Bluelime Media - Interactive Solutions with a Twist

Karma yoga at Bluelime Media

One of my New Year’s resolution this year was to deepen my yoga practice and integrate yoga philosophy in my daily activities. I was already practicing 5 times a week, so I’ve now increased to 6 and sometimes 7, I attend workshops whenever I can with visiting teachers and went to my first yoga retreat a few weeks ago. I feel better than ever, but I still haven’t found an way to involve yoga in my Web work.

Ideally my goal would be to develop and create sites dedicated to yoga. I’ve had the pleasure to work with Barbara from Bluecitrus for many years now. When I first met her, she had just launched Chakravibe, an e-commerce website selling yoga jewelery based on the chakra colours. Built using OS-Commerce platform, the website functioned very well, but was difficult to update and maintain and the code was a complete nightmare to decipher. When Barbara approached me earlier this year and asked me to help her move the static pages to WordPress, I decided that if I wanted to get involved in the yoga community, this was a great first move.

Joseph and Ben took responsibility of the OS-Commerce component and moved everything to a sub-folder. I took care of re-creating the design using up-to-date HTML/CSS and removed all of the tables and set up the WordPress templates. I doubt that many people have noticed that the website has changed. Except for a few pixel adjustments here and there and the changes in url, the website is identical. We’ve also added a blog allowing Barbara and Teresa, to write posts and tell us what’s new. So far the results have been very positive. Barbara is very pleased that she can update the content and post new images and Teresa has been writing great posts.

I’ve spoken to a few yoga teachers and have plans on creating more WordPress yoga templates this summer. Hopefully when things slow down (fingers crossed), but if you know and yogis looking for a blog, send them my way.

And if you are visiting the chakravibe website in the next little while, enter the code code CV20122J09 and save 20% on on any Chakravibe product. This Spring special is only available for for a short time, so hurry.

Wordpress 2.5 is a welcomed improvement

WordPress version 2.5 was released just a week ago with a bit of grumble from the web community but overall I think that it’s a major improvement. This week I upgraded 15 blogs and installed 3 new ones and I must say that everything went without a hitch. I held my breath for quite a few minutes while upgrading one particular blog from version 2.0.2… but nothing broke and everything seems to be in working order.

I must say that the interface has come a long way. I really like the work that the Happy Cog folks and the WP community have created. My favourite component is the image uploading. Having the option to add different types of media and a window pop-up makes it much friendlier.

In the past I’ve used the flexible-upload plugin for re-sizing my images but this new version has made it no longer required.

The only glitch that came about was with the admin drop down menu plugin. If you were a fan of this plugin and upgraded to 2.5 you’ll notice that your navigation has completely disappeared. Just remove that plugin and everything will be back to normal.

If I were to complain about anything with this new version is the absence of post-id. These id numbers are very useful when building sites to be used as CMS. Let’s hope that they bring this back.

I also noticed that when you insert an email address, the tinyMCE interface no longer gives you the alert box telling you that it will convert your email address into the right HTML code. Instead it just sticks your email address into a url, which of course makes no sense. Maybe this is something that needs to be added, but I’ve never enjoyed fiddling with tinyMCE. Has anyone come across this and found a solution?

Inspiring Blog Designs

Smashing Magazine has published another great list for inspiration: 45 More Excellent Blog Designs. It’s a great illustration of how much variation there can be in blog design.

Perhaps the most interesting is Chris Contolini’s mash-up of Google maps with his blog.

I also enjoyed Ideate’s Television-styled YouTube player - even though the video was no longer available, it’s a nice treatment.

Northern Voice is a wrap

This year’s Northern Voice was my second. I thoroughly enjoyed both events and look forward to next year. I suspect that 2010 will prove to be a bit problematic due to another event happening at that time of year but, hey, that’s still a long way away.

Following last year’s conference I told all of my clients who were blogging that they needed to go next year. So as soon as NV08 was announced, I sent them all an email and encouraged them to register. I think that I sent the email to about a dozen or so of my clients. Only one came, Heidi, which is a shame, but a start. I got the chance to speak to her about the event and I think that she enjoyed it thoroughly and, like me, left the event with lots of ideas. 

Every year the organizers try to do something different and this year the Internet Bootcamp was on offer during the first day. I think that of all the talks that were given, this session was the most valuable for bloggers who are just dipping their toes in the blogosphere. As an educator Heidi is using the Web and social media to reach out to kids and teachers and help create a better educational systems. Heidi is already pretty tech savvy and has been blogging for a while, but these sessions were hopefully able to answers some of her questions.

