1. 10 Useful RSS-Tricks and Hacks for Wordpress – Smashingmagazine
   Great tips for any user of wordpress that relies on RSS for syndicating content.  Most of these tips show you how to gain more control over your RSS feeds.
2. 5 good programming habits in PHP
   General rules of thumbs for php programmers.   Some of the rules may make you think twice, like the rule of “Never copy and paste”.
3. What is More Important To Succeed Online:  Business or Technical Skills?
   A question for the ages, at least in the IT field, is it more important to be business or technical minded?  A very interesting article on how these skills have attributed to the success of several companies.
4. Firefox 3.1 beta news – web workers
   A CNET article on Firefox 3.1.  The interesting part is how “web workers” can process work in the background.  Background processing would push the RIA movement further and I’m sure would lead to some very novel ideas from early adopters.
5. How to Setup a Dedicated Web Server for free – with Ubuntu
   A practical and useful article on how to setup a web server.  This is a very well written article that shows how far Linux has come in terms of ease of use.
6. How to use Twitter as a tool
   An article by Guy Kawasaki on how to use Twitter for productivity.  It’s a very detailed post and for those new to Twitter, it explains the utility factor of Twitter beyond just being a gossip tool.
7. Online Advertising and Its Impact on Web Design
   An excellent article from Smashing Magazine on how online advertising affects web design.  It’s an interesting topic as web advertising is a primary means of revenue for the majority of blogs.
8. Top 10 Web Dev Blunders of 2008
   A list of some of the biggest “mistakes” we’ve seen on the web this year.
9. Who Protects The Internet?
   Who does protect the Internet?  This article should be of interest to anyone who uses the Internet, so that’s a lot of people.  Techcrunch takes a go at reviewing where we are with the Internet.
10. Referrer Detector Wordpress Plugin
    A great wordpress tool to greet your users coming from specific sites.

I hope you find these articles useful.  You can contribute your own links by visiting this buncholink which groups related links together in a useful manner.

Without a doubt there are at least two faces to any open source publishing platform. There is the elegance of the code, and then elegance in the visual design. Sometimes it’s this difference between the ease of working with the source code vs. the ease of designing a visual interface that will account for why one boutique shop will roll out websites with online-community-type features in, say, Joomla, while another will roll out websites that do more or less the same things, but in another tool, say, Drupal.

Coming up with a sharp new design for a website is one thing, and implementing it into a working website is another – this is particularly true when it comes to taking a Photoshop mock-up and splicing it up to fit the markup and code generated by open source software. And unfortunately, there is no good way to get a good feel for this other than getting your hands dirty yourself, or talking to someone else who has (and whose skill level you know and trust).

When it comes to the design aspect of open source software, not all products were created equal – some open source products are easier to design for than others.

Drupal, for example, is infamous for offering incredibly powerful programming possibilities, but sometimes to the point where designing beautiful interfaces becomes a real challenge for even the best designers. Now that being said, there are some amazing sites out there that are driven by Drupal.

The other alternative that will be available to you is to turn back to the “source” and make use of some community-created templates (for example: Drupal Themes, or WordPress Themes). This is an excellent alternative, especially if you’re really under the gun to churn out a hot-looking site pronto. This can also be an incredibly helpful way to learn more about what’s involved in customizing the designs for the open source tool.

Key Design Skills for Customizing Themes and Templates

There are a few key skills that you’ll absolutely need to have “in-house” if you’re going to tackle any design work that touches the source code:

1. Expert Knowledge of CSS

Any open source software you download worth its lick will have templates that rely heavily on CSS for its overall look and feel. Knowing how to edit someone else’s CSS can sometimes be trickier than starting from a blank slate and creating a completely fresh stylesheet. Either way, you’ll need to have someone on your team who knows their CSS.

2. Familiarity with Templating engines

By “templating engines” I’m referring to things like Smarty or the overall framework for how Drupal or WordPress pieces together what becomes the template of your site. While it would be ideal to have the in-house knowledge of the exact platform you’re using, the reality is that different platforms have their own methods for creating the overall look and feel of their sites, so you’ll be just as well off with a generalist who is able to figure out how a particular platform pieces together the programming logic, markup, and styles. Just because you know one, doesn’t mean you’ll automatically know them all. But if you get the gist of how a template engine/system works, you should be able to adapt to figure out the others.

3. Past Experience Customizing a Design

Ok, this one’s admittedly a vicious circle – how do you leverage past experience if you don’t have any? Well this is where it comes back to how the only way you’ll REALLY learn what’s involved in customizing the design of an open source platform is to get your hands dirty and start trying it.

