visnum
When one door closes, another opens.
Even The Shortest Essay Is Not A Blog Post
January 15th, 2007 by Osman S BoruteceneI have been thinking on a project that involves some minor information design. I suddenly caught up by the idea of what is a post and what is an article. This reminded me of a blog post of Dave Shea.
I think a blog is news source regardless of what is it about. It may inform you about that the blogger saw this movie and has slept with that person, etc. It’s a news source that can tell you that the blogger person has written a new article, but its not the article itself.
Therefore, Wordpress has the static pages feature. So that the user will be able to both blogs about this and that and then also writes articles, or essays in whatever kind of nature.
Just a couple of cents in a break.
Robert Scoble Is One Clever Guy
January 6th, 2007 by Osman S BoruteceneNowadays, I see posts about Robert Scoble and his blog and his job and his nearly everything here and there. These posts mostly talk about Scoble’s views on certain products that he writes up in his blog. Others are simply hate propaganda against Robert Scoble.
I don’t specially like or dislike Robert. I just think that he is a clever, special guy who likes to initiate discussions in a provocative fashion. His provocativeness is a must as a journalist. And yes, he is a journalist. He does interviews. He does it well, I think.
His provocative posts are generally about comparing two or more products or services. For instance, once he questioned whether Apple imitates Microsoft. There have been 230 comments under this post so far and he made people to come out and talk. Okay, I know that topics like Microsoft vs Anything can be quite intriguing at times but he has the ability to achieve more buzz than an ordinary Microsoft vs. Oranges and Apples kind of comparisons.
Another nice post to play with from Scoble was about why United States will remain dominant in tech. He claimed that United States will remain dominant in tech because Iran and some other countries mistreat their citizens. Robert Scoble knows very well that there are lots of countries on earth that are coming really close in competition on tech. I don’t think that his claim was sincere. I think he just knows how to make a buzz.
For a last example, I will mention his post about how Microsoft is gonna edge in on Google. I am sure that Robert is joking here completely.
Now, more important than all this is how and why people react to Robert Scoble. I feel disturbed by the hate propaganda that some bloggers carry out against him. I just don’t understand why they keep reading him if he discomforts them by his posts.
There must be something else, some other reason that some people hate Scoble and keep reading his posts. This isn’t just a love-to-hate situation.
My opinion is that those people don’t have the guts and the mindset to post like him. I think that is jealousy. Most people that blurbs about Robert Scoble blurb about him just because they think he gains and earns by something they cannot achieve. Those people cannot make something on their own, they feel needy most probably. Or at least, they cannot see the buzz he creates and they forgot that Robert Scoble is a journalist. One of his provocative posts was about comparing Windows Vista and Mac OS X. He needs this to do his job. He needs to and must podcast about odd things sometimes. That happens all the time, all day long with a whole press and media.
Anyway, my suggestion to those suffering from the Scoblenvy: Go try and create your own buzz and content. You are free to add any interesting content to your blogs. Do it and try to make it better than Scoble, then come and blurb about why Scoble makes no sense.
By the way, among the negative comments blurbs about Scoble, the oscar has to go to Yuvi who is a 15 year old Geek wannabe from Chennai, India. He is a VB and C# guy, but is trying to expand his horizons. He is the best representative of people who like to blurb about Robert Scoble.
update: Another post from Robert Scoble that drive people crazy. Now it is iPhone. Well, another reason why I think that Robert Scoble has a playful cleverness. There are many people out there, important names who blog about the iPhone recently. They write down very decent things, evaluating iPhone and the future of Apple, swot of opponents etc. but none of them get the attention that Scoble is getting right now. This isn’t Scoble’s way, that’s just what we call “social psychology” among academic jargon.
Creating Purposeful Home and Landing Pages
January 6th, 2007 by Osman S BoruteceneI recently added something to my home page. The addition is a little information on what this web site is about.
I have done that because I noticed the fact that even blogs have to identify their home pages. When users land on to any post or page from search engines like Google, there is a purpose there. The visitor reads the page, gets the information she needs and that’s it. However, if she clicks for the home page, than there must be some additional information where she is and what this place is all about. Briefly, of course.
Do this for your own good. The less confused visitors you have, the more user-friendly you will become (Master Yoda, 2007). Becoming more user-friendly is beneficial for your sites search engine optimization, results in more people bookmarking your site and increase overall quality of experience of your website or blog.
