In my last post, I talked about the different types of templates and what they’re used for. Now that we have a feel for what our templates do, let’s take a closer look at one and see what’s going on inside. [Read more…]
Archives for April 2008
Friday Focus: 04/18/08
Designs of the Week
Clean designs are my favourite, and I think that todays list are especially nice. The last in the list, Omnitech is very “AJAX” heavy, which I am not a fan of, but both its dark and light incarnation are fairly beautiful to look at.
When creating a “simple” looking design, typography, element placements, and colours are even more important than in a design that has much more in the way of graphics, images and content types to work with.
Social Media Weekly
Design – Emersian
No, there is no specific post I want you to see, but instead the whole site. Written by Paul Scrivens, the site takes a hard look at design without being too snobby. I highly recommend reading it, as it is very interesting and honest.
Design – How to Blog Design Style Guide
A great list of inspiration when planning a blog design with some tips, tricks and information included. They start from the header and work their way down. Very nice list, though it only helps to remind me of my own incompetence as a designer.
Programming – What Makes a Great Developer?
Developers, be they web, server, mainframe, or desktop are a different breed, with an interesting way of looking at things. I Love Jack Daniels breaks down the personality of a great developer.
Programming – No CSS Reset
Jonathan Snook doesn’t use no stinkin’ CSS reset code when developing sites, and he talks about why in a recent post.
Programming – 3 SEO Tools Worth Your Time
Stop paying an arm and a leg for horrible SEO, and learn to do it yourself. Some great starting applications that will help you with the basics of SEO on your site or blog.
Typos Killing Your Code?
One of the most frustrating things that programmers have to deal with is typos. If you forget something regarding syntax or accidentally misspell a variable name, your program can start doing weird and wonderful things or spitting out errors that are less than helpful.
A friend of mine Jonathan Snook recently wrote about this on his blog.
Here’s the code that wasn’t working for him:
Can you see the issue with it? It took me a while to figure it out, and I tried not to read ahead, and once I realized what the issue was, I couldn’t stop seeing it. Unfortunately, if this was part of a many thousand line file, you might never be able to find the error in forrest of code.
if this was part of a many thousand line file, you might never be able to find the error in forrest of code
If you’re more observant than I you’ll notice that the second A is missing in javascript. Without a proper MIME type, browsers don’t process the script leaving you with…nothing. Imagine my amazement when none of my functions worked, with no error messages, no nothing.
I have often forgot to throw in closing quotations in items, or a semi-colon in my PHP that has lead to errors on the screen that were less than helpful. This is always the issue when creating vast amounts of code. Your attention to detail has to be at one hundred percent, or you will find yourself pulling out your hair.
Of course you can build in error reporting that can help with this issue, and there are extensions for Firefox that might help in debugging, but I definitely recommend that developers use an application that does syntax highlighting for their code, as it will sometimes make errors apparent by a line being the “wrong” colour. I currently use Crimson Editor on my Windows box, and Smultron on my Mac. Both applications are free, lightweight and powerful.
Better still though, according to Jonathan and others, are applications that help with completing your code.
The two most popular suggestions seem to be E – TextEditor for Windows and TextMate for Mac. Neither are free applications, but both seem to be considered valuable by a myriad of people.
What are your favourite light-weight, advanced text editor applications, and please, no Dreamweaver.
An Introduction to Movable Type Templates
If you’ve installed Movable Type recently, there’s a fair chance you looked at the templates and were immediately overwhelmed. Don’t feel bad, you’re not the only one. By default, MT ships with no less than 56 different templates — all to publish a blog with a single style. You might find yourself asking…
What are MT templates for, anyway?
The templates in Movable Type format the output of your blog. When you write a blog entry and click Publish, MT figures out — based on the date, category, etc. — which of your template files to use in generating new pages on your blog. It reads each template, plugs in the data from your entry, then outputs the new file as part of your blog.
As you poke around in the templates, you’ll find some of them refer to other templates, while still others don’t seem to be used at all. And while this can make MT confusing, it also makes it very powerful. All those templates make customizing your blog much easier.
To understand MT templates, you need to understand the different types and what we use them for. MT templates are all about context. The context of a template determines what MT tags you can use within that template. It’s also possible to establish your own context within a template to customize the output. For example, the <mt:entrytitle> tag only makes sense in the context of an <mt:entries>. The individual entry archive establishes that context automatically. But, if you wanted to put a “Featured Entry” in your sidebar, you would need to create an <mt:entries> context within the sidebar.
