Why Twitter Is Great, and Why That Doesn’t Matter

Twitter! It’s so hot right now. As I write this sentence, the #1 trending topic on Twitter today (New Moon) has generated 40 more tweets in the timespan between my typing of the words “sentence” and “tweets”. Twitter is fast. It’s easy. It’s a continual conversation with your friends. It’s the top source of Inside Info On Celebs. Twitter users can sway the decisions of giant companies! News hits first on Twitter! It’s the new source — an eternal fount of information! It’s the new empowerment — users can be heard!

(There are 285 new tweets about New Moon now.)

Development Notes: Krystal Blitz

This isn’t strictly my design — I was contracted in a development capacity — but it was certainly an interesting change of pace to implement someone else’s mockup and make it Web-friendly.

The job was to take the site mockup for the new Krystal Blitz energy drink and implement it. Although a microsite such as this could typically be handled in Flash by most agencies, I built it in a combination of PHP, Javascript, and Flash to maximize accessibility — this is a quick article about how I went about tackling it.

The Slow Ocean

My preemptive apologies for this line:

I’ve been fighting this for years.

That may sound melodramatic. The whole process has been, nauseatingly so.

Tidy URLs in ExpressionEngine

ExpressionEngine’s strict template_group/template URL structure allows for some wonderfully tidy content organization. However, an annoying downside to this structure is that EE’s URLs tend to be a bit overgrown. For example, say I have a “blog” template group, and I have a “single.php” template within it that I use to display single posts. The URL would look like this:

http://www.mysite.com/index.php/blog/single/the_title_of_the_post

I don’t know about you, but that index.php in the middle there just hurts my brain. There are a number of techniques to get rid of it involving some .htaccess trickery, but I couldn’t find one that worked properly on my hosting setup. But hey, what about just renaming it? EE has a nice little writeup explaining how to do so. I just renamed my index.php to “v1” (with no extension) and now it looks like a nice directory in the URL. Niggling problem solved.

http://www.mysite.com/v1/blog/single/the_title_of_the_post

See, better already! But wait - there’s plenty more you can do here.

Goodbye Forever, .css Files

Designers: when was the last time you created a new file with an .html extension? Hopefully, it’s been quite a while. I personally have the habit of making even the most mundane Under Construction Splash a PHP file, just in case I want the file to be able to do something.

CSS files are just text files with a fancy extension. Lose ‘em. Their utterly static nature is a harbinger of inflexibility that will result in silly find/replace changes down the line. I urge you to abandon the arbitrary .css extension altogether, and instead create your CSS files in PHP.

Basic ExpressionEngine Layout Tips

I’m already very impressed with ExpressionEngine’s versatility. It’s caused me to reconsider a few things about how content management systems can work.

I used to use WordPress and force it to be a content management system. For a while there, I played around with Chyrp, because it was so lightweight that I could go in and mangle it into whatever I wanted to be. Basically, I preferred systems that allowed me to dig right into their code and adjust things at my leisure.

I thought ill of systems that had their own templating language, but EE’s templating system is so well-done and comprehensive that I haven’t had to write one line in PHP yet. This kind of functionality — not to mention the brilliantly comprehensive documentation — is miles away from the days when I was cross-referencing WordPress functions to try to deduce what kind of data a particular object contained.

EE is great. But, for some reason, the built-in template is quite wasteful. There are too many files, code is repeated everywhere … it’s a bad initial example for anyone looking at EE for the first time. So, for your benefit (hopefully), here are some templating tricks I’ve learned from my first big dive into ExpressionEngine.

The Über-Droplet: Tidy Your Work Folders

Note: This extremely simple mini-tutorial was written for Adobe CS3. Hopefully CS4 handles everything the same way.

I personally have an intense fear of two things: a) losing image data and b) having disorganized folders. I always keep hi-res versions of any image separate from the final comp, and I most definitely always keep my .psd finals. However, for any web graphic, you also will need the flat jpeg version. However, if you use this technique, you’ll keep your work folders clear of those redundant jpegs.

I’m sure everyone has some form of coping mechanism for the .psd/.jpeg glut, but for what it’s worth, here’s mine. It’s possibly the simplest tutorial ever, but I hope it helps you out.

Welcome

Welcome, Internet, to Cameron Daigle Dot Com, version 4.

Actually, I’m not precisely sure it’s version 4. That’s what the folder with the .psd mockups is labeled — “CD v4” — but there are also folders labeled 2.0a, 2.0b, 3.0, 3.0a, and 3.0b, so my versioning system is symbolic at best.

My Internet presence actually started at a completely different domain, nevernameless.com, which was alliterative but didn’t really mean anything. It’s currently owned by nobody. I eventually abandoned the personal-brand thing — I’m no branding expert, but if you’re already a person with a name, adding another name to represent yourself seemed a bit pompous for a lone designer — and bought up My Name Dot Com, which is (mostly fortunately) not particularly common.

A Normal Person’s Guide to Quicksilver

(This is an old article from a previous version of the website that I thought deserved reprinting here. I attempted to explain QS in terms that anyone can follow, and as such, the article is far too long. I hope you enjoy anyway. - C)

Here’s what’s going to happen: I’m going to teach you how to install and set up Quicksilver. Once we’re done here, you will be ready to use it every day, and almost immediately, you will wonder how you ever got by in OSX without it.

This goes for all of you — but this article is specifically for those of you that have never heard of it (heretofore arbitrarily referred to, for the sake of clarity, as “normal people”). The rest of you can do what I did and slog through one of the dozen or so instructionals online.

I am forewarning you: This article will be long, but that’s because I’m making it easy. Fear not! I’ll walk you through every step — this is a guide for laypeople such as yourself, and it’s based precisely upon my personal experiences with slogging through the aforementioned tutorials.

Alright, enough hype-talk. Before I even tell you what Quicksilver is, let’s answer a more important question: