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Getting Ready for WordPress 2.7: Sticky Post Styling

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Sticky posts are a new feature in WordPress 2.7. Basically, it means that you can mark a post as sticky, which means it’ll stay at the top of your post listing until another sticky one shuffles it down. More or less like sticky posts on forums.

This has been possible previously as well, with a plugin by Lester Chan.

WordPress 2.7 is out in beta, and isn’t due until later this month (late, most likely), but you might want to get your themes ready for this new functionality. You do have to change your post class output to post_class, which I detailed here.

This is what you need to add to your style.css:

[CSS].sticky { background: #bbb; }[/CSS]

That’s right, it is just one simple little class, .sticky, for you to add to your stylesheet. The code above will just give the sticky post a grey background color, so how about we do something more funky?

[CSS].sticky {
font-size: 24px;
border: 1px solid #bbb;
border-width: 1px 0;
background: #eee;
padding: 15px;
}[/CSS]

That would give us a box with large text, a grey border in the top and bottom, and a light grey background, with 15 pixels padding. Naturally, you’d have to style your sticky posts for your design, this is just to give you something to think about to highlight your headlining posts in the future.

Remember, this won’t work with versions of WordPress prior to 2.7!

Handling Headers: Where to Use h1 and h2

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How to handle headers, ie h1, h2, h3, and so on, is something that I’m being asked a lot. The most common question by far is “should I have my logo in the h1 tag, or my post title, on my blog?”, and it is a good one. In fact, I’d reckon not all of you will agree on the answer.

The reason I’m bringing it up now is this post on the topic, over at Webmaster-Source. I’ve gotten several emails asking if Matt’s conclusion is the right one. Basically, this is what Matt says about it:

Here’s the best way to handle headings on blogs:
On the index and archive pages, h2 tags should be used for post titles. On permalink pages, use h1 instead. You can then use h2s, h3s, etc in your post content, for subheadings. I suppose an h2 would work for the “x Comments” and “Leave a Comment” messages as well.

Personally, I don’t do it that way. The way I see it, the h1 should be the site’s name, even if it is a logo, since that is the highest item in the hierarchy. For me that goes on both listing pages and single pages. Like so:

Website Title → Post title

I think this is true because you’re on a website, reading something that is located on this website. That means that the actual website name (usually a logo, as I said) should be the first header, ie h1, while the story you’re reading should have its title in h2, and then sub-titles in h3, h4, and so on.

That’s my take.

However, I’d love to hear how you guys do it! How do you arrange your headings on your blogs and websites, and why do you do it the way to do it? Share in the comments below.

Gravatars: Why Both Commenters and Publishers Should Use It

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Gravatars are global recognizable avatars, a hosted avatar service for profile pictures, usually used to pimp comment sections on blogs, but also on forums, author pages, and whatnot. We’re using Gravatars here on Devlounge, both for the author byline at the top of each post, and for commenters.

It used to be a poor web service, actually. Gravatar started out great, but then got massive issues, having a hard time serving all the avatars across the web. That all changed when Automattic bought the service, and with the hardware support of their servers, Gravatars are now delivered promptly and without hassle.

I’d say they have managed to get the Gravatar service to where and what it should be: A stable global avatar supplier, with support for multiple email addresses for the more schizophrenic among us, me included.

So why should you have a Gravatar associated with your email when commenting, and why should you have Gravatar support on your blog or forum?

Commenters: Get a Gravatar!

No matter if you comment to voice your opinion first and foremost, or if you have a more hidden agenda (like getting visitors to your site, or promote a product or service for that matter), you should have a Gravatar. Not only does it make your comment stand out more than the ones who doesn’t it’s also an opportunity to promote your brand, be it yourself or something else, a little.

You could use:

  • a photo as a Gravatar, which will show off your face.
  • a logo as a Gravatar, which will build brand recognition.
  • a product picture as a Gravatar, which will build product awareness.

You could also have a humorous Gravatar, or a serious one, or whatever you’d like to gain attention to. Having a good and thought-through Gravatar is a way to be seen, and to get a message across, in addition to your actual comment.

For myself, I’ve got a photo. This is suitable for several reasons, one being to show my face and therefor imply that I’ve got nothing to hide. Or something like that.

Publishers: Add Gravatar Support!

Publishers should definitely add Gravatar support if they have any kind of user interaction on their site. As I said, user comments is a pretty common way to add Gravatar support, but you could also add it to a forum, a more elaborate guestbook, or similar.

