Magis Chair One is the most uncomfortable piece of furniture I’ve ever laid my behind on. And not even the cushions help it feel a bit better. Being made of metal also impacts other aspects of its usability – one has to put significant effort to move the damn thing just a few centimeters to the side. I believe it would have been much better if it was made of plastic. It’s not something I’d put in my living room and feel proud of anyway. If I’m about to spend €275 a piece, I’d rather go for an Eames DSR.

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Title says it all. Watch closely this project, I expect some mind-blowing examples of (un)human creativity!

1. 
   See that selection of mind-blowing wedding pictures. Some made me lose my vocabulary. ...

Starting left to right:

1. Xing logo and search bar indentation makes the header look like a roof. Can’t really see the point for that.
2. Block containing number of new messages and pending contact requests is floating amid of nowhere and looks more like a result of messed up CSS.
3. There is much confusion about link appearance throughout site. Especially in “What’s new in my network” block, where three different link styles are used.
4. Two totally incompatible sets of icons, one of which is absurd, to say the least.
5. Ugly, obtrusive and really pointless shadow below main navigation.

I spent ~1 hour fixing those issues in Photoshop and here is the result explained.

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One thing I learned at P2P 2009 – people should check whether their camera’s battery indicator is blinking before they go to a conference, so they don’t end up with a single shot.

I could not attend all the topics, as they were spread at different places and God knows why I thought I will be able to take part in everything. Instead, the first day I went to BlogCamp and attended the first half of Web 2.0 block on the second day.

Opening lection was held by the general sponsor of the conference – Superhosting. It was a mixture of numbers, assumptions, complacence and pointless bullshit, and generally sounded like “we invented the wheel, particularly in Bulgaria”. Blah.

BlogCamp was fine. I met people I knew for some time over their blogs and it was all nice. Nikolay Bachiyski of Automattic presented WordPress 2.8, which is expected to go public in the beginning of May and will hopefully solve lots of issues, and get alot of new features. Not sure about the exact feature list yet, but hoping for the best.

Corporate blogging should be used with great caution and only if you are absolutely sure you can do it right.

There was a discussion about corporate blogging, that in my opinion was shifted by the moderators. They were trying to push their point of view instead of doing what a moderator is supposed to do. Speaking of corporate blogs, there are 3 types in Bulgaria:

- corporate blogs, that are simply used for promoting products and services;
- corporate blogs, that soon die, because noone knows what to put there;
- corporate blogs, that are actually very good;

1. P2P Conference 2009
   P2P Conference 2009 is something like the local technology event of the year. It will be held on April...

It won’t be that I will be blogging or tweeting from the spot, because I’m not that type of guy. But nevertheless, I will make sure to provide unprejudiced cover of the event once I’m back. First thing that comes on my mind right now, is next time they should provide English language version of the site. Might help attract foreign speakers and attenders, which will be a major plus. And generally put some real work on it. Because, you know, web and technology conference with site like this…

1. P2P Conference 2009: The Outcome
   One thing I learned at P2P 2009 – people should check whether their camera’s battery indicator is blinking before...

Sometimes something funny happens to browsers (Firefox 3 in this example) and they lose their default white background colour. Of course, this can be easily fixed by going to Tools – Options – Content – Colours, and checking “Use system colours” box. If you haven’t done something weird to your default colour scheme, it should set it back to pure white.

My point however, is different and is directed (along with my finger) towards web designers. Dudes, just don’t overlook the background-color: #ffffff; CSS property. Because this is what happens when you forget about it:

Not too inspiring, eh? Let’s see how long will it take for those sites to get fixed.

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IOJ is a service I just found and liked instantly. Basically it allows you to do seamless file upload and sharing. And it works like a snap – point file, select IOJ Upload or IOJ Zip And Upload and that’s it. Then just press a button to copy the TinyURL style link, paste it in your email or chat and you are done in matter of seconds.

Besides your file, dynamically generated URI also features forum embed code, which is a nice touch. It’s equally easy to capture and upload a screenshot or video. Perfect solution for quick on-the-fly presentations. And there is also a Firefox add-on, that allows you to rehost image from a random site on IOJ. While I like the idea, I can’t ignore the fact it also makes it easy to snatch copyrighted content.

The only question is how to delete files you don’t need anymore and I’m still waiting for their response. You can delete links if upload dialog is still present, but once you close it, there seems to be no way to do that, as the client does not keep history of your uploads. And I’m still not sure if deleting a link has effect on the file. So at this point I would not advise anyone to put their valuable content there. Not until some clear idea about that is present, or an updated version is available.

Oh, and the client also sports version for your favourite Mac, too.

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People around me know me for my passion for WordPress. I can say that with confidence.

Don’t let me even open the topic about how long have I looked for a decent CMS! I tried both free and commercial platforms, and none was ever good enough for me. Well, maybe except for CMS Made Simple, which I was using before I started experimenting with WP.

I sport WP since version 1.2. Took me some time to realise it can be used as a CMS, as well, but I’m glad I came down to this.

Couple of years ago I was wondering what kind of backend to use on my inspiration gallery. I was even planning a custom development, but I did not really want to put money in something I am not going to gain profit from.