Semantic Markup Is More Important Than Tableless Design
January 2nd, 2007 by Osman S BoruteceneI appreciate tableless design and I am an eager advocate of a semantic web, divs instead of tables, content that form the shape, all the bells and whistles and the better accessibility it brings.
Unfortunately, there are still problems with tableless design. For instance, there is this firefox bug about two divs nested in one. Firefox does not recognize the width of the first div when you nest two divs inside a container div. More important than that, Internet Explorer still cannot handle divs properly.
Of course there are always workarounds to those problems. You can create tableless cross-browser design via css hacks, conditional internet explorer html interpretations, etc.
However, when it comes to everyday designer with deadlines and less time for the learning-curve of tableless design and css hacking, design without tables can become a nightmare just because of cross-browser compatibility issues.
The optimum solution to this might be using tables less than before and creating a design where tables are just used for main positioning. This can eliminate the time and effort until each and every designer have her/his time to develop skills enough to cover tableless cross-browser compatible design, or until Internet Explorer dies, or until each and every browser agrees upon a certain CSS specification especially on positioning of elements.
Good news is tableless design is not necessary for a valid XHTML design and making use of semantic markup. More important than tableless design is the semantic markup and the use of proper (x)html elements when organizing the data, the content that the page should serve to visitors.
You can still make use of h1, h2, h… header tags, li, ol, ul, dd, dt, dl, etc., tags that tells search engine robots what your page is about and how it can be indexed properly.
Tableless design is still necessary and should be a standard when we talk about a more accessible web. Making use of tables for positioning is not a good practice, I am not here to tell you that there is no harm in using tables. I just want to tell you that you can still create valid (x)html and semantic markup and be more accessible than the past, until you learn about CSS hacks and a cross-browser compatible tableless design.
Don’t give up on accessibility, valid and semantic markup just because you are not ready to do tableless design. Try to take your time and make progress in this transitional period. This is why we call certain DTD (Document Type Declaration) as transitional.
Why Not To Use Word
December 30th, 2006 by Osman S BoruteceneA must read short article for bloggers from WordPress.Com
WordPress Features Shadowed by Blog Usage
December 23rd, 2006 by Osman S BoruteceneWordPress is beautiful and functional content management system. However, due to its excessive popularity among bloggers, it is mostly seen as a blogging-only tool.
WordPress has native features for a static home page in it. For instance, a WordPress installation first looks for home.php which can be used as a front page. It only loads index.php if there is no home.php specified. Let me tell you what that means in plain english: You don’t have to be stuck with themes and templates that are prepared primarily blogging in mind. WordPress has a feature so called pages, that are apart from the blogging cycle. By using home.php, header.php, footer.php, sidebar.php (alongside with sidebar widgets or not) and several pages.php, you can easily use WordPress for your static web site content, for instance for your corporate web site or brochure-ware.
I won’t go into detail right now because there are tons of documentation on the web about how to prepare a home.php, how to prepare page templates for WordPress.
Why should I use WordPress if I am going to have just a static web site?
Because you will still benefit from hundreds of plugins developed for bloggers. Then you will also benefit from a great documentation. Furthermore, you will take the advantage of WordPress’ builtin editor, management panel, etc.
Why don’t you put together a tutorial for what you tell here?
It’s just a matter of time. I’ll try to provide one soon.
Shonfonfe for Blogger
December 8th, 2006 by Osman S BoruteceneWe are only hours away from the Shonfonfe theme for Blogger. See it in development here: http://kerizettin.blogspot.com and here: http://goddess-artemis.blogspot.com
Shonfonfe, A New WordPress Theme
December 7th, 2006 by Osman S BoruteceneI am happy to introduce you a clean, minimal, new WordPress theme. It’s WordPress Sidebar Widgets compatible.
See Shonfonfe in action:
http://jefe.hayatkisa.com/
DOWNLOAD Shonfonfe
Download as *.zip
Download as *.tar.gz
The template is more or less the classic wordpress template with a little fiddling on it. Phu Ly’s Treba was a good starting point too. Well, of course the greatest inspiration came from National Geographic Magazine’s famous yellow frame.
The stylesheet is easy to work on. There are not much details, just a little more than 250 lines.
The theme is licensed under the CC Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License.
Feel free to play and tweak with it. If you come across any bugs or have any questions, please leave a comment to this post.
Firebug
December 5th, 2006 by Osman S BoruteceneThere is a must-see web-developer and designer extention for Firefox. Firebug helps you organize and manage your CSS, XHTML and Js properly.
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