web design

I’m seriously considering purchasing Chris Pearson’s Thesis theme. For some reason I have started hating the look and feel of my own site. I want to change everything about it. It’s looked pretty much the same for almost 4 years now …

Update 2008-08-21: I did it. I bit the bullet and am now running Thesis. What do you think?

I was very happy to see that the WordPress developers included the ability to “tag” posts. For a long time I’ve been using my own bastardized version of Bunny’s Technorati Tags to add tags to this site. A few days ago I decided to bite the bullet and convert to using the tag system that is now baked into this CMS.

Here’s my only problem: The standard WordPress tagging engine is designed so that clicking a tag on a post displays an archives page with all of the other posts tagged with that tag. (Confused yet?) I don’t like that. One reason I don’t like that is because I have not yet managed to transfer all of my tags from the old system to the new, so lots and lots of my posts have no tags. That means if you click a tag for “ovulating kleptomaniac”, for example, you’re not going to get any results. So I have hornswaggled the code a bit to make it so that on this site the tags link to search results for that tag instead. I think it’s a much more “visitor friendly” implementation of tagging.
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The new member registration form at the Blue Cross of California website has what I consider to be several major bugs.

• A user’s username must contain a number and a letter. Because this is not exactly a ‘net “standard”, they need to do a better job of bringing this to your attention.
• When you submit the form with an error — for example, not including a number in your username — any values selected in drop-down combo boxes are reset to their defaults. This means that you have to re-select your “Group Member Type” and “Secret Question” before submitting the form again. If you don’t re-select these fields, the submission fails.
• When you submit the form with an error — for example, if you didn’t include a number in your username and then re-submitted the form without re-selecting your “Group Member Type” and “Secret Question” — the two password fields (which you entered twice to avoid typos) are cleared as a security precaution. You must enter these values again.
• When you submit the form with an error — for example, if you didn’t include a number in your username and the re-submitted the form without re-selecting your “Group Member Type” and “Secret Question” and then re-submitted the form without re-entering your password twice — you really have a strong desire to punch your monitor.

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A day or two ago I was pinged by a co-worker from my previous job. He wanted to know why, during its recent redesign, I didn’t include keywords in the URLs of the pages on a site I originally built a long, long time ago. I told him that there was no concrete evidence anywhere to support the theory that search engines give any weight to keywords in URLs. He then pointed me to an article at Search Engine Land that begins by stating that, “Keywords in the URL can help rankings,” and, “Hyphens are better than underscores when separating multiple words.”

First I noted that I don’t include keywords on this site, either, and it’s been doing just fine. Then I argued that I find it very, very hard to believe that Google (or any other search engine) has some sort of negative bias against the underscore character but that hyphens are just fine. So basically I completely disagree with the single piece of actual “advice” in the article.

Am I saying that it is wrong to include keywords in your URLs? No. I don’t think that at all. I just don’t think you should be stuffing keywords into your URLs in an effort to boost your pages’ rankings in search engine result pages. It makes great sense to use words in your URLs if you’re doing it to improve the usability of your site or to make it easier for people to link to your site. Unfortunately most site designers and blog engines — WordPress included — fail to effectively do this.

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MTV completely redesigned their site. They switched from all-Flash to (gasp!) all-HTML. Brilliant.

A few weeks ago I saw an image on Chris Pearson’s Pearsonified that I just loved. He had taken a photo of something — I can’t remember what it was — and made it look like an old-fashioned Polaroid. “What a great idea!” I thought. Surely I can figure out how to do that in Photoshop. And I did. So now I’ll share.

How to Create a Polaroid Using Photoshop in 10 Simple Steps

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I have been planning to add an “About” page to this site for about four years. Everybody who’s anybody has an “About” page. People who visit and know not what a blog is must wonder what this site is “About”. I just never seem to get around to it. I have no idea what this site is “About”. And every time I take a crack at it I can never seem to be as pithy as all the other great “About” pages I’ve seen on blogs over the years.

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I have finally updated two of my WordPress hack tutorials so that they are compliant with v. 2.04.

The first one — DropCaps — allows you to put that nifty “dropcap” into a post. This post begins with a dropcap I.

The second one — Amazon Tags — adds two new buttons to your editing screen. They allow you to link directly to an Amazon item by its ASIN or to add a link to an Amazon search.

The second one includes a link to a zipped copy. You can just extract quicktags.js into your wp-includes/js folder and the images into your wp-images folder and you’re set.

Happy WordPress modding!

Currently in Austin, TX for SXSW. I’m on the 15th floor of the Hampton Inn and the view from my window at 2am is gorgeous. This is a great city — a lot like Gainesville, FL. The conference is just extraordinary. I have been taking notes like mad and will hopefully someday post many of them.

For quite some time now I’ve been wanting to be able to create “new!” and “updated!” type images for use at work and here on my site. I wanted something like you’d expect to see on a box of Tide or cereal, y’know? The splash-graphic. The “new and improved!” image.
I finally found the answer. If you want to make nifty 3D(-ish) “badges” like this one, look no further than the excellent tutorials at Bartelme Design: Part 1 and Part 2.

CapitalOne’s website is just terrible. About every third time I click the “LogIn” button on the front page it simply redirects me to the front page. Even on my work connection the entire site loads like it’s running on a 1992 486 box. There are ridiculous pop-ups thrown at me every time I attempt to download a statement. The layout is cluttered with AdSense-esque ads and 63 small-print disclaimers on every page. This is a company that must have money falling out of their pockets — why can’t they have a fast, slick web site? Even Washington Mutual — my local bank — has an infinitely better system.

So I took a stab at creating a header image. I used that crazy haettenschweiler font. I wanted to use the American Idiot font, but I could only find cheesy imitations and not “the real thing” in my five-minute Google hunt for it. This is actually the first time there’s ever been a header image on davidgagne.net — amazing when you consider this site’s been chugging along for over five years now. I just got an email and a gift certificate from dreamhost to congratulate me on my four-year anniversary with them.

from silverorange labs