.
• provide options to let you turn all of these elements on or off.

(And, yes, my backlinks are really pathetic!)

The post composer & editor

This is where you go to write new posts. In the new interface they’ve moved a lot of the options to the space below the post editor, instead of keeping them in the sidebar. The only thing they kept in the sidebar is the preview and save/publish links, plus a list of related links.

There are a couple of reasons why this is really annoying:

• When I finish writing a post, my eye is at the bottom of the post text box. Now I want to either preview my post or publish it. But where are the buttons to do that? Not right underneath the post box where they should be, they’re over in the sidebar near the top of the page.
• When i start writing a post I want to make sure I remember to enter the tags and categories. In the old interface this was next to the post box where I could see it from the start. Now I have to remember to scroll down below the bottom of the post box and fill in those options.
• Meanwhile, the permalink edit option is right at the top, under the title of the post. How does that make sense? (Not shown in screenshot - this only shows up after a post has been saved once)
• The new arrangement of the page, along with the larger size of headings and bigger margins means that this is a much longer page than it used to be. There’s a lot of unnecessary scrolling.
• The related links bit is really unnecessary because those pages are easily accessible through the header menus

The image uploader

One of the things they’ve added here is a media library feature that can be accessed through the write interface. It seems they think that Wordpress users like to add a lot of audio and video and stuff. I don’t. Image uploading is enough for me.

The other problem with this tool is that it doesn’t actually work. I found out later that it uses flash, which is a bit of an issue in Opera/Linux. (Flash does work in Opera/Linux, it just doesn’t work well). I was fiddling around with my permissions trying to figure out why this didn’t work but it turns out that all sorts of other things could be going wrong. I didn’t get any error messages either.

I’m also not a huge fan of the lightbox effect. I guess some people think this is cool but for me it’s kind of lame and annoying.

Other new features

I am happy that the new visual editor works in Opera. I can write HTML just fine but when I’m writing I prefer to concentrate on writing and looking at mark-up gets in the way.

Tagging is fully integrated in the 2.5 which is nice to have. You used to have to install a plugin for that. However, I must wonder if it’s really necessary to include these things in core when they can be easily managed by plugins.

It is really awesome to have notification of updates to plugins and an easy way to install them quickly. Although now I know how to use wget and I’d rather do it that way…

Final thoughts

I guess this release was designed with a certain type of blogger in mind. Someone who uses a lot of multimedia and changes themes a lot. That’s not me. I’m not a super hard core wordpress user like some people. I like the platform but I don’t really have time to spend much time playing with it and participating in the community. I guess it’s time for me to delve into creating a custom CSS and checking out some of the plugins available for the admin panel.

Edit: I just came in to fix some type-os and once again attempted to scroll to the bottom to find the save button! This is going to take some getting used to.

I brought this up over a year ago and this time, others are talking about it. Jeff Croft says that “Your markup validator, whether it’s the one on the W3C site or one built into your favorite coding tool, is not a measuring stick for greatness.”

It’s like a spell checker … but not

This is an oft made comparison: the validator is like a spell checker. You wouldn’t turn in a school assignment or publish a print document without spell checking would you? Right. You’re also not going to put a sticker on it to say that you passed the spell checker.

And, of course, we all know that the spell checker can’t catch your grammar mistakes or misuse of words blah blah blah, you know what I mean here.

On the other hand, it might not make that much of a difference if you’ve got a few validation errors. In fact, most of the time it won’t. This page might have some validation errors, I actually don’t know if it does or not, I haven’t checked lately. It would be pretty dumb to spend your time going around checking validation on your sites all the time. Although I must admit, i do have the HTML validator extension installed in Firefox. When I use Firefox (which is only for testing…).

It’s not that important to me

Really, it’s not. It may make me slightly uncomfortable, and I may try to fix things if its convenient. But most of the time I’ve got better things to do. It’s not the end of the world if a page isn’t valid.

Suggesting validation to others

In the comments on Croft’s article people are talking about suggesting validation to others in forums. We do tend to do this sometimes at TWF but it’s often because the code is so bad that it’s really difficult to pick out what the problem might be. We may also suggest that people run the validator if they’re having a lot of display issues. We would never just say “run a validator” and leave it at that though. We would explain that if the code is correct it can often help to straighten out display problems etc.

Web Standards != Validation

The validator also doesn’t cover all of the many facets of standards compliance. Web standards are much more than validation alone. To me, it’s most important to follow standards in this sense (using proper semantics, separating presentation from content, minimizing extraneous code etc.). I’m sure you’ve seen the examples of really bad code that passes the validator.

And you?

How often do you validate? Do you obsess about it? Does it take precedence over other aspects of web development?

Edit: My apologies if anyone attempted to comment on this post and wasn’t able to. I upgraded my wordpress and it was doing some weird things.