Publishing Yourself on Twitter – Tip #1

There are plenty of other blogs that explain what Twitter is, can be, and should be.

My beliefs are simple, Twitter is a means to an end.  Write what you want as long is it furthers your cause.  That’s it.

The complications come if you do not take into account the community you create or take part in.  Remember that in order to share your content you must be part of a healthy community.  Be part of the conversation – whatever that means to you.

Welcome to the new design!

We wanted to show the creativity and innovation we strive for by trying something new. Most sites are designed to be either left justified or dead center. We believe that a site can work in any alignment if done properly, so we wondered if our skills could indeed design a right justified design that looked good.

In contrast to our previous design, we thought of going from fluid width design to a “tiny” design as well as making it right justified. :)

WordPress 2.8

The new release continues with the backend design introduced with 2.7 but adds a few tweaks and improvements. Also new is a streamlined Plug In management system. This new system will allow users to install plugins without having to leave your admin area. Pretty nifty. One of our favorite additions is the new code editor. Color coding and line numbers! Good stuff.

We’re still testing some of the new features on our WordPress installs so if we find anything worth mentioning, you can be sure it will be noted on our blog.

News

Tomorrow is WordCamp RDU and we’ll be attending! If you aren’t familiar with WordCamps you can read more on the WordCamp homepage. It’s basically a conference for WordPress, although it is more accurately referred to as an UNconference. It’s not as big but just as informative, if not more so. We’ll be live blogging the event on our Twitter account, @FiveMediaDesign. Speakers include Matt Mullenweg of Automattic and many local web developers and bloggers as well. Should be a good geeky time!

Please leave your thoughts on our new design and on the newest WordPress release in the comments!

UPDATE: WordCamp RDU was amazing.  I am writing up a quick post on my experiences and impressions.  The live blogging was done through my personal account, @Guamaso.

The newest version of the popular blogging platform, WordPress, was released last week.  I have already upgraded our blog as well as my own personal blog to version 2.7.

The new version boasts many new and exciting changes.  One of the biggest is the new administration backend.  It is, in a word, gorgeuos.  The layout is more efficient allowing a much easier to navigation of the admin area.  It is set up to reduce the amount of clicks it takes to do what you want to do.  This is one of my favorite changes Automattic and co. have made to the backend.

Last year, the release of 2.5 was a huge change.  This year, they have outdone themselves again with all the modifications .

If you haven’t already switched to WordPress, now is the time.  It’s a little more involved then other blogging platforms, but it only allows your creativity to reach higher planes of awesomeness.

Of course, if you need help setting up an install on your server, or if you would like a custom template, give us a jingle.  Check out the contact page to find out how you can get a hold of us.

Hope you all have a great holiday season!

I started this promotion back in September in preparation for the holidays.  If you can’t find the ever elusive perfect gift, then consider giving a website or blog theme designed by Five Media.  Our promotion page always lists something good that can help with the cost of your next purchase.  Use it to purchase a custom template or website!

Happy Holidays and have a safe and happy New Years!

Months ago I set up a WAMP server for testing our templates and other code.  Downloading a prebuilt package like WAMP Server or XAMPP, both free packages, made the entire process cleaner and painless, to a degree.  The install, though easy, required some specific changes to fit our purposes.

We used WAMP server for our setup on a Windows XP Professional box.  The install itself was simple and fast.  We needed to open up access on the firewall for WAMP.  We also set up Remote Desktop so we could remote in, when needed, via other workstations.  Our entire network is behind a router firewall, but to add an extra layer of protection we left the server’s firewall active.

We don’t need a DNS server, but we do have separate domains for different projects.  We setup the Hosts file on every computer accessing the server with the appropriate url and IP address.  The down side to this is everytime we change one of the subdomains we need to change the hosts file on every PC.  It works for now, but maybe we can figure something out in the future.

We also made sure the server had a static IP.  If the IP address gets reassigned, the Hosts file would need to be changed to compensate.  The static IP would keep the IP address until we changed it.

We set up a small script that shuts down the computer when we are done (saving energy is important to us) at the end of the day.  Very simple DOS script.

Lastly, we shared some folders that store our projects for the entire wired network.  Very important!

This was easy, the difficult part was installing Wordpress Mu, which isn’t saying much because that is relativley easy to install as well!

