cre8d design

Bloggers are super-excited about a new way to drive traffic to their sites through Facebook’s newly announced “like” functionality being available to all websites now.

If you’re a developer, this code will help but if you’re a Wordpress user wanting to jump straight on board, Jonathan Dingman has written a plugin for you which can be downloaded here:

Facebook Like Wordpress Plugin.

It’s yet to be added into Wordpress’ plugin repository. Expect other plugins to be developed over the coming days and weeks with added options, but if you’re wanting code now, give his plugin a go!

We recently watched the documentary “We live in Public“. It’s disturbing, prophetic, confronting and thought-provoking. While it’s an extreme version of the lives almost all of us live, the elements many of us play with each day inch closer to “living in public”.

The ubiquitousness of social networking, recording devices and ease of worldwide distribution in merely a few years has changed what each generation understands as being public versus private.

I’m all for engaging with social media and I love using Facebook and Twitter, reading blogs, video conferencing and using my iphone. But at the same time, I found myself reflecting on some of the comments made in the documentary – made years before the advent of these things:

• How people find their self-worth based in the number of comments, or reads, or likes or numbers of “friends”.
• How people are crying out to be heard and to get their 15 minutes of fame every day.
• How we think we’re getting community online but we often feel more alone.
• How we trade privacy for connections with people.
• How we forget how public things are when we’re immersed in a culture with no privacy.

When I found myself in the emergency room of hospital ten days ago, I sent txt messages to close friends and family – but didn’t tweet about it. I wanted to know that the people I love deeply knew first. Years ago, news would take quite a while to circulate in a circle of friends and acquaintances but now it can be done in an instant – globally.

I’ve seen numerous times people forget this on Facebook or Twitter and stress about making sure someone knew before they were told by someone else – rather than directly. From the outside, it may seem silly that someone should “forget” that anyone can read it, but once immersed in social media it is hard to remember what private means.

Another result of watching the documentary: I recently did a cull of people on Facebook – names I didn’t recognise, or people I had never exchanged communication with on there. There were surprisingly lots of them and it actually felt good to do a spring-clean.

I also was reflecting on my sister’s comments about how she always left a comment if she looked through a set of someone’s photos on Facebook – she felt a bit stalkerish without doing so. That’s quite a nice thing to do and it really doesn’t take time – let someone know you’ve noticed, you’re interested, you’re there. We read so many blog posts and then skip on to the next interesting thing without stopping to engage – because it’s not required. We’ve swap ease of access for probably less engagement. Yes we don’t have to sit through boring slideshows of other people’s trips and can pick and choose what we want to see, but we’ve lost all those real conversations, the context around the photos – the laughing together, the eating, the swapping of stories. They can be gained online, but it’s more work than we’re used to.

PS, I’m fine!

There’s quite a variety of Wordpress books out there for sale and I regularly have a flick through new ones which come out but usually don’t feel compelled to purchase them.  I was recently sent a copy of Wordpress 2.8 Theme Design by Tessa Blakely Silver to review and I was pleasantly surprised.

The book is an incredible helpful guide to anyone starting out, or even intermediate Wordpress users looking to create their own themes from scratch.  The book is conversational but not to the point of being waffly or frustrating.  It’s full of helpful little tips along the way about the general process of making a theme and even just rapid prototyping and designing in general – not just a book full of code snippets which can easily be found by using Google or the Wordpress codex. I liked her insights and approach for sketching, wireframing and coding early on even though I’ve been designing Wordpress themes for years it’s always handy to see a fresh perspective on the process.

There’s plenty of practical and common types of things you’ll want to add onto your theme, such as plugins and widgets.  Alongside this, you’re given information on a wide variety of tools that most web developers usually have at their disposal for handling the technical side of managing sites, especially bug testings.

The book is a good mix of advice, non-technical and technical information.  Parts of it you may want to skip over on first read and use more as a reference – not every theme has all the complexities mentioned in the book.  It’s not exhaustive, but again that’s where the codex and Google come in handy.

There’s a little on adapting other themes and frameworks are mentioned but if you’re looking to work with Thesis or adapt an existing theme, this book will be helpful but not provide the answers you’re probably looking for.  One thing I’ve come to learn after looking at so many themes is that while there’s a lot in common, they do take quite a bit of tuning in to, to understand how the theme author has organized things, especially with the more complex themes.  Some themes have been designed for maximum flexibility – within a certain set of parameters – and if you go outside these changes, it can become a bit of a nightmare.  Other themes haven’t come with all the bells and whistles of their own administration interface but are quicker to adapt.

While Wordpress 2.9.2 is already out, there will be little information in this book which is dated and in fact, screenshots of Wordpress’ administration area are minimal.

My only criticism of the book would be that I would have loved to have seen a few more case studies (or mini-case studies) of building a theme, rather than just one long in-depth one on building a magazine-type theme. These days there’s so many different types of Wordpress themes out there, used for so many different purposes.

Chapters are: Getting started, Theme Design and Approach, Coding it Up, Debugging and Validation, Putting Your Theme Into Action, Wordpress Template Tag, Function and CSS Reference, AJAX/Dynamic Content and Interactive Forms, Dynamic Menus and Interactive Elements, Design Tips for Working with Wordpress (including SEO).

For more see: Wordpress 2.8 Theme Design