These are some of the videos I’ve enjoyed watching earlier this year on wordpress.tv, and thought worth noting.
A technical overview of the structures and processes of a WordPress site.
Part Two of my report on WordCamp Birmingham 2015.
You can read Part One here .
As noted by Claire Brotherton in her round up of Day 2, Sunday morning seemed sparsely attended, the announcement that the previous night’s social was a record bar taking for a UK Wordcamp presumably no coincidence.
Despite a brisk and enjoyable late-night walk home, I confess I was one of those lunching out the morning, so I missed Petra Foster on how to Be a Brand, Not a Commodity (although I’d caught this presentation at the previous month’s WP Brum meetup) and Pauline Roche and Ted Ryan on WordPress for Small and Not For Profit Enterprises.
I also missed Paul Cherry on Customers and the Web, who has put the slides from his talk online.
And the morning concluded with Ben Furfie on Why it’s time to stop using Photoshop for web design. But, you can read useful summaries of all these talks in Claire Brotherton’s post.
Continue reading WordCamp Brum roundup – Sunday
WordCamp Birmingham (UK) 2015 happened last weekend, and seems to have been a great success for all concerned, putting the Birmingham WordPress community in, if you’ll excuse the pun, bullish mood. I certainly enjoyed myself. The event reignited my passion for WordPress and web-work in general, answering a few questions, confirming a few biases and giving me new energy and contacts. For anyone involved in WordPress, whether as a developer, designer, site manager or content creator, I would heartily recommend getting along to your nearest WordCamp. They tend to cater for all tastes and areas of this kind of work, and, as with most conferences and meet-ups, the most interesting conversations occur at the margins outside the programmed content.
But that’s another story. I thought here I’d gather all of the most relevant online stuff I can find from the event: slides of the talks, comments from myself on those talks I attended, comments and a sense of the buzz from others, as well as some of the photos available online. This will be a multi-part post, and in this one I’ll focus on day one.
Continue reading WordCamp Brum Roundup – Saturday
Another great article from A List Apart, this time on re-purposing old content. I found especially interesting the insight that the web has not yet adapted to slowing down, and ease of access leads to a lack of context for old content.
IN a new article on A List Apart, Håkon Wium Lie, the “father of CSS” and CTO of Opera explores how new devices “force us to rethink web design”, as scrolling gives way to app-like paged gestures, and figures will float in multi-column layouts, and to what extent this can be achieved in pure CSS.
While CSS figures and paged gestures are a little while off browser support yet, multi-column layouts are available now (vendor-prefixed), and Håkon gives an example.
To me, this is where CSS code morphs into poetry: one succinct line of code scales from the narrowest phone to the widest TV, from the small print to text for the visually impaired. There is no JavaScript, media queries, or expensive authoring tool involved. There is simply one highly responsive line of code.Håkon Wium Lie
Your site is not your product
Rather a website becomes part of your product – one channel or manifestation of it. This point stands out in a talk, still engaging today if a little orthodox now, given four years ago by Tom Coates on the web of data, called Everything the Network Touches. It’s an amusing listen and includes some early breakdowns of the “internet of things”.
The audio is archived at the site for the 2010 dConstruct conference in Brighton.
Back in April Jack of all trades Danimo blogged a tour of the ownCloud Client version 1.6, shortly after its beta release. Danimo emphasises a raft of “tremendous performance improvements”, and mentions a switch from Qt 4 to Qt 5 for Windows and Mac OS X (and calls for leads to help achieve this for Linux too). The team “also implemented an item that was on many peoples wish list: a concise sync log“. Version 1.6 was released on 2nd June.
Private one-click uploader for ownCloud, built on and for Mac OS X.
Version 6.0.3 of ownCloud was released at the end of April: the changelog includes “performance improvements by reducing the number of chmod operations”, “don´t allow creating a “Shared” folder” and “Documents improvements and fixes”.
Version 6.0.4 is due for release imminently!
Following the feature freeze on ownCloud 7 development, the alpha (testing) version was released on June 11
Modern CSS opens up new possibilities for designing animated web user-interfaces, with the @keyframes rule and css transform and transition properties.
A List Apart recently published UI Animation and UX: A Not-So-Secret Friendship, outlining good design patterns for using animation, and includes a number of useful links for further reading, including information on the performance cost to the browser of these new-ish features. .
About yourself in 160 characters or less
A Twitter Bio shows up in the header of a Profile view, and would be encountered, alongside name and avatar, when browsing a list of Twitterati; both placements make them key for conversion.
In crafting a Twitter Bio users can enter any text, including hypertext. This leaves many choices of content, tone, link strategy and so on: straightforward, ironic, informative, inspirational, cryptic, humourous or even empty, which do you need?
Late last year, Emma Boulton contributed this excellent article to 24ways.
For more on this topic, see also my introduction to research and questionnaire design.