Look out for our post on installing Wordpress Mu!

These are some of the more important principles that Five Media DS designs by.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization works on many aspects of your site, improving your overall ranking in searches and total visitors.  If a site will need traffic, then this is high on the priority list.  FMDS specializes in optimization for several search engines – we just make it easier for visitors to find your site!

Usability – Navigating through a site should be fluid to the visitor.  If a site is hard to navigate, visitors are more likely to leave before the site can market itself to them.  Easy to use sites will allow visitors to focus on the content, spending less time figuring out how to get around.

Aesthetics – The content of a website is one of the most important aspects of design.  Aesthetics is the positioning of this content and is also very important when creating a website.

Browser Support – Although standards exist, some browsers will render code differently.  One day all browsers support the standard, until then, designs and code must support the discrepancies in rendering.  We code with this in mind.

Accessibility – Many sites must meet accessibility standards due to certain needs.  Meeting these standards while keeping the site user friendly is key.

Flickr is essentially an online storage for digital photos.  For many people, myself included, it is more than that.  Flickr can be described as a photo sharing service, a social network, and a photo organizer.  It can be used to share images between family, friends, businesses, and everyone in between.  Some photographers, graphic designers, and other professionals, use it to display their work as a digital portfolio.

Flickr use Folksonomy to organize photos.  Folksonomy just means you can give your photo a tag like the word “cats.”  If you wanted to view all your images that you tagged with the word “cats,” you just click on the corresponding tag.  This also works if you want to search for other images from all the Flickr users, as they will tag their images as well.

SETS allow you to group photos together, almost like a folder, but with folders, a photo can only belong to one folder at a time.  With SETS, a photo can belong to one set, many sets, all sets, or no sets.  If I have a photo of a cat, I can add it to a set that is labeled ANIMALS and another set labeled PETS.

To use Flickr, you must sign up for a Yahoo account, then register the account with Flickr.  This process allows you to post an unlimited amount of images to your account, but only your 200 most recent images can be viewed.  Flickr will not delete the rest of your images, it only removes them from public access.  Viewing images on Flickr does not require a Yahoo account.

Once you’re signed up, if you would like the ability to display all of your images, you need to sign up for a PRO account.  A PRO account costs $24 per year (at the time of this posting).  A free account will allow you to create 3 SETS and upload up to 100 MB of images (no video uploads with free account) per month.  A PRO account removes the SETS limit and allows video uploads.

Flickr can be a fun way to share your images with people that share your interests. Flickr Groups are user created groups that other Flickr users can join and add their own images to the pot.

Flickr also includes privacy options that allow or block users from viewing your images depending on their status with your account.  You can label users as Family, Friend, and more.  Each type has a different level of permissions to your images.  If you want to share images of your child with family only, clicking on the appropriate settings will block all users from viewing your images except for Family members.

Flickr’s service is limited only by your imagination.  Start with a free account and post your images, play with the interface and sign up for some groups!

We’re rebuilding!  In the middle of all this dust we found this nifty coupon.  We thought sharing it with everyone would be the nice thing to do.

Please review our current clients’ sites, then give us a holler if you have any questions.  We even provide a useful contact form too.

Feel the power of Wordpress! Wordpress is a blog platform, but in the right hands, it turns into a very nice content management system!

Previous to the switch, we used simple static pages, but with the introduction of the blog we decided there were many benefits to using a content management system. Wordpress being free, was a good option so we gave it a try. There are many different thoughts and feelings out there about the use of WordPress as a blogging platform or as a CMS.

We believe that, in the end, it is a decision of preference. We tried it and we liked it, so there you are. There is also much talk about security within Wordpress. If the user follows certain practices just like they should when browsing the Internet, they should be relatively safe. Yea, sure, there’s always the chance that someone will break through, but, that’s why we make off-site backups, right? Well, it’s one reason why we do that… the point is, you can’t be 100% protected. The best way to protect yourself is to enlighten yourself about the possible vulnerabilities.

In the case of our clients, if they choose for us to monitor their site, we take care of the security stuff for them. In some cases, they choose to go it alone, which is fine, but we prefer to teach them as much as we can about security on the Internet.

There are many other issues with Wordpress, but we believe that the benefits out-weigh the deficiencies. We also believe it’s not for everyone, but for those that enjoy it, we are here.