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

Tomorrow, the biggest telethon the world has ever seen is taking place to raise money for the people of Haiti.  All week I’ve been monitoring the news coming out of Haiti, watching the incredible rescues, seeing the despair as aid struggles to get through to those desperately in need and how the aid efforts have been – by some reports – a bit of a shambles.

I received a press release today saying that the website for the telethon was now live and that the TV networks will be promoting it.

I was so disappointed to see the site – it seems to exemplify the mess that the aid efforts are reported to be in.  I would love to redesign it for free before it’s showcased to the world.  I’m sure many other designers would jump at the chance to do the same.  If you’re a designer or a coder, go take a look and let me know what you think:

http://www.hopeforhaitinow.org/

Via ffffound.

In my last post I wondered about the tweet-to-comment ratio (I’m still digesting your fantastic comments – thank you!) and I’m still wondering if the viral-focus has meant more traffic but less real engagement and community on many blogs.  That’s not to say they can’t be found on blogs, it’s just that many of the big blogs are now morphing into something quite different than, say, a niche blog with a focused readership.

If I go to Mashable, I’m not really ever interested in the comments to be honest.  It’s all about the news for me.  Their design reflects this, with such a tiny emphasis on the number of comments, or the ability to add a comment:

Tweetmeme’s retweet button and Facebook’s share button are now the new standard.

However, for blogs which do want to keep an equal emphasis on commenting as well as sharing virally, perhaps there should be a “new” design for comment buttons which is something like this:

Or something like what we did on a recent blog design (this requires using Tweetmeme’s API, not their standard buttons):

What do you think? When you look at your blog’s design, does it reflect the priority you want to give to commenting vs re-tweeting and sharing or have the big buttons muscled in and taken over?

It made me wonder: how is tweeting changing the nature of blog comments? Is it replacing the blog comment or merely giving a little sound to the normally silent majority who just read a blog post? (Most tweets add little or no commentary on the article.)

Figuring out the answer to this question isn’t an easy task as blog readership numbers and makeup change over time, Twitter has taken off in the last eighteen months or so and re-tweeting tools (especially now that it’s native in Twitter itself) became more standard. There’s so many variables involved that a simple analysis won’t suffice.

Has anyone done in-depth research on the changing nature of interaction with blogs?

Looking back, I was actually pretty spot-on with them all!  Twitter has of course since added lists, which I referred to as TwitterRolls.  The integration of blog and twitter comments, Tweetbacks, was picked up on rapidly by Wordpress plugin developers and external tools such as Disqus have taken this a step further, making it easy to use your preferred social networking login when commenting on a blog and even better, pulling in dispersed reactions to your blog posts on other social networking sites.  Twitter has indeed moved right to the top of the ShareThis! tool and many bloggers have ditched general sharing tools for just TweetThis and FacebookThis.  TweetMeme has made tweet stats front and centre of many blogs.  Most bloggers now have some sort of Twitter widget on their site.

So where to next?  Here’s 4* more ways Twitter will continue to change blog designs in 2010:

1. Stop Subscribing, Start Following
   My hunch is that more bloggers will ditch promoting their RSS feed (besides, browsers do a pretty good job of alerting you to them – if you’re a feed reader sort of person).  They’ll focus on getting people to follow their tweets or subscribe to their blog via email.  Of course feeds are still the glue which automatically tweets your latest blog posts and is often used to create the newsletters. Likewise, the number of followers will be more promoted than the number of subscribers.  Facebook’s “Become a fan” popular widget which shows avatars of Facebook fans of the blog and highlighting your own friends will be rivaled by similar ones for Twitter.  (Google’s friend connect widget is another such example.)
2. Most Tweeted Widgets
   A widget for bloggers to show their own most-tweeted posts of all time (or some other time period).  TweetMeme told me last year that it was in the works but I haven’t yet heard back about the status of this. I’m surprised there aren’t more twitter analytics packages in use on blogs.
3. Latest Tweet focus
   More will become a part of a blog’s introduction or header area.  Originally tweets were relegated to blog sidebars, then integrated into the content column.  Just the latest tweet will be displayed, rather than multiple tweets. Maxvoltar is one example of this.
4. Bye Bye Gravatar, Hello the new Gravatar
   Twitter and Facebook avatars will become the de-facto official avatar online, instead of Gravatar.  More blogs will use Twitter and Facebook integrated login systems for their commenters (or switch to a system like Disqus).  As people regularly change their Facebook (and less so, Twitter) avatars, these will be more relevant to display than a hardly-ever-updated Gravatar.

* Because why make a list with a “nice” number if it just means trying to fill a list

Ever since I started cre8d, I’ve pretty much employed the same type of habits – working all over the place: at the kitchen table, on the couch, on the floor, in the bedroom, outside, at the coffee shop. The time has come though for me to grow up a little and have a formal office space of my own. With cre8d growing, I need somewhere to file all the computer equipment, design inspiration ideas, books, magazines and arty pieces I’ve been collecting. I also need a bit more separation now Mr Toddler is on the move!

So I’m taking over a spare room in our house and can’t wait to get in and organising my very own office space! I’ve been hunting for a new desk (I probably will still roam!), couch and some bookshelving (an ongoing issue, since we don’t have IKEA here and I’ve been lusting after their Billy cases ever since I first stepped into an IKEA years ago). I’ve been looking on Etsy for some new art to inspire me when I’m working (I love this and this!). We have already painted one wall a gorgeous deep blue and put up three invisible shelves from Umbra which look fantastic.  I’ve had these cute little wooden pegs and want to put up some wire to hang pictures off.  For more ideas, I’ve been looking around Design*Sponge and lots of other little design blogs from all over the place.

I’m excited for 2010.  Delving into a whole new bunch of content-rich blogs today made me re-realise the wonder of blogging, of connecting with people all over the globe.  Over the past year, a lot of my personal “blogging” has been done inside the walled garden of Facebook and while that’s great, you just don’t get inspired by meeting new people in there.  In Facebook, I’m cautious about accepting friend requests from people I don’t know or have friends in common with.  Through blogging over the years since 2002, I have met some of the most wonderful people and some of my dear friends.

So I’ll still continue with blogging about the work we do in cre8d, but I want to share a bit more of my life through this blog so you get to know me more and hopefully I’ll meet lots more fantastic people throughout the year in return.

Here’s to new friendships, discovering and creating gorgeous new blogs!