We’ll get deeper into this in future posts. For now, just keep in mind that context is important for tags, and templates help to establish that context.
Let’s take a look at the different types of templates:
Index Templates
Index templates don’t have a context by default. Instead, you create context within them through the use of container tags. This is a very powerful feature, because it allows you to publish your entries as anything. Index templates are used to produce RSS and Atom feeds for syndicating your blog. You could use one to produce a CSV file that you could import into Excel. Any kind of text file can be generated by index templates — they don’t even need any MT tags in them. You can use them to maintain your CSS and JavaScript files, if you want.
Archive Templates
Archive templates are used to publish entries and pages, either individually or grouped together based on category, date, or author. How an archive template gets published depends on its type (assigned when you create the template) and the archive mappings associated with it.
Archive Template Types
There are three different types of archive templates. The type of template determines what context the template has when it’s published:
- Entry – Entry templates are for individual blog entries. They have an
<mt:entries>context, which is filtered down to a single entry. You can use tags like<mt:entrytitle>,<mt:entrybody>, and others. Typically, this is the template you’ll use to publish an entry and its comments. - Entry Listing – Entry listing templates are for a group of entries. These are your category archives, date-based archives, or author-based archives. They filter the entries to publish based on the archive mapping (more on that in a bit). These templates create a context for tags like
<mt:archivelink>and<mt:archivetitle>, as well as more specific tags based on what kind of archive it is. - Page – Templates for individual pages. These tend to be very similar to Entry templates, since Pages are just entries that exist outside the flow of the blog.
Before you can publish an archive template, it needs an archive mapping. The mapping tells MT where to publish the files and, in the case of entry listings, what type of archive to publish. An archive template can have multiple mappings. This can be used to publish the same templates in different locations. With entry listings, this allows you to use the same template to publish all your archives — categories, date-based, and authors.
Template Modules
Template modules are snippets of template code that are called from other templates. If you are familiar with PHP or SSI, think of it as an include. In fact, that’s exactly how you use it:
<mt:include name="Header">
Template modules do not get published on their own, only when they’re included in another template. You use them for pieces of code you want to reuse. They make it easy to have the same header and footer across all your pages, for example. Anytime you find yourself using the same code in multiple templates, it’s a good idea to evaluate whether you should pull that code out and put it into a module.
System Templates
System templates are used for pages that MT has to generate based on an action taken by a reader, such as posting a comment or searching your blog posts. These have their own contexts, and they have a few quirks because of how they’re generated. We’ll explore system templates more in an upcoming post.
Widgets
Widgets are just template modules, but by declaring them as widgets we can use them in Widget Sets. Widget Sets give us an easy drag and drop interface for customizing our sidebars, footers, and more.
Backup Templates
Backup templates are copies of templates that have been replaced by MT. This can happen if you use the Style Catcher to change the look of your blog, or if you use “Refresh Templates” to restore your templates to the defaults.
I recommend taking a look at the different templates to get an idea of how they’re structured. We’ll go deeper into this in future posts, but for now just try to get a sense of how the different templates are connected. You can do this by opening the templates and looking at the information to the right of the template. This will tell you what template modules and widgets are included in the template, and what MT tags are used. The tags link to the MT documentation, which can be useful for learning what the tags do.
Have a question about MT templates? Let me know in the comments.
Upload And Manage Your Images Online For Free
Doing all that reviewing of online image editing software really got me thinking about what else can we do with all those neat images once we’ve done massive editing and reworking of them? So, I decided to look into some of the many online photo storage sites, several of which I already belong to, and write a quick review of some of my personal favorites!
Redbubble
Redbubble is an astonishingly complete site for uploading and organizing your images, and it has a whole lot more to offer than most of the others, that’s why I’ve decided to review the “very best” right off the bat instead of saving it for last!
This site is a relative newcomer to the Net, only being around for about a year. Even so, it is such a powerful site and community, that it earned itself a honorable mention from the much coveted Webby Awards! It deserves the recognition, believe me. At this site, you can pretty much upload your entire catalog or repertoire of large images for free, and that’s only the beginning!
