FFFFoundRSS Plugin For WordPress

Posted on January 23, 2008January 23, 2008 Posted in TechnologyTagged , blog, feed, ffffound, plugin, rss, wordpress11 Comments

For all you WordPress and FFFFound users out there, here’s a sweet little plugin called FFFFoundRSS. I had an idea for a plugin that would pull in your personal feed from FFFFound and display it on your blog. Since I have no idea how to create WordPress plugins I started to search for someone who could. That’s how I found Dave Kellam, who’s created a similar plugin for flickr and has done an excellent job with the FFFFound plugin. It’s easy to install via a widget or a php include and it has some nice features like image caching. Go to Dave’s site to download and get more info.

You can see the plugin in action in the sidebar to the left.

A Portfolio That Aggregates And Consumes

Posted on January 17, 2008January 17, 2008 Posted in Design, TechnologyTagged database, Design, flickr, graphic, Graphic User Interface, portfolio, Technology, this and again, Twitter, Yahoo

This site mainly focuses on the design aspects of a portfolio but here’s one where the technology behind it is unique (the design work is good too). Andrew Sliwinski, a graphic and user experience designer living near Detroit, has developed a framework using Yahoo! Pipes that aggregates and consumes data from a network of nodes (Flickr, Blogspot, Twitter, Del.icio.us) and displays it on his site. So when the network is updated, the content or data gets added to the portfolio. Andrew is basically using these sites as a back-end CMS tool to edit and manage his portfolio. Brilliant.

You can read a detailed explanation of the technology here.

NetNewsWire Style

Posted on November 15, 2007February 2, 2009 Posted in Design, TechnologyTagged feed, grids, netnewswire, rss, style4 Comments

Recently I’ve started using a great RSS reader called NetNewsWire that makes managing and reading my 50+ feeds much easier and efficient. The one problem I have with it are the styles that are bundled with the app. Some of them are nice but most of them are hard to look at. They also all use pretty the same boring layout. Title, feed info, content, all in a row. So I figured I’d try to make one and see how it comes out and I can honestly say that I like it. I used a grid system to design it so it has a nice structure.

The one issue with it though is that it breaks if there are multiple images in the feed. Works great when there is one image or no image but once there are multiple, they all lay on top of each other so you only see the first image. To fixed this I made a second style titled AisleOne Multiple that alters the layout a bit to compensate for this problem. So you set your style to AisleOne Single and when you get an article with multiple images you change it to AisleOne Multiple. It’s a terrible solution and I’m going to continue working on it. I need to figure out a way for the CSS to see that there are multiple images in the feed and set a different style in that instance. If anyone has any ideas on this, please let me know. Also if you have any issues with the styles just post a comment and I’ll try and fix it.

I’ve only tested it in the new 3.0 version. To install just double click the files.

Download NNW Styles

The Evil Widows & Orphans

Posted on November 13, 2007September 30, 2008 Posted in Technology, TypographyTagged plugin, smartypants, Typography, typogrify, widont, wordpress3 Comments

Personally I can’t stand widows and orphans and I’ve encountered a number of designers that pay no attention to them, some of them don’t even know what they are. A shame really. Anyway, one thing I don’t like about WordPress is how there’s almost no way to easily control the typography of each post. In comes Typogrify, a plug-in originally created by Christian Metts for Django and ported to WP by Hamish. It’s an excellent little plug-in that includes the Smartypants and Widont engines.

Here’s what it can do:

– Prevents text “widows”.

– Run text through SmartyPants.

– Wrap initial quotes (and French style (Guillemets) quotes) in class=’dquo’ or class=’quo’ depending on if they are single or double.

– Wrap ampersands in class=’amp’.

– Wrap multiple adjacent capital letters in class=’caps’.

– Add a thinspace before and after en and em dashes.

– And of course it has a function to do all of the above.

I love the damn thing and it will make my life more fulfilling. If you run a WP blog download the plug-in so we can do away with Widows & Orphans once and for all!

Via I Love Typography

New Theme

Posted on September 3, 2007 Posted in Design, Technology16 Comments

So I’ve decide to just use an existing theme and customize it for myself. The current theme is based on the beautiful Modicus by Robert Ellis from Upstart Blogger who has designed some great themes for WP. I wanted a more clean, simplified look and I think this works well. Let me know what you guys think and if you experience any issues.

The Web Design Survey

Posted on April 24, 2007April 24, 2007 Posted in Advertising, Design, Technology, Typography

A List Apart is running a survey that looks to answer some questions about use Web Designers and Developers:

Designers, developers, project managers. Writers and editors. Information architects and usability specialists. People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Who are we? Where do we live? What are our titles, our skills, our educational backgrounds? Where and with whom do we work? What do we earn? What do we value?

Participate and you can win one free ticket to An Event Apart event held in the continental U.S.; an Apple 30GB video iPod, an Event Apart jump drive, or a funky A List Apart T-shirt.