I do hope that this session will return next year and encourage would-be bloggers to attend NV09.

See you next year. 

How to widgetize your blog or website

Susie Gardner from Hop Studios gave a pretty good demo of how to add widgets to your blog today at Northern Voice. Widgets, also called plugins or badges, are little apps which consist of bits of code that once added to your blog or website, pull in external information. They usually appear in the sidebar of your blog. These widgets could pull the latest news feed from a site such as Voxant, the latest Dilbert cartoon, a list of books you are reading or meaning to read, the weather, or a series of flickr photos.

These widgets can be a fun way to add content to your website. The only downside of adding these, is that you have to dabble in the code a bit which can be scary at first. Additionally if you’re blog is on a hosted platform such as WordPress.com or Typepad, you may not be able to add these.

So how do you go about adding a widget?
First let’s select a widget. Of all the widgets mentioned during the presentation, I found polldaddy.com the most interesting. As the name would suggest polldaddy allows you to create polls.

1. First you need to go to their site and sign up for an account. This is done very easily simply by filling your name and email. (Don’t you love people who don’t ask you for every possible detail?)
2. Next, hit create a poll.
3. Type in your questions.
4. Type in your answers,
5. Select the “look” of your poll.
6. Hit save and Voila!

You will then be sent to a new screen with code which may look scary, but here’s the catch. You don’t need to know how it works. Just copy and paste it. That’s it. And here’s the poll I just created:

Now, for this example, I’ve copied the poll in the body of my text. I don’t really want to clutter my sidebar with more stuff, but if I wanted to, I could have a permanent poll anywhere on my site. The beauty of this widget is that simply by login in to my polldaddy.com account and creating a new poll, the poll on my website is automatically updated.

I mentioned earlier that widgets usually appear in the sidebar of your blog. This is where dabbling in the code gets a bit tricky. If you’ve set up your own blog and have access to the presentation, you can go to the template editor, locate the sidebar.php and add the widget code in there. If you are like me and using WordPress which you’ve downloaded and customized, you can also use the widget editor, but be careful and make sure that you back up all of your files, just in case you mess things up.

I should also point out, that if you copy and paste code into the body of a post, like I just did, save the post and come back and edit it, chances are the code for your widget will need to be updated. The visual editor in WordPress seems to alter the code every time you save and edit. I’m not sure why, but it just does… So just add your code once you are happy with the post and no longer need to edit.

Have fun.

Links are first-class citizens in web pages

Blogging expert Richard Eriksson opened the Internet boot camp today at Northern Voice with the blogging 101 session. The information session covered the basic information such as what are blogs, why blog, what are tags, Rss feeds etc… Although the information wasn’t new to me, it was good to be reminded of the reason why one should blog and how easy it is. I was particularly interested in hearing him state that blogs who link to other sites tend to be read more than others.

One of the benefits of blogging is that you create a two way conversation. By linking to external sites, you allow users to discover new information and you build a reputation of being a valuable resource. Most sites do this of course but there is a difference of opinion on how it should be done. Some sites link to external sites simply linking to them while others target a new page. Personally, I’m not a big fan of opening new windows. I’ve heard the argument that by opening a new window, you keep users on your site, but this isn’t particularly true. Web users will stay on a website because it has the information they’re looking for, or because it helps them achieve their goals — not because the browser window is still open. I asked Richard and he seems to think the same way as I do. Let the user choose. If people go away they can always come back by hitting the back button. 

What is your preference? Do you get annoyed when a site opens a new window or pleased?

Bluelime Media may need to rebrand…

One of the biggest changes that we’ve seen this year is that clients are no longer asking for a static website but instead want to maintain their own site. This has been great, but now I think that we’ll have to change our name to something like WordPressLime Media. The number of WordPress (WP) sites we’re churning out is huge. The exciting thing about working with WP is seeing how far we can push the design. We work with a lot of different graphic designers here and it’s been challenging at times figuring out how we can convert their ideas into WP templates. Here are the latest ones we’ve been working on:

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Google Calendar for your Website

Louise’s great suggestion for putting your business on the Google map reminded me of another way to use Google’s tools for your business: a Google Calendar. You can share your calendar with selected viewers, say, to keep your family or partners in the loop. If you want the whole world to know when your Tupperware party is, you can make your calendar public to anyone with just a few clicks. (Do they still have Tupperware parties? OK, maybe you want to list your naughty toys party instead. Whatever floats your boat…)

You can take it even a step further, and include a public calendar in your own website to list your events or schedule. When you sign up for a Google Calendar you can create more than one calendar — so if you had a Bed & Breakfast, for instance, a calendar for each room could show when it’s booked.

