Archive for May, 2008
Anyone who blogs consistently knows how hard it is to come up with fresh content all the time. And when you do, it can take hours and hours to perfect that article before it’s ready to go live.
Say you work on a post relentlessly for two or three hours one day, and a few days later you go back, make your final edits and set it up to publish next Monday. And then the Friday before you see that someone else has gone and posted their spin on the exact same idea that you worked SO hard on.
You run into a fork in the road - do I publish my article as is no amendments? Do I delete it and cry over the hours of hard work? If I publish it are people going to think that I saw XYZ’s blog post and copied the idea? Do I include a link to XYZ’s post to show camaraderie?
I’ll be honest, when I have experienced this (and it happens at least once every other week to me!) I get so angry at myself. I kick myself when I’m down. I scold myself and question why didn’t I just post it when I first had the idea. Why did I put SO much work into it, and not publish right away. Than I usually sit on the post for a few weeks before I put it live, unless I think it’s really, really good and want feedback and to share it right away. A few times I have gone back and reworked the post to be a little bit different that what XYZ published and often included a link or reference to XYZ’s post as well.
What would you do?
We are never satisfied with our blog software or CMS - it’s almost like an unwritten rule. We are constantly awaiting new updates and features, and when they come they are never good enough. It’s why the age old debate of Wordpress vs. Movable Type exists, and why there is never one clear winner.
So what do we really want in our Content Management Systems?
For myself I would love to see the following capabilities:
- Sweet templating system (a la Wordpress)
- Comments (preferably threaded, with an easy way to distinguish admins)
- Statistics built in (post views, exit points, referrers, # of subscriptions
- Kick ass spam management
- Easy image uploading (multiple images) - (haven’t used WP 2.5 yet to test their version of this)
- Category systems that allow you to better organize categories.
- Better back-end user interface (no winners: Movable Type, Wordpress, Joomla, Expression Engine, Textpattern, etc all fail in some points)
- Better draft and published posts editing panels
- Better documentation
- Multiple blog/site support
So, what do you want and/or need of your CMS? What doesn’t it do right now that you wish it did? What does it do, but you wish it did better?
One of my favorite parts when creating a new design is the process of choosing a color scheme. There are times when the colors just fall into place after I have my main color, or when using a photo the colors just flow around it. But sometimes you need a little help.
Whether your looking for a color scheme to base your design on or you need a little help picking out complimentary colors the generators, articles, color wheels and more below will assist and inspire your color creativity.
What’s the difference you ask? A lazy coder MUST be a bad coder! If you’re lazy then you’re not coding to best practices therefore you MUST be a bad coder.
While the above in part is true, there is an integral difference between someone who is a flat out BAD coder and one who is just a bit on the lazy side. If you’re looking to hire a coder there is a few key ways to tell the difference.
How to spot a bad coder vs. lazy coder
Nobody’s perfect, not even the best designers out there can claim perfection even as we fawn over their immaculate and beautiful design and code. Even for the design elite there’s always those few things we wish we could do better.
So, what’s your flaw? What do you think you need to work on? What elements in your design/code process do you wish you could do just a little bit better? And once you’ve defined that problem, how do you think you can make it better?
For each side of the web development process I want to improve one thing. From the design side, I want to broaden my “color imagination” and on the coding side I want to improve the readability of my source code for myself and other users.
