SuperSatellite ||

So at this point, I think it’s time to get off and running. The best way I can think of to start, is to…well…tell you how I started. If you are here reading this, you are clearly interested in web design in some manner or form, or at the very least you think I’m an awesome dude, who’s words you pine over daily. Which is awesome.  I can live with either, don’t worry. Anyway, I thought this first post would just go into how I put together this site, explain Wordpress a little, and tell you about all the plug-ins that I’m using to make it all work. That way, if you want to follow suit, you’ll have a little commentary on some stuff you can look in to.  Plus I love the power of brainstorming, so if you’ve thought of something I haven’t, an alternate usage, a better tool, whatever the case might be, just shout it out in the comments section.

There are any number of ways to go about designing a site such as this. Because blogs are the new “it” thing, there is hardly any shortage of examples out there, this being just one more on the haystack. So why re-invent the wheel? There are plenty of good scripts out there that can take a ton of the burden off of you. Based on the relatively simple nature of information architecture I had in mind, I fairly quickly ruled out using a full blown CMS (Content Management System). It’s not that there’s anything wrong with that, though. Systems like e107, Joomla, or dotCMS are all very mature, well-developed systems that are enormously powerful. But in this instance, I didn’t see an overwhelming need to over do my deployment. I wanted a basic blog, with extendability. WordPress was a system I was familiar with. SixApart (owner of LiveJournal) also has a nice paid system called Movable Type. Google owns Blogger. ExpressionEngine is getting a lot of good media play. Obviously the choices are many. To emphasize that point, swing by OpenSourceCMS and click on the “Blogs” category. There you can demo no less than 16 different free, open source blog scripts (including WordPress), as well as dozens of other CMS’s, wikis, image galleries, and other content tools.

In the end, the choice is completely up to you. One is not always going to be better than another. As I’m sure you know, everything has its strengths.  I’m not going to spend time outlining all of WordPress’s features and tools, because there are too many, and you can just read about them at the site.  The same goes for other CMS’s and blogs; their sites maintain plenty of feature lists.  So does Wikipedia, though that list is a little thin on features and details.  I recommend demo’ing a number of open source programs and seeing which one just feels better at your fingertips, then go look into how hard it is to build templates and implement plug-ins, and how good the support community is. This is an area I found WordPress to excel in. Themes apply with a click of a thumbnail after uploading them.  Making them involves learning a little PHP, but just so far as the functions you need to syndicate the pieces of content you want from WordPress.  The support community is strong and great for help at that too.  Plug-ins couldn’t be easier. Upload and click “activate.”  On occasion you’ll have to drop a PHP function into your theme to have plug-in content show up in a certain place. And WordPress has built in editors so that if you need to tweak your theme or plug-in, you can do it from the admin console no matter where you are, provided you have set the file permissions properly. Open source software is becoming so good and so mature now, that there isn’t a very great reason to justify paying for a blog these days.  Especially those of us who might have bigger financial worries that fall way ahead of a web site.

That being said, you do have to decide if you want to host your blog yourself, or go with a hosted service like LiveJournal or Blogger. Hosted services tend to allow you the power of tapping their whole user base, but at the cost of some flexibility and control. Some are free, and some have a paid level that offers more control, power, and options, and in the long run isn’t much different than paying for a web host. Doing it yourself gives you full control. You can leverage your own domain name, and get around a lot of restrictions a blog host may place on you. While the software you use might be free, hosting generally isn’t. Expect to start around $7.95 a month for a decent web host. Being a control freak, I opted to host my own. That way I can always feel like if something’s going wonky, I have the control and power to fix it. Obviously for a less tech savvy person, a hosted solution is a good one for putting maintenance responsibility on someone else’s shoulders.

So, with a blog in place and host pumping ahead, I wanted to extend the system; add some functionality. As I already mentioned, WordPress is beautiful at this. Here’s is what I am using:

Adsense-Deluxe This tool is useful for placing Google ads in your blog. It will actually handle Yahoo too. I figure if you’re here, I might as well make a couple dimes to pay for the hosting off you, right?

Akismet This plug-in comes packaged with WordPress and I recommend enabling it. You’ll need a WordPress.com API (Application Program Interface) key, which you can get by registering an account with them. Instructions are included, just sign up (you don’t need to start a blog, just register a username) and plug the key in to the control panel. Akismet leverages the power of community filtering to block spam comments from blogs. Invaluable.

Dean’s Code Highlighter I particularly liked this tool over other code highlighters. I see myself showing a lot of various code examples in the future, and this one allows a variety languages all in one script to make it look all nice and understandable. Plus it has a CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) file included that you can use to tweak the output to your liking.