The point here, though, is that if, for example, you already have one or two people with past experience modifying a WordPress template whereas no one has yet tackled a Drupal theme, this should really weigh in on your overall decision-making process of what tool to use. It’s nice if you have the time to learn the new tools, but if you’re pressed for time and need to roll out what you can by the deadline, go with what you know.

4. Past Experience Implementing & Modifying Extended Themes/Templates/Plugins

There are a lot of really good – and freely available – templates that others in the community have created and shared. And what you may quickly find out is that your time will be better spent taking one of these extensions of the core templates, and then making the customizations on these rather than the original default templates.

This, again, is an area where past experience will do you well – you really won’t know (and can’t appreciate) how hard or easy it will be to implement and then modify an extended theme or template until you’ve gone ahead and tried it.

Similar to how you should be selective of which plugins and modules to use, you can apply the same measures to help you be selective of the themes and templates you set up for your site – how active is the template designer? What sorts of questions are being asked by others who are using the template? Is the original template creator still using the template themselves?

These are just some thoughts, tips, suggestions. What do you think? What else would you be looking for in a designer? What would you want to know before diving into redesigning an open source template?

Part of the point of open source is that you don’t have to be a Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net nor a super programming ninja to get up and running with pretty powerful software. Open source increases access to the technology which in turn helps it grow. But “open source” doesn’t mean “free”. It’s free in the sense that you don’t have to pay a license fee to use the software, but there are still costs associated with running open source software. Other than basic infrastructural costs you’ll have for hosting any website, there is the added cost of the time it will take you or your developer to learn the tool.

What’s Your Time Worth?

It’s cliche because it’s true, but time really is money. The time you or your developer spends in learning the intricacies of an open source tool may pay dividends down the road – at least if you end up going with the tool that you spent all that time to learn. But the time you or your developer spends in learning the tool may also turn out to be a sunken loss if it turns out that you can’t use the software in the end. Sure, it’ll have been a good learning experience, but there’s only so much learning you can afford to do before you’ll need some bottom-line results.

Time becomes an even larger factor when it comes time to selecting and implementing plugins or modules. With each plugin or module you add, you start branching yourself off into a smaller sub-set of the larger community. If you customize the software yourself without contributing your modifications back to the community, you’ll be branching off even further. What you want to avoid is deviating so far from the core community that you end up on an open source island all to yourself.

Don’t Be Scared, Be Selective

The point here isn’t to avoid plugins, modules, or customization. In fact, it’s this extending of the core software that often delivers the kind of features that really draw in the growing masses of users. The key, though, is to be selective with what you implement.

The best time to pick-and-choose plugins and modules is early in the game when you’re taking the first steps in planning your site. And in fact, there are a few ways you can go about doing this.

Method 1: Draft up your list of all the features you’re looking for, then go hunting for a plugin/module that does it.

Method 2: Search-hunt-browse through the available plugins, modules, demo sites etc. and see what’s available. You may even get some new ideas for what you want to do with your site based on what you find.

Method 3: Do both of the above, and if you can’t find a plugin/module that does it, consider building it yourself! (Or contracting out someone to build it for you.)

You’ll likely end up doing a little of 1 and 2 (if you’re considering Method 3, you probably stopped reading this article a long time ago). No matter what, it never hurts to give a plugin or module a quick dry-run or pilot it on your development environment or sandbox – you can learn a lot very quickly just by trying to get it all set up, working (and looking) the way you want it to.

Do Your Homework, Do Your Due Diligence

When you evaluate these extensions, be sure to visit the sites from the plugin/module authors. When did they last update the plugin/module? What sorts of bugs have been reported? What kinds of comments are others submitting? Is the author actively using the plugin/module on their own website?

Depending on your technical knowledge, you may also want to take a look through the source code itself. If this plugin or module is going to become a core piece to your overall website, do you understand what’s happening well enough so that if you ever had to, you could be the one who maintains the source code as newer versions of the larger open source tool are rolled out?

Some Popular WordPress Plugins

• WordPress.com Stats – the same stats plugin running on WordPress.com
  
• cFormsII – a form-builder plugin
• podPress – to add podcasts to your blog

Ok, the Gears are Turning, but What About Making it Look Hot!?

While you assess the core functionality, the plugins or modules, along with your ability to support and customize these, you’ll also want to consider how far you can take the visual design – i.e. Step 3: Determine Your Capacity for Internal Design Work (coming up next in this series of posts).

