Since I began blogging about design for profit I’ve learned a few things about myself and about blogging. There’s more to it than just stating your mind, when you’re doing it for money essentially you’re working for the public and your job is to be as accurate, as helpful and consistent as possible.
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JonGos in Photoshop | No Comments »
Google became an OpenID provider. All blogger users can use their blogger URL as OpenID to log into many OpenID supported websites or services. This is a good news. When Google first started to expend their business by introducing new products, they had a vision to provide a single ID for every computer users. But keeping the service limited inside the company is not a good solution, because LiveID (AKA MSN passport ID) was doing the same and if Google wants to grab more market share than MSN and that is why they had to introduce more and more better products.
Well, if I want to write a sort introduction to OpenID, then I must tell you one thing. People are getting tired of creating a new account on every website they use. They are getting tired of keeping track of the password they are using in different sites. Well, OpenID is an open technology standard that solves problems like these. The OpenID technology will allow users to use one account to sign in to hundreds of websites! And this list is growing every day!
Once you get and OpenID, you can simply tell any OpenID enabled website that you are a OpenID user. You will be sent to OpenID provider to verify your ID and password and then signed in to the website.
Yahoo joined the OpenID project long ago and Yahoo users can use Yahoo IDs as their OpenID. Now Google starts offering an (automatic) OpenID URL for each existing google account, thus allowing the google accounts to be used on any OpenId-enabled web site.
After launching it, some users are saying that Google realized that allowing the google users to use their same (google) ID on other (non google-affiliated, independent or rival) sites, (while maintaining the single google logon) is something that the users want.
Visit OpenID homepage.
Omi Azad in Web | No Comments »
In my ten part series “Designing and Coding a Wordpress Theme From Scratch” we made our own Wordpress theme starting with a design in Photoshop. But now that you’ve made a theme, what about releasing it to the public?
JonGos in General, PHP, WordPress | No Comments »
Part 3 - “Photoshop to XHTML in 24 Hours” Part 4 - “Cleaning Up Your XHTML” Part 5 - “Preloading Images with Javascript and CSS” Part 6 - “Marking Up is Hard to Do” and “The Anatomy of a Wordpress Theme” Part 7 - “Beginning with PHP for Wordpress” Part 8 - “Putting the Press in Wordpress with PHP” Part 9 - “Marking Up Header.php, Footer.php and Sidebar.php”
So far we’ve made a ton of progress with our theme design. We designed it in Photoshop, we converted to XHTML and then we began the somewhat tedious task of adding PHP. Now that we’ve created index.php, header.php, footer.php and sidebar.php, we can move on to creating the rest of the theme.
JonGos in General, PHP, Photoshop, WordPress | No Comments »
Part 2 - “Layout And Structure” and “Designing Wordpress Themes in Photoshop” Part 3 - “Photoshop to XHTML in 24 Hours” Part 4 - “Cleaning Up Your XHTML” Part 5 - “Preloading Images with Javascript and CSS” Part 6 - “Marking Up is Hard to Do” and “The Anatomy of a Wordpress Theme” Part 7 - “Beginning with PHP for Wordpress” Part 8 - “Putting the Press in Wordpress with PHP”
Because Wordpress is fundamentally a PHP system we can add a few snippets of code to make our header, footer and sidebar files dynamic.
Marking Up Header.php
Your blog header file usually contains the title of your site linked to the homepage. In an HTML page we would simply add text or place an image and link to the homepage using <a href=”"></a>. The key to making our Wordpress theme, however, is we need to make all our links relative so that the end user can install the theme and use it with their own unique site with as little fuss as possible. It should just work.
JonGos in PHP, Photoshop, WordPress | No Comments »
Last time we talked about the sweet stuff that comes with business blogging. However, like everything else in life, there’s a flipside to the story. Let’s take a look at just a few of them.
Things a Blogger has to Contend With
1. Time-consuming. Serious bloggers put in a lot of hours everyday just to be able to keep abreast of the latest in their niche and churn out relevant posts. Updates are usually posted on a daily basis, but it really depends on the nature of the blog. Try to find your own rhythm and stick to it. If you can’t, hire someone competent to write for you.
2. Not every business is blog-friendly. There are some niche markets that are really compatible with blogs, and others that just isn’t the right match (at least not yet). It’s all about Internet demographics and your target audience. Although people over 40 are spending more time online, it’s still the younger people who dominate the scene. There’s also the issue of location, as in some countries Internet penetration isn’t high enough for business blogging to be feasible. Again, there’s a big “YET”.
