Archive for the ‘Articles’ Category
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.
So, yesterday morning I logged onto my computer, opened up my twhirl to see who’s been updating their twitters, and found out I had been disconnected. Ok, no problem. Typed in my login information, tried again. I received an error, #2032, with the accompanying message “Sorry, could not log you in to twitter with that username and password.” Tried various times throughout the day with no success. This morning I received the same problem. I checked my connection, reset my password, rebooted and uninstalled/reinstalled twhirl. No go.
So, I went to the twhirl website, and searched their trac (help ticket center). And I found this ticket, chronicling users with similar problems. Low and behold I found my answer rather quickly after a simple search.
The problem was caused by Internet Explorer! Twhirl uses IE as a proxy to connect, and apparently somehow my IE changed itself to the “work offline” mode, causing twhirl not to connect.
So twhirl users if you suddenly receive this error message and your sure that your password is correct open up IE, goto the File menu and make sure that the “Work Offline” (located right above Close) item is NOT checked.
And let’s hope in future versions of twhirl their error reporting will be a little more intelligent so that it can detect that you are not connected and print that error message instead of saying the username/password isn’t correct.
