It’s nice to see someone from the graphic design industry poking a bit of fun, as it’s well needed — as lets face it, there’s no shortage of designers who take themselves far far too seriously. From the post: “If graphic design was a religion, fonts are its priests – some are brilliant and enhance your understanding of the text and others are, well … best avoided.”

Check out the full post for a lot more hilarity at the expense of font choice (and church newsletters).

So, welcome to the new look of Dao By Design. Slicker, more organized (or will be when we get everything in its place), more useful and generally just much much better.

Previously the site utilized Joomla for the main CMS and WordPress for the blog. With the CMS-focused improvements that WordPress development has brought over the last two years, we felt it was time to make the switch to a 100% WordPress-based solution.

Some new features:

• Knowledge Base: We started this under the old system, but it will be much easier to improve on using the new management system. While primarily this will be a space for us to provide articles of interest to our clients and potential partners, we hope it will also prove valuable for the random visitor that happens by as well.
• Our Work: Once finished this will provide a more fluid and easier to navigate rundown of projects we have been involved with. It will be replacing our old, scarcely updated “Portfolio” page.
• The Blog: In the 3+ years that the blog has been running, it has admittedly been a bit “all over the map” with its content. The new design brings with it a re-thinking of how we will utilize the blog as both a way to share advice and tips on design/coding with the community, as well as communicate our thoughts and opinions in the area of Web design and development.
• Contact/Quotes: We now have a mechanism for those wishing for quotes to provide more details directly in the initial contact. This is more time-economical on both ends as it saves us from having to send out the boiler-plate e-mail of “We’d be happy to provide you with a quote for your project, but we will require some additional details from you…”
• Free Plugins: Previously when we released a new plugin or update to one of our plugins it was all handled through the blog — not the most practical or expandable solution. This is now handled as its own independent area of the site; which is much more browseable in my opinion.

We’re also sporting a new logo:

Old Dao By Design (Pre-2010) Logo

New Dao By Design (2010) Logo

The new logo was chosen for its cleaner layout, slightly