3. Naysayers. In all the things you do, there will always be critics hounding you (and sometimes it’s yourself). Although blogging has been around for a long while, in terms of technology, its application as a business tool has only been recently explored, and people fear what they do not know. Their comments are best taken with a grain of salt. Use them as a way of making reality checks, but don’t let them become too much of a distraction.
4. Info overload. One thing you have to be wary about when blogging is saying too much. With the pressure and excitement of putting things out there, something might slip by that’s better kept as a company secret. Also, do check all your facts before publishing anything as whatever goes on the blog does not only reflect on the author but the entire company as well. For opinion columns, a disclaimer notice is usually found on the sidebar as a legal precaution.
5. No direct earnings. Business blogging is different from blogging as a business. The former is using blogging as a tool to promote an existing business, while the latter uses blogging to earn revenue (from ads, affiliate marketing, etc) by writing about certain topics like magazines or news sites. Business bloggers, for the most part, don’t really count on their blogs for direct earnings, because the benefits are largely intangible. However, this is not a hard and fast rule as there are many enterprising bloggers out there you can emulate, if you should choose to play it both ways.
Do you have a business that uses a blog? How has your experience been so far?
Scout in Content & Blogging | 2 Comments »
Love them or hate them, regular expressions are here to stay. When it comes to quickly dealing with large blocks of data, batch processing operations or screen scraping, regular expressions are often the most effective solution. There’s just one problem, though - learning them can be as hard as learning a new language altogether. Here’s how to get off to a flying start.
Akash Mehta in PHP | 1 Comment »
My friend and co-author of this blog Scout would be very concern now and will try a lot to find and share ideas on how to make your images search engine optimized after Google announced about image ranking.
Well, Google is Idea Giant, because users likes the ideas they brought to us so far and hopefully it will happen for Google’s future ideas too. So Image Ranking idea is the latest brainchild of Google. Recently two Google scientists presented a paper at the international World Wide Web Conference in Beijing describing what the researchers call VisualRank, an algorithm for blending image-recognition software methods with techniques for weighting and ranking images that look most similar.
Honestly I like the idea, because when people look for common image titles, most of the time any image with that title comes as a result and I believe this new technology by Google will change that.
From Dell to Intel, companies have started to put up their own blogs as a new way to communicate with their customers. A lot of smaller businesses are trying to follow in their footsteps (with various levels of success). The question is: “Is it really worth it?”
The Good Stuff
1. Getting Personal. Many businesses already publish newsletters for their clients, but blogging takes client communications to a higher plane. The key is interaction. Blogging is a two-way street, usually in an informal atmosphere. With it, one can create a strong personal relationship with customers, encouraging brand loyalty.
2. Reader-friendly. The basic blog format is clean and simple (unless cluttered up by ads). If you use any of the popular platforms such as Wordpress, there are hundreds of great-looking free templates you can choose from. And, since people are used to blogs by this time, it’s easy for them to digest your content and navigate through your site.
3. Uncomplicated. You don’t have to be a very technical person to start a blog. Most can be set up in a matter of minutes. Enhancements like polls, podcast widgets and other plug-and-play add-ons are also available.
4. Low-cost. Blog setup can range from free, if you use a specialized blog host such as Blogger, to a few hundred dollars, depending on whether you plan to get your own webhost and use a personalized domain name. Of course, the latter will appear more professional.
5. Blog as portfolio. Aside from featuring the latest announcements from your company, your business blog can include articles on the latest trends in your industry, to show people that you are up-to-date and that your products and services reflect that. You can also post in-depth how-tos, reports, or opinion pieces that can build your credibility as an expert.
Scout in Content & Blogging | No Comments »
Part 1 - “Tools For The Task” and “Preparation” Part 2 - “Layout And Structure” and “Designing Wordpress Themes in Photoshop” Part 3 - “Photoshop to XHTML in 24 Hours” Part 4 - “Cleaning Up Your XHTML” Part 5 - “Preloading Images with Javascript and CSS” Part 6 - “Marking Up is Hard to Do” and “The Anatomy of a Wordpress Theme” Part 7 - “Beginning with PHP for Wordpress”
Wordpress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability as the makers proudly proclaim at wordpress.org. The keyword there being ‘publishing’ and the most important part of the Wordpress publishing engine is the element that allows content to be published online easily and automatically. This element is called the the loop.