What’s great and amazing about Redbubble is that it is a veritable “United Nations” of photographers, fine artists and writers. Everyone there has the ability to create their own personal page or “gallery” full of their work, whether it is art or prose, you have a place to do your thing for absolutely free. What else is fantastic about the “Bubble” is that you have the opportunity to actually sell your work, seriously! You can choose several different format options for your art and sell it as prints, greeting cards, or posters, whatever you want! Heck, you can even design and sell T-shirts of your art work. How cool is that?
Both the management and members at Redbubble host tons of interesting groups that you can join and participate in within the site. Lots of fun contests are running most of the time, and you can even be honored by having a piece of your artwork ‘exhibited’ on their front page. Lots to do all the time… you can never, ever get bored on the Bubble!
Another wonderful aspect of the Bubble, and perhaps my favorite of all, is the ability to meet people across the globe from Australia to America, England to Dubai, or Portugal to Canada, it doesn’t matter about the time differences, people will just gravitate toward each other, and have an opportunity to network with other like-minded artists and creative people. You can also comment and critique others’ works, and have your own work critiqued by your peers and friends. It’s just a wonderful place to go and find others like you, and have a great time talking to many diverse peoples all over this big Bubble we call Earth. I absolutely can’t say enough about this site, it’s really a ‘home away from home’ inside my computer! This online cybercafé, art gallery and community gets the absolute most rousing, foot stomping, Bic-flicking standing ovation from me ever!
Flickr
Flickr is a neat little photo and image storage site that allows you to login to it using your Yahoo email address since it’s a Yahoo company. What I like about Flickr is that it allows you to connect a little photo slideshow to your blog at Blogspot.com should you have one of those blogs like I do. It is a nice little place to do some very limited photo editing, and it has a nice drag and drop feature to allow you some batch processing say you want to resize a bunch of images from your ‘photo album’ on Flickr. One issue I have with Flickr is that it only allows you to upload 100 MB worth of your images per month, that is if you don’t have a premium account that costs about $25 bucks per year. This is probably okay with most people, but I’m one of those folks with tons and tons of huge images, so this site isn’t probably as flexible as I need it to be for my own needs, but it is a nice site and worth a look! Flickr gets a big round of applause from me for its ease of use and uploading, and for its little slideshow feature!
York Photo
York Photo is a wonderful site for all things image-related. What I like about York is it reminds me of an old style photo lab in that it allows you to upload you images and then order prints of them quick as a flash. Their offers and deals are unbeatable if you want to upload tons of your hi-res images and then have copies sent to you for very cheap or free, that’s right, York gives you so many freebies just for signing up. I am on my second round of “25 free prints”, which is fantastic in my view! This site also lets you have some flexibility in creating gifts out of your photos like mugs and mouse pads, T-shirts and greeting cards, and their prices are competitive. But wait! They even offer free shipping on lots of your orders, so they’ve definitely got my attention. This site gives you unlimited upload and storage capability, and the best part of all: Their printing is superior. I received some free copies of some of my uploaded images the other day, and the prints were just spotless and brilliant. They aren’t too bad with turnaround time either, and if they should falter and take a bit too much time getting your prints to you due to their high order volume, they e-mail you, and reward you by adding more freebies to your account. Everyone would be well served to sign up at York, it is well worth going there to check it out! York gets a rousing ovation from me for their great service!
Snapfish
Snapfish is a very nice photo storage program that is owned and run by Hewlett-Packard (HP), so you can bet that the quality is there, and is something worth looking into. This site offers you cheap prints for around 0.9 cents each, which is nice, and also gives you a sign up bonus of 20 free prints. When you login to Snapfish you’ll notice the GUI is very similar to York Photo, and they also use the same FTP, so it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other, but nice and easy just the same. Snapfish has also been around for quite a number of years, as has York, and I believe you’ll enjoy using both of them. You can never have too many photo upload sites bookmarked on your computer! Snapfish gets a very warm round of applause for their nice upload site.
Final Thoughts on Image Upload Sites
I must say I am very impressed with the quality, upload speed and ease of use of all four of the sites I have reviewed in this article, and I am confident there is something for everyone on any of these sites. Another plus for having your images uploaded to any one of the sites I’ve reviewed above is that you can copy and paste the link from your photo directly into your blog or websites, and then viewers can see your photo without it physically being located where your sites or blogs are. Very convenient! Whatever your needs are with regard to digital image processing, from storing large amounts of high-resolution images to printing copies of your photos, and even networking with a bunch of fantastic, like-minded, artistic individuals like yourself, it is definitely worth a few minutes of your time to go and visit these sites and have a look around!
