visnum

When one door closes, another opens.

A New Visual

May 20th, 2007 by Osman S Borutecene

Blogging is hard. Doing a custom template for yourself from scratch in WordPress is harder.

I have completed most of the job. There may be portions of my website which still does not function. Please do me a favor and leave a comment to this post if you encounter anything that doesn’t work.

By the way, this blog is going to be the new home of my other blogs in english. I have some other blogs about sex and relationships, clinical psychology and alternative treatments, web design and development and several geeky stuff, etc.

I have recently decided to unite them under one. This is the address.

Some parts of the new template still needs a little fiddling. Thank you in advance for your patience.

Posted in Blogging, Web Design, Theme, Template, WordPress Theme, Blogger, WordPress, Word Press, Usability, Design | 2 Comments »

Even The Shortest Essay Is Not A Blog Post

January 15th, 2007 by Osman S Borutecene

I 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.

Posted in Blogging, Web Design, Style, Blogger, WordPress, Word Press, Design | 1 Comment »

Creating Purposeful Home and Landing Pages

January 6th, 2007 by Osman S Borutecene

I 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.

Posted in Blogging, Web Design, Style, Blogger, WordPress, Word Press, Problogging, Web 2.0, Usability, Design | No Comments »

Why Not To Use Word

December 30th, 2006 by Osman S Borutecene

A must read short article for bloggers from WordPress.Com

Posted in Daily, Blogging, Microsoft, Web Design, Theme, Template, Style, WordPress Theme, Blogger, WordPress, Word Press, Problogging, Usability, Design, WordPress Sidebar Widgets | No Comments »

WordPress Features Shadowed by Blog Usage

December 23rd, 2006 by Osman S Borutecene

WordPress 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.

Posted in Blogging, Web Design, Theme, Style, WordPress Theme, Blogger, WordPress, Word Press, Social, Web 2.0, Usability, Design | 1 Comment »

Blogging From GNOME

December 9th, 2006 by Osman S Borutecene

Seth Nickel from Gnome coded a nice blogging application for Gnome.

Posted in Daily, Blogging, Web Design, Blogspot, Blogger, WordPress, Word Press, Problogging, Linux, Gnome | No Comments »

Got Blog?

December 9th, 2006 by Osman S Borutecene

So you want to have a blog. Start with choosing a topic and a blogging platform. If you intend to post on a personal blog, then it’s not of great importance of the topic and the publishing platform because personal blogs usually do not create massive amounts of traffic. But anyway, for such a personal nonprofit blog I suggest you WordPress.com which is a free blog hosting platform by the people of WordPress and Automattic and its free. Moreover, it has great features and it’s real fun. However, if you aim to start a blog in a certain topic, or a blog for earning money with adsense then there are points that you should take into consideration.

If I were you, I would prefer blogspot. Blogspot allows you to tweak the theme you use and you can also add scripts which enables certain features as some free statistics, adsense code, etc. Blogspot has a nice, good tutorial on its features.

If you have enough budget to host your own installation of a blogging or cms software, then I suggest you to consider using WordPress, seriously. WordPress is most probably the best publishing platform, especially for personal publishing on the net. By an enough budget, I mean something around $20 would do it.

If you intend to engage in problogging, you should choose a main topic and try to be consistent and coherent on that topic. If you want to earn money through your blog then that means you have to serve something to the public and in return you will either earn from advertising on your blog or commissioning from affiliate programs. So, in order to maintain a reasonable amount of traffic, you should pay attention to what you give your visitors as your content. This isn’t hard to achieve (not the traffic I mean, the content). Put your visitors’ shoes on and try to look for something on your blog. If you are at least moderately pleased with the results then you are on the right way.

There are plenty of success stories and how-to like articles on the net so make sure you check a couple of them.

By the way, what not to do is also crucially important. Don’t trust automated problogging software. This is a digital world and you will get caught as fast as the speed of the internet and you’ll surely lose credibility.

What I tell you here is just a mini start. Dive into your favorite search engine and you will find plenty of meaningful reading about blogging.

Posted in Uncategorized, Blogging, Vlog, Blogspot, Blogger, WordPress, Word Press, Problogging | No Comments »