There are certainly more advanced and customized ways of doing some of these things, but this is some great functionality if you’re on a budget.

How to add a public calendar to your WordPress site

If you’re comfortable with the teensiest bit of HTML tweaking this is really easy to do.

1. Create a public calendar at google.com/calendar
2. Make a page in WordPress
3. Go to the Google Calendar Details screen and copy the code for including the calendar in your website
4. Paste it into your WordPress page. Note, you’ll need to switch from Visual view to Code view in your WordPress editor. You may also need to adjust the width and height to fit your page layout.

Your website calendar page will be kept up-to-date because it loads all the events you add within the Google Calendar interface, each time your page is visited.

That’s it. Neat trick, eh?

Putting Technology on the Map

Back in the summer, we were asked by Rob at Techvibes to come up with a mini website with a Map of the Web 2.0 companies of Vancouver, aptly named Techcouver. Darren drew up the map mimicking the Transit Map and we went ahead and created this mini website over the course of a weekend. It was very well received, but hardly “Web 2.0″ material. The site consisted of a static image which was impossible to alter.

Following a meeting with Cameron, we discussed the idea of creating a map to which companies could be added easily. Cameron worked on a flash version of the site and came with with version 2.0 of the map. Although much improved, the map did have limitations and grew crowded very fast.

Techvibes has also been growing rapidly these past few months and in an effort to cover more cities and different technology, we knew that a better solution was needed. The idea of using Google maps had been mentioned from the very beginning but we never had the time to implement it - until now.

This week we launched version 3.0 of our map. The title “Techcouver” has been dropped and we’ve added different technologies. Techvibes goal is to provide visitors with the perfect tool for locating technology service providers across Canada and eventually the US.

If you’d like your company added to the map, fill out the request form and we’ll get you on there. If you have any feedback on the process, please report back and we’ll continue to make improvements.

Web Directions North is a Wrap

There are many reasons why one should attend conferences. It’s a great way to meet new people, share ideas, learn from your peers and see what everyone else is doing. But more importantly, for me, the main reason is to convince myself that I’m not alone. Others have had the exact same problem and may have a solution that they can share. This year’s Web Direction North conference did just that.

Josh William, the founder of Firewheel Design and founder of my favourite invoicing system, blinksale gave a great talk on how he took his company from the bedroom to the boardroom. His presentation was very insightful and made me realize that some of the business issues I’ve been casually sweeping under the carpet, will need to be addressed soon.

Tara Hunt presented a series of examples where citizens have come together and created solutions to better their cities, transit and build better communities. Although I wish her talk would have provided more examples of government sites as the title had promised, she managed to convince me that we can’t wait for governments to take action and fix everything. By trusting their citizens, governments can use eager web developers who build websites and web applications and build better communities or change their way of thinking.

Indi Young also demonstrated how people are the ones who need to be listened to and influence the web. When coca-cola came up with their new formula a few years ago, they weren’t fixing any problem, but instead just focusing on their product and the result was a disaster. Innovation doesn’t happen when people create great products, but rather, when they fix people’s problems. Using mental models, Indi Young discussed a series of examples where she showed us that by asking the right questions she was then able to look at marketing and product opportunities. As a result, her mental models enabled me to think of a new way I can visualize web projects.

This year’s Web Directions North conference was a great showcase of how people are using Web 2.0 technology and web apps. The message that stood out for me, was that webmasters no longer have roles to play but every site needs a “community manager”. The Web is no longer about “The Company” or “The Man” but rather about communities. For the past year or so we’ve had a huge increase of requests for blogs and content management systems (cms) at Bluelime Media. As a result we’ve been building more and more sites using WordPress and our clients seem to be happy, but Boris Mann’s presentation made me think that other types of cms may be better or at least worth a look. I haven’t downloaded my copy of Drupal yet and I’m not 100% convinced, but I may need to follow his advice or at least attend a drupal templating meeting just to see what the fuss is all about.

As with every conference, my brain is full and I’m knackered, but I would do it again in a heartbeat.