DropCap First Character Yes, I fully realize I could do this myself, but I was lazy, browsing random plug-ins, and this caught my eye. Now I can be totally lazy without having to manually add a class to my posts to do a nice looking drop cap at the start. Also controlled by CSS making it very easy to modify.

podPress This is a beautiful add on to allow podcasts, which I plan on doing with each article. Very powerful, very well thought out.  Also handles multiple media types.

Post2PDF This doesn’t produce the cleanest PDF versions of pages that I’ve ever seen, but it does make them simple, and it does seem to work consistently. You also have a fair amount of control over how it makes the page and what it puts in the header and footer. In all fairness, I didn’t look heavily into PDF generators, I just found one that worked and slapped it on.

Sociable This particular plug-in was nice. While I hate the “Web 2.0″ fad craze, I am rather fond of social bookmarking, more for the bookmarking side, than the social side. First off, whatever social bookmarking site you use, it’s in there. You can pick the ones you want displayed, drop a function into your template, and you’re rockin.’ I had to modify the script so that it output in a manner that was friendly with my template though, so just be aware that if you don’t like how it shows up by default, there might be a touch of PHP editing in your future to make it look how you want. You can see the effect on the left side of the screen towards the top of this post.

the_excerpt Reloaded One thing I noticed with the Hemingway Reloaded theme was that where it outputs the About page in the ancillary area, it really liked including the whole page. I wasn’t so much a fan of that, as it made that section way too long. And I couldn’t get the normal the_excerpt function to behave as I wished. This plug-in simply creates a new function that is similar, but more flexible. I was very pleased with the effectiveness of it.

Ubernyms Great for people who are OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) about accessibility, but can’t always remember to put appropriate <acronym> and <abbr> tags on acronyms…which in retrospect would be the opposite of OCD, I suppose… (aside: I always use <acronym> by default, because IE6 doesn’t play nice with <abbr> and IE7 has a bug or two with it still, and I know that doing that isn’t recommended, but we will discuss that at a later time) It will automatically detect acronyms and abbreviations based on a definitions file you edit, and then wrap the proper tag and title with it. You can see above what it did for OCD a couple lines up. Best of all, it comes packed with a bunch of standard computer jargon acronyms from the start (I had to add OCD to the list). It also has a fancy tooltip function which I am not using at the moment, but looks nice nonetheless.

Ultimate Google Analytics  If you don’t yet have a GA (Google Analytics) account, go get one. Don’t worry, I’ll wait. Seriously, short of a paid analytics package, this can’t be beat. I’d even argue that it beats out some paid systems, and I think it’s easier to understand and use than AWStats.  Again, it could be argued that one could just built GA tracking code into a template, but this makes it very nice and easy. It will also detect if a visitor is someone like me (an admin level account) and not track them and potentially skew results if you visit your own site a lot.

WP-Amazon  Another shameless plug-in for making money. This provides a quick and easy interface in while edit mode to add in Amazon products you might be discussing or want to plug, and will tack on the necessary Amazon Associate information. Very nicely implemented with an AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) interface that hides away when not in use.

WP-Print  Similar to the Post2PDF, this was simply a quick solution to the issue of creating a simple, text output for printing. It does a good job of reformatting a post and also adding any URI (Uniform Resource Identifier)’s that might be used at the end with reference numbers. Test it with the printer icon in the “Export” area above the Sociable links at the top of the article. The options interface makes it easy to create a custom formatted link that will streamline into a template nicely, unlike the Sociable plug-in, where I had to edit the plug-in itself.

XSD Snapr  This is how I get all those neat pop up bubbles with thumbnails of external sites on links in an article. WebSnapr is a free service powered with a little Java and a lot of love. It’s similar to Snap’s Preview Anywhere, but faster, and like Alexa’s Thumbnail Service, but free. It’s actually very useful, and perhaps a little gimmicky, but I like the ability to preview a site before clicking a link. I think a feature like this has been long in coming and will be used ever more frequently by designers. I liked this one over, say, Snap.com, as this one just puts a tiny tag line in the thumbnail and forgoes any ads or other dressing. It’s straight and to the point. And last I knew Alexa’s service charged $0.20 per 1000 impressions.

Looking at that list now, I scare myself a little come upgrade time. But it shows how easy it is to just start plugging away new features.  None of these services gave me any grief outside of my own tweaks that had to be made for presentation’s sake.  This goes back to credit WordPress for making a substantially well thought out system API for developers to use in making plug-ins.  I hope that overall this provides some insight into a number of tools you can use, and helps you on your path to blog autonomy.  Good luck, and post any questions.