Today is the launch of Bluelime’s fourth website re-design. I’ve revised and reduced the content to bring clarification of my skills. I’ve also cleaned up the blog. I know that some folks don’t believe in killing blog posts, but I just couldn’t have old, irrelevant info and I must confess, I’m addicted to the delete button.

I also inserted various jQuery elements. I’m not a jQuery ninja and I don’t think that I’ll ever be, but these few elements were easy enough to achieve and are here to showcase what can be done.

I’d like to thank Todd for editing my website content and Kathleen for her visual input.

Hope you like the new look. Let me know what you think.

Some of you might have disagreed with me when I answered No to the question ” Is WordPress a CMS?” I probably should have said Yes AND No…

I’ve been using WordPress for a number of years now. Version 1.2 might have been the first version I worked with. Originally built as a blogging platform, WordPress 1.2 mainly focused on Posts. The ability to display anything but your blog posts on your home page didn’t exist and I’m not even sure Pages were around. When compared to larger CMS built by Oracle, IBM and Microsoft some would argue that WordPress isn’t a CMS mainly because of the lack of approval process. Content types in WordPress are also limited, but WordPress 3.0, due for release anytime soon, is about to change that. Custom post type and menu management will offer us much more flexibility to manipulate content and thus enhance WordPress’s CMS ability. No changes in approval processes are expected for WordPress, but personally I don’t think that there’s a need for this. If this is all that it takes for WordPress to gain the title CMS, then I think it can do without. Organizations and companies looking for sophisticated approval processes usually have many layers of bureaucracy and probably won’t be looking for a free CMS anyway.

Looking back at an older versions of WordPress, it’s interesting to see how the platform and community has evolved. I’m not sure that Matt and the folks at Automattic perceived that one day WordPress would become much more than a blogging platform and be used as a CMS. I can only see great improvements and exciting features when I look at WordPress’s evolution and I won’t be looking at another CMS solution for a long time.

Having said that, we’d like to make sure that our presentation meets the audience’s needs. If you have your ticket for WordCamp Vancouver, are interested in learning more about how to use WordPress as a CMS and have a question, please leave a comment below or on the WordCamp blog post.

See you next weekend.

Categories are easy to grasp
Sorting out your blog posts is crucial. This simple act alone will tell your readers what your blog is about. I currently have 291 posts organized in 22 categories. Visitors to my site can clearly see what my blog is about simply by scanning the category list. I like to think that these categories are similar to the sections of a book store or library. If you’re looking for the latest Neil Gaiman novel, you’re most likely to go in the Fiction section instead of the cookbooks. The same is true for your blog categories.

Thus when planning your blog, you should think of broad categories that will guide your users towards the content they are seeking.

Tags are too personal
On the other hand, tags aren’t very logical. As Michael Fields pointed out in his excellent article, tags are found on items sold at department stores and on Christmas presents. When applied to blog posts, they don’t make as much sense and are highly personal. Sites such as Delicious and Flickr use tags and I find myself frustrated to see that there is no proper tagging convention.

As a result I find myself only using categories and so far have never had a request asking me where are my tags? Perhaps that’s because my blog is simple and doesn’t have that many articles. A blog with numerous writers or that focuses on many different subjects may benefit from the combination of both tags and categories. In fact a complex blog may also benefit from Custom Taxonomy. Michael Feilds’s article describes how custom taxonomy can be used to organize your blog in new and exciting ways. I highly recommend that you have a look at it and learn about the many ways you can use tags appropriately.

One of my latest project consisted of converting a design provided by Mizu Creative into a WordPress site for Paul Sangha. The site included a photo gallery which required jQuery animation, a few different templates, random background images and flash on the home page. I’m very proud of this work, but more importantly, by the fact that it looks nothing like a WordPress site.

I’ve worked with many graphic designers in the past and when asked about constraints, my only suggestions is to keep the width of the canvas to 960px. This constraint is only there to ensure that the site will look good on most browsers, but even this is debatable and will depend on the target audience.

The Paul Sangha website is a great example which demonstrates that designers should not be constrained by the CMS.

Personally I was a bit blazé about this whole Olympic event. But once it got started, I found myself caught in the whirlwind of excitement. Walking through the city, the buzz just took control of me and I became an immediate fan. We invited ourselves to a few friends place and went to a pubs to watch the events on their TVs, but we couldn’t justified doing this everyday.

To my delight and more importantly my husbands’, we discovered that we could watch most events on the Internet. CTV streamed all of the events including the medal ceremonies. Using my dual monitor set up, I was also able to follow most of the events at work.

As Mhairi wrote a few weeks ago in a post discussing Social Media and the Olympics, this year was also the first “Twitter” Olympics. Using a series of hashtags such as #van2010 and #olympics following the events became quite fun. I was also able to get and share info about the different houses and free venues using Twitter. For example on day 2 of the Olympics, I found out that the queue for the zip line was already 2 hours long an hour before being opened and posted the info on Twitter. A follower thanked me and made different plans for the day. How great is that?

Prior to giving up TV I also stopped my subscription to the newspaper. The only time I ever looked at the sport section was during the Olympics, but now I no longer had that option. Flickr of course came to the rescue. Following the appropriate tags led me to discover fantastic photographers and photography blogs.

I’m not sure that Vancouver 2010 would have been as much fun without the Internet and I didn’t miss having a TV one bit.

During the holiday season, I took a stab at redesigning the kitsilano.ca blog. The original design was somewhat too constricting and Rob wanted a few features added. The greatest addition is the incorporation of random banners submitted by the community. If you ever find yourself in Kitsilano and snap a few pictures, simply upload them to flickr and tag them with kitsilanoca, and you never know, you’re picture may be used as a banner on the site.

We also completed a blog for Patricia Robitaille’s company, PR Strategies Inc. Being self-employed since 1993, Patricia’s wealth of knowledge on self-employment is incredibly valuable. Her blog will allow her to share tips and tricks with those wanting to learn more about self-employment.

Another self-employed colleague of ours, Bruce Clarke is president and co-founder of Superna Life Sciences which is a specialty pharmaceutical company focused on the commercialization of treatments for niche diseases and indications, primarily hematology and oncology, in the Canadian marketplace. We built a simple, yet elegant website for Superna allowing them to promote their new venture and raise funds. The branding and design of the website were created by Johnny Kuan at Avenue Creative.

Next, we also collaborated with Splat Designs and built two websites for the Yaletown Laser Centre and Cosmetic Dentistry. Both sites used the same layout and look and feel but display different content. Building two sites at once was very efficient but also very confusing. More than once, I inserted the wrong image and content on the wrong site.

Last but not least, my on-going collaboration with Tzaddi at ThriveWire continued and we put together a WordPress site for the Vancouver Convention Centre‘s Intranet. Unfortunately, this site is located on their own private server with no public access so we can’t show you anything. Working with the VCC’s IT team, we developed it on an IIS server which proved very challenging at times, but the the team at VCC is very happy with the end result and it will serve their company well.

Working with Catherine Worrall and Marga Lopez from Ideastream Design, the Minerva Foundation created a new logo and colour palette. Instead of simply slapping the new logo on the old website, Ideastream Design approached me and inquired about converting their existing site into WordPress. The old website consisted of a huge amounts of documents, static html files (with Ack! tables) and images, making it quite challenging to update. Converting the site to WordPress, simply made much more sense. Using a few plugins, like the Next Gen Gallery, the Foundation can now create as many photo galleries as they want and the rest of the website is a breeze to update. The new website is inviting, easy to navigate and will hopefully help the Foundation with their future endeavors.

All throughout the day, you’ll no doubt be reading on the many actions you can take to help stop climate change. But did you know that if you are using WordPress, you could be making minor adjustments that also help? Making your website “green” is as easy as reducing the number of of calls to your database. Let me show you how.