Then all of a sudden while I was browsing Web Creme, it hit me. It was WP based! So were 90% of all other inspiration galleries. Ingenious! 3 days later I launched the site.

And that was the time when I started using WP as a CMS. Thousands of plugins at your disposal, really flexible when it comes to implementing twisted design, easy to work with, regularly updated… The last is also WP’s major problem if you are using lots of plugins developed by lazy coders when they have the time.

But…

WP is not an all-round solution. It was never meant to be a CMS. It was only meant to be a great blogging platform.

Even that it seems they are going to put a bit of an effort in CMS direction (if you have filled the 2.8 feature wishlist you know what I am talking about), there are certain issues that prevent it from functioning as a real CMS yet. I also mentioned those in my remarks within the wishlist, and I hope they will be taken into consideration.

User management

Although it’s ideal for building corporate sites, journals and information-rich sites, WP seriously lacks decent user management. There are numerous plugins, that claim to extend it’s capabilities, but as you know, using plugins to handle fundamental functionalities is always risky, and should be avoided, if possible. You generally risk to fuck up your entire project if it turns out that the plugin is not compatible with the latest WP version, and the author does not seem to care anymore.

I had to learn that the hard way. Spent two months on an ambitious project (mixed content types, forums, custom fields, cross-linking data) which involved 30+ plugins, and lots of custom coding, just to find out in the end, that majority of those plugins are not supported by the latter WP versions. So I’m stuck with WP 2.5 for the time being, and honestly believe I should migrate this particular project to another – more social platform, as otherwise it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

You can hardly make any use of WP’s default user fields, levels, and organization beyond blogging. Fortunately there is Role Manager to help you with user levels and their abilities, and Cimy User Extra Fields to help you add custom fields. Unfortunately, you can’t gain control over their grouping in user profile, but if you can live with that, go for it.

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Have you noticed? Everyone turned out to be a SEO expert these days. And I don’t see a reason not to be such. It’s not a rocket science, no matter what they say.

SEO is not what it used to be just 6 years ago – a dark mystery. At least that’s what it was to me at that time, when I realised adding endless lines of background-coloured “sex” to the bottom of the page does not work anymore and not just that, engines started to ban sites exploiting such techniques. So it was time for total switch in SEO tactics. To be honest, I was not prepared for that and soon left competition. Until few years later, when I realised how things do actually work.

I’m not an expert, professional or even advanced user in this field. And I have never strived to be one. That’s not my game. Hell, what you can’t do for free, you can pay for! But it happened, that I managed to get some sites properly indexed. And here is the summary of my experience in the past 3 years.

Before you start, you should keep three important things on your mind

1. SEO is not a one-time process! It requires constant attention and effort. If you don’t have the time or the nerve – just drop it and pay someone else do it for you.
2. SEO is a long-term process! It usually takes two or more months in the beginning, before you can start assessing initial results and start building your strategy from there.
3. SEO is a constantly changing process! Yesterdays tricks will not work tomorrow. You need to be educating yourself on a regular basis so you can keep in line.

SEO requires certain knowledge, but that’s just a small part of the whole. The main part is to be observant and curious about how things work.

With the development of social networks, blogs and other mediums with actively changing content, search engines started prioritizing different content aspects. It’s still best to have keywords in your title and your URI, but it also matters how often is your content updated, and generally how popular your site is.

Of course you can’t be very popular right from the beginning, unless you have some good connections and pull the right strings (or you spam), but nowadays that’s not an issue. Especially if you pay attention to the following tips.

note: I assume you have certain knowledge about how things work on the web.

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But WordPress has a well known issue with wp_query and pagination, which I was about to face…

My decision to add shorts on the left turned out to be an unexpected challenge. I’ve never tried to fetch posts before the main loop so far. Well, I have, actually, but using other means – the Get-a-Post plugin. Which was not quite the same, as I soon found out.

“The query_posts function overrides and replaces the main query for the page. To save your sanity, do not use it for any other purpose”

While there is virtually no problem querying posts multiple times outside of the main loop, regardless of what they say, it’s not the case when you try to fetch those posts before the main loop. And it’s definitely not the case when you add pagination.

And even that you can come up with a solution, you will have alot more work trying to fix your search results page and your archives. Actually, I could not fix the search results, but as I said, I am not a coder and my knowledge in this area is almost equal to zero. So I started looking for something else.

After some searching, testing and cursing, which took a couple of hours, I finally found a solution that worked. My point here is, if it worked for me with my zero coding skills, great demands and “impossible, my ass” attitude, it will certainly work for you. So simple, yet so elegant.

<div id="shorts">
<h4>Shorts</h4>
<?php
$temp = $wp_query;
$wp_query= null;
$wp_query = new WP_Query();
$wp_query->query('cat=10&showposts=3');
?>
<?php while ($wp_query->have_posts()) : $wp_query->the_post(); ?>
<?php the_content(''); ?>
<div class="clear"></div>
<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php $wp_query = null; $wp_query = $temp;?>
</div>

Thanks for saving my day, mate!

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