But what works for one, won’t work for all, and quite often the sucess of your site may depend on that very first decision you make in selecting one tool over another. So how do you choose which tool(s) to use?

Here are a couple scenarios to set the stage:

Scenario 1 – You’re the local web designer/developer of your company and you’ve been tasked with selecting an open source tool to re-create your company’s corporate website. You know there needs to be some blog-like functionality, and it would be nice to add things like RSS feeds, maybe a photo gallery, and maybe some online forms for customers to contact your company reps. It needs to look sharp and have the interactivity, but most of all, you’re under a tight timeline to get something up.

Scenario 2 – You’re a small business owner wanting to redesign your online presence and maybe add something like a blog, maybe some more interactive features, and you’d really like to be able to update the content yourself without having to contract out copy-and-paste jobs to the local web boutique. You have high ambitions for the type of features you’re looking for, but are also on a tight budget.

Scenario 3 – You’re a web entrepreneur about to embark on your next project. You’ve seen some sites already that sorta do what you want to do, but not quite, but they’re pretty close, and now you’re in the process of deciding how you’re going to build this next site of yours. You need to roll something out quickly, but also need to be sure that you can maintain this initial creation and handle the future growth you’re planning for your project.

In all these scenarios, you’ll likely consider using some open source application – it will get you a head start on implementation and give you close to instant access to advanced functionality, and all for a (perceived) cost of free.

But, with the recent swell in adoption of open source platforms, the decision of which tools to use might not be as straightforward as you might think. Some common questions will arise:

• Where do you start? How do you start the selection process of an open source product?
• How do you decide which tool to go with and which to rule out?
• Once you’ve selected an open source tool, what level of customization are you going to have to do?
• What will you customize yourself, and what will you look towards community-created plugins and modules for?
• What sorts of resources are you going to need? Where will you find the talent and expertise if you don’t have it internally? And what will that cost now and in the future?

This is the first in a series of articles looking at steps you can go through to make the best choice to suit your needs (and your capabilities).

Step 1 – Do some “guerilla” market research

One way to select a platform is to do a little market research – guerilla style. Go visit some other sites that are doing what you want to do with your own web project and take a peek under the hood (Noob hint: hit Ctrl + U or Command + U for Macheads to quickly view the source code, or click through your browser’s menu looking for something like View > Page Source or Source Code).

While some developers go to great lengths to hide the fact they’re using an open source platform, many will show you in plain sight that their sites are, for example, powered by WordPress or Drupal. Some tell-tale signs of WordPress and Drupal:

WordPress’ footprints

• Do a search for “wp-content” in the source code – this is the default directory where WordPress stores things like the site’s template theme
• Look for something like <meta name=“generator” content=“WordPress 2.5″ /> – this is generated by default as well and will appear unless the developer decided to remove it from the template

Drupal’s footprints

• Look for a series of lines near the top of the source code that follow a pattern like:<…../modules/….>
  <…../modules/….>
  <…../modules/….>
  <…../modules/….>

  Modules are Drupal’s way of letting developers add pre-canned features that other developers in the open source community have created – it’s a way for you to pick and choose to add just the extra features and tools you’re looking for.

• Another sign of a Drupal-powered site is a line with:/modules/cck/CCK is an acronym for “Content Construction Kit” and is one of the most popular modules for Drupal that lets developers add greater customization to the default Drupal installation.

Ok, so why does this matter?

Based on what you’re seeing in the source code compared to what you see through the user interface, you may also start to get a sense of how much customization or extension is needed to achieve the functionality you’re looking for.

Now again, sometimes developers will take steps to re-write the original template source code to remove traces of the tools being used, but by and large most will keep some hints behind and, in the case of Drupal for example, if you see an abundant number of /modules/ added, that’s your first sign that they went through some fairly extensive work to achieve the functionality they have on their site.

After you’ve looked through a handful of sites that seem to offer the type of features and functionality you’re looking for in your own site, you’ll get a sense of what the preferred tool of choice seems to be. There’s nothing wrong with replicating what the most successful sites are doing. In fact, it’s probably in your best interest to do so.

There’s a little bit of game theory involved here. You’re not the only one taking a peek at the source code to see how the bigger players are powering their sites – a lot of other folks are doing this too. The more people who adopt a particular open source tool, the more likely there will continue to be strong adoption and further development of the technology, and the more likely you’ll have a reliable community you can turn to for help in the future.

Next step (to come in a future article): Determine your capacity to set up and maintain the open source tool

Make sense? Anything Else?

This is just one of a handful of different ways to gather your own pieces of “web intelligence”. What else would you do? What tricks do you use?