WordPress is a database driven website. All of your content, posts and page information resides in a database and  every time someone visits your site, a call (SQL query) is made. Reducing the number of calls will not only green your website, it will also speed it up.

Obvious ways to reduce the number of calls are by:

• optimizing your images and make them as small as possible
• displaying a few posts on your page instead of hundreds
• cleaning up your css and reducing the file size
• minimizing the use of plugins

Something that may not be as obvious is to remove calls to the database located in your template files.

For example the header.php template is usually made up of the following code:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="<?php bloginfo('html_type'); ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />
<title><?php if (is_home()) : ?><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> - <?php bloginfo('description'); ?>
<?php else : ?><?php wp_title('', 'false'); ?> - <?php bloginfo('name'); ?>
<?php endif; ?></title>
<!-- leave this for stats please -->
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS 2.0" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="RSS .92" href="<?php bloginfo('rss_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom 0.3" href="<?php bloginfo('atom_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="pingback" href="<?php bloginfo('pingback_url'); ?>" />
<?php wp_head(); ?>
<style type="text/css" media="screen">
<!-- @import url( <?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?> ); -->
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="wrap">
<div id="header">
<div id="logo"><a href="<?php bloginfo('siteurl'); ?>"><span><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></span></a></div>
</div>

You can eliminate 5 calls to the database simply by replacing the meta http-equiv tag with:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

the feed with:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS Feed" href="http://www.yourUrl.com/feed/" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom 0.3" href="http://www.yourUrl.com/feed/atom/" />

the pingback link with:

<link rel="pingback" href="http://www.yourUrl.com/blog/xmlrpc.php" />

and the style sheet link with:

<!-- @import url( http://www.yourWebsiteThemeDirectory/style.css ); -->

It’s not much, but any reduction in energy use is better than nothing.

I was also not expecting much. As the saying goes, you get what you pay for, so how good can a $20 conference be? WordCamp PDX proved to be exceptional and went beyond my expectations.

The first scheduled speaker, Jason Grigsby started the conference with a bang and demonstrated how important and easy it is to speed up your WordPress installation. His presentation consisted of information that was easy enough for bloggers to grasp and yet didn’t belittle hard-core developers.

Matt Mullenweg opted for a casual question and answer session instead of a presentation which gave the audience an opportunity to pick his brain. Having heard Matt speak in the past, it was great to see him answer people’s question and chat with them casually afterward.

Saturday ended with another great presentation by Tyler Sticka who talked about WordPress powered portfolios and provided us with code samples that we can use and customize to our liking. Once again, the talk was slightly technical, but Tyler managed to present in a way, which I think wasn’t too intimidating to non-coders.

Sunday’s presenters were equally stellar. John Hawkins and Will Norris gave us great advice on how to build plugins and what not to do, while Scott Porad, Cheezburger Technology Officer of Pet Holdings, Inc., the company behind the hugely popular I Can Has Cheezburger? and Failblog.org gave quite a high-level presentation explaining how his company operates and shared tips on how to be more efficient when programming.

Overall, I was very impressed with the information I gathered during the weekend. I was expecting discussions on CSS, content organizing, problems with installation, etc.., but instead, was confronted with SQL queries and plugin development code. I learned a great deal and now have plenty of advice to follow and put in place.

As most WordCamps go, the model is based on the unconference. As a result, during the scheduled talks, other discussions were taking place here and there. People simply wrote topics on the board and initiated the discussions. A group of realtors even gathered on the roof deck on Sunday afternoon to discuss matters that relate to them. How awesome is that?

As Matt pointed out during his Q&A session, WordPress has become popular because of people like you and me who attend and organize WordCamps. Regardless if your a blogger or hard-core coder, WordPress is a great platform and there’s bound to be something for you at WordCamp. So check it out and see if there’s a conference near you.