So why would you want to do that? Well, first of all, it will be another push to get readers involved. Think about it, if a reader is aware of the benefits of having a Gravatar, and possibly using it to promote a brand of some kind, then that’s just another reason to leave a comment to your post. Not only does the reader get to write a comment, the Gravatar further adds to the free exposure. The same goes for forums, of course.

Another reason is to help you manage spam. Most spammers don’t bother to get Gravatars for their spambots, if any, and that actually makes it a little easier for you to manage your comments in moderation. No Gravatar doesn’t mean that the comment is spam, but it is way more likely than if there is a Gravatar. It works the other way around as well: If a commenter’s got a Gravatar, it’s probably not a spammer, at least not an automatic one.

Also, adding Gravatars makes the comments more pretty and alive. That in turn makes them all the more appealing to participate in.

How to Add a Gravatar

Are you using Gravatars on your blog or forum? Why, or why not?

Why I Love Web Without Words

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Web Without Words (sorry for not typing it like you want to, creators, but it disrupts the type) is a great site. I love the idea, and as a designer, I love what it represents.

Just take a look at this wordless version of Yahoo’s website:

This is great, this is a way designers should look at webpages to know how their layout is working out. Yahoo is obviously pretty cluttered, no surprise there, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a bad design. What it does tells you is that there’s a risk of clutter, and that’s something.

Looking at the web without words is more or less suitable for different sites. For instance, I think it works better with CNN.com than with Yahoo above.

What You Can Learn From Web Without Words

The thing to take from Web Without Words is a different way to look at websites. You get a very honest picture of your sites layout, the actual wireframe of the site. Web Without Words creator Paul Armstrong explains his site like this:

web.without.words started simply as a way for me “practice what I preach” — to visually represent my core belief that hierarchy, grid systems and uniformity ultimately lead to a more natural user experience — to show the overall structure of any website, by striping away all the distractions of text and ads and images and showing a site for what the eye unconsciously perceives. I dissected CNN.com (primarily as a way to recuse myself from all the political grandstanding), cobbled together a website and showed a few friends

It is pretty spot on, but even if you just don’t buy the obsession of grid systems and things like that, it can still be a good idea to look at Web Without Words in general, and applying it to your design in particular.

Now if someone would please build me a service where I can just put in an URL and get it rendered in Web Without Words style.

Bloatware: How to Avoid Bloating Your Application

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I read an interesting reflection by Jeff Chandler over at Performancing. Jeff asks if all software is destined to become bloatware, and then applies it to blogging platform WordPress. While I don’t agree with the Google Chrome – Mozilla Firefox comparison, basically talking about how much faster and sleeker Chrome is, it is an interesting question.

So far, it looks like WordPress 2.7 will contain a number of integrated plugins into the core leaving some to believe that WordPress is becoming bloated. Although I am not a software developer, this had me thinking on whether or not all software is doomed to become bloatware.

Yes and no, is my answer. Most software becomes bloatware because it isn’t rewritten enough. Think about it, if you build upon a core that is dated and bulky it will affect everything you put on it. However, if you revisit your old code every now and then, keep it up to date, and rewrite portions (or all) of it, there is really no reason why your application should become bloated.

Think about it, if you build upon a core that is dated and bulky it will affect everything you put on it.

If we look at web applications in particular, we’ve got to take scripting and databases into account. PHP gets updated, and suddenly your old code written for an early PHP 4 version should be swapped for PHP 5 code instead. New database queries can be used to speed up your web application, and so on. In fact, because of this, I think revisiting and rewriting the core of a web application is way more important, than traditional software.

WordPress in particular could probably use a rewrite here and there, at least that’s what people are telling me, I wouldn’t know myself. This is probably something that goes for a lot of open source projects. With the November release of WordPress 2.7, we’ll get a bunch of features that previously was handled by plugins. That means that the core is growing, and one should be wary of that. However, this isn’t necessarily an issue, because online you just load what you want to load, and if the WordPress core is organized in a decent manner, that means that the extra stuff won’t be called for unless needed. I’m not really worried about that.

I am, however, a bit more concerned about walking in old tracks, which is another kind of bloating I guess. If you’ve got a great idea in 1.0, you build upon it, and then you build upon it, and build some more. And you know what, then you’re stuck in it! It would be awfully hard for WordPress to lay off the categories, for instance, and every larger revamp they do to the admin interface will turn a lot of people off.

That’s why we get new projects, like Habari.

Any piece of software, online of off, can be bloated. That doesn’t mean that it has to.

What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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