Devlounge

Design, Develop, and Grow

Jonathan Snook

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Today we are joined by Jonathan Snook, of Snook.ca, Withcake, Haylia, and the Sidebar Creative.

Jonathan Snook Snapshot

DL: I assume a good portion of my audience knows who you are, but care to introduce yourself and share some facts about yourself with us?

Jonathan Snook: My name is Jonathan Snook and I’m a web designer/developer based out of Ottawa, Canada. I’ve been running my blog at Snook.ca since 2003 although I’ve had posts from 2001 before I really called my site a blog. I’ve been tinkering on the web since 1995. These days, I freelance full time all the while just trying to be an active member of the online community.

DL: You’ve thrown a lot of your support behind the CakePHP framework, and not to long ago, your personal site was also updated to use Cake as the backend rather than Movabletype. What do you like best about Cake that convinced you to switch and play around with it?

Snook.ca Powered by CakePHP

JS: The best part about Cake has to be the automation of mundane tasks. It takes the convention over configuration concept from Rails and does it in PHP. It’s been a pleasure to develop with and has given me the flexibility to customize my site in a way that wasn’t very easy to do in Movable Type or WordPress.

DL: On the topic of Cake, you also created your own CakePHP developer job board, called Withcake. With all the job boards already out there, how has Withcake been doing? Do you think it helps focusing on just one job field, in this case, Cake developing, as opposed to a bunch of different fields? (Personally, this would be my kind of job board – anything with Cake is usually good)

JS: By this point in time, I was hoping to see Withcake.com really see a surge but instead, it’s been in a maintenance pattern. Not enough people yet to have it complete at the level of other job boards but its specialization in a specific framework means it doesn’t have to either. There are companies and developers alike who’ve chosen CakePHP as the core to whatever they happen to be building. It’s great that they have a central place to go to and find like-minded people to work on projects together.

DL: The newest project just launched from Sidebar Creative is My Mile Marker. From what I understand, you were responsible for the UI. How long was this project planned for, and what was the inspiration behind it?

MyMileMarker

I’d have to look back but I believe the original idea behind this was Steve Smith’s. We often discuss various project ideas and this is one we had settled on as being the first as it would be fairly quick to put together and launch. There was no specific development plan; we just worked on it when we could with each of us providing insight or development along the way.

DL: Being part of Sidebar Creative, where each of you have your own obligations to other companies / sites / etc, how easy it is to find time for everyone to sit down and put work in on a project like this? Do you wait for everyone to have a free block in their schedules, or is everyone allowed to work at their own pace?

It’s worked out extremely well with each of us being able to pitch in at different times in different ways. None (or at least, very little) of the development was done simultaneously. We’d simply chat when we needed to, exchanging files until it was all done. It’s an oddly seamless process, that speaks to the power of the web and to the fantastic group of people I’m extremely happy to be associated with.

DL: Last project question, I swear. What do you hope your Haylia project accomplishes, and when can we expect to see it go live? For those that have not heard / seen it yet, Haylia is hosted blog solution for sharing adoption stories, inspired by your own adoption story. I think it is an excellent idea, and a great way to take the traditional hosted blog platform to a different, much more personal and focused level.

Haylia

JS: I’d like Haylia to become a success, of course. Success means a few different things in this context, though. Sure, there’s the financial success one hopes for but more importantly, it’s enabling people to share their stories. My wife and I believe that adoption can be a great experience and one that should be shared with many people.

Launching the site for the masses, however, has taken longer than hoped. Working on it has taken a back seat while I work on client projects but I do intend to have it see a soft launch before the end of August. The majority of the functionality is already in place and ready to go. There’s just some polish and some templates that need to be added.

That’s been my biggest problem as a freelancer: I don’t spend as much time on my own projects as I should.

“It’s an oddly seamless process, that speaks to the power of the web and to the fantastic group of people I’m extremely happy to be associated with.” – Snook on working with Sidebar Creative

DL: If you could name five must have apps you use everyday (web and/or desktop based), what would they be?

JS: Very utilitarian, I’m afraid: Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, Firefox, Mint (I’m a stats junkie), and UltraEdit (currently my text editor of choice).

DL: Alright, last question. Here comes your free plugging opportunity. Could you please share some sites you visit / read daily? They can be on whatever topics imaginable – they don’t have to be design / development related.

JS: With the advent of RSS, Google Reader has become essential. There’s no sites that I specifically jump to on a daily basis to check if there’s new stuff. The sad consequence of that is that there has been the occasional RSS feed that gets changed up and I’ll lose track of a site for a couple months until I suddenly realize I’ve been missing some good content. Now, there are certain sites that are consistently good like Roger Johansson’s 456 Berea Street, Andy Rutledge’s Design View, and Simon Willison’s site, especially his daily links. Natalie Jost also has really good, insightful posts. There’s so much talent in the industry it’s hard to keep up with everybody!

DL: Thanks for answering a few questions for me. Good luck with the many projects you currently have on your plate, and of course, we will all be awaiting to see what else is next.

JS: You’re welcome and thank you very much!

New Author and Category: Actionscript

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I’d like to take a moment to introduce you to the newest member to join our staff team: Alex Jillard. Alex is an experienced flash and actionscript developer, who approached me about bringing flash related articles and tutorials to Devlounge. We are always looking to expand our reach, and we think by catering to flash developers in just another step in doing just that. Tomorrow, a new category will be added to the articles page called “Flash and Actionscript”. Watch for it to begin to be populated very soon. We are very excited to have Alex on board, and we hope many of you will find his posts informative and useful.

To get an idea of what to expect from Alex, here are some of his favorite articles he has written:

Also, here is a teaser to an extensive XML / Actionscript article he is currently working on:

Using Actionscript to get XML content where you want it
I find that there are many tutorials out there showing how to make a simple xml driven project, like a photo gallery or menu, which is great, but if you want to use xml elsewhere, you’d be a bit stuck.

The goal of this tutorial is to teach you how to use xml and Actionscript together to get dynamic xml driven content exactly where you want it. I will be showing you some logic for using and creating xml, a good technique for getting that xml into Flash and breaking it down so it is easy to access as you need it, and how to that data onto your website or application where you need it.

To give some visuals and examples to the tutorial, I’ll step you through making a website using everything you’ll learn. In the end you should have gathered enough knowledge to use xml when and where you need it.

Looking for your input

One thing Alex has asked if for me to ask you, the readers, for article suggestions. What kind of tutorials do you want to see involving Actionscript and Flash, and what do you want to know in general? Please leave your suggestions in the comments; we’d really love to hear them!

Features page returns

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The feature page is back up, and Devlounge 2 (the WordPress theme) will be available either tomorrow or the following day. I’ve been weeding through various errors today, and I have noticed one thing. It seems some posts and pages have been effected by the database restoration we underwent a few weeks back. It has caused the page design to break, when it shouldn’t have. I’ve spotted many of these and fixed them by reposting the article and / or page (only way to fix it is to delete the old so it’s out of the database). Of course, it is impossible to look through every single post and page, so if you notice any problems, please just let me know. I’m pretty sure I’ve got most of them, but you never know when something will slip through the cracks. That takes care of today’s updates. Tomorrow new feed options will be introduced, and hopefully I’ll be able to stop with these updates, because I’m sure it’s annoyed some most of you. 😉

SEO and Personal Blogs, What to Do?

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Running a personal blog can be great. You have total free reign on the topics, you can build relationships with readers and you can express yourself in any way you like.

Running a well read, well visited personal blog is even better. It’s no secret that the best traffic is organic traffic, from search engines.

The reason why SE traffic converts so well and is held on such a high pedestal is the SE user is essentially looking for your site. They might not know it, and you certainly don’t but once they do find your site they’re happy. They’ll look at some other pages, maybe subscribe or buy something.

But a personal blog doesn’t have anything to sell, except for your self, of course. The thing with personal blogs and search engines are that you’ll be getting mostly long tail terms or your name popping up in Mint, or your favourite analytics app.

There are exceptions like everything else, where people may target certain terms that are mildly relevant, but the main purpose is for that oh-so-golden traffic.

What Should you do With Your Personal Blog?

There are tons of things you can do to better optimize your blog for search engines. After all, if you’re not getting that one juicy term, then you’re going to be relying on the inevitable long tail.

First, let me explain long tail search terms to those no savvy at the moment. The term simply refers to search terms, usually three or more words, that can seem random but the user finds a post or page from your blog that has the aforementioned words scattered on the page. Basically you’re getting refined terms. A searcher looking for “design blog” might refine their search by looking for “web design and development tips blog”.

So, lets get down to it, shall we? You want to optimize your blog to increase SE traffic which will in turn raise your overall traffic, readership and earnings if you’ve monetized. Sounds like a good idea to me.

The Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup is exactly what it says it is. Tell search engines what parts are important and in what order is very important, and will help your site in terms of SEO. Post titles are back links, and when they’re served in <H1>’s they really increase the long tail possibilities.

When you’re writing your headlines, you also have to think about search terms. I’ve personally written a couple of posts with titles laser targeted at range of long tail terms. While these posts are stale to my current readers, they bring in SE hits every day. Blog post titles can come from a couple categories, you just need to choose clever, concise or made for Google.

Another great article made to set you on your way to SEO heaven is “Search Engine Optimization for Blogs“. SEO is something most personal bloggers don’t know about, but it’s something that is really simple at the basic levels. After you start developing, meaning more posts, better posts, more backlinks, more link exchanges and relationships, you’ll notice your traffic increase.

Connor Wilson is a freelance web designer living in Toronto, Ontario writing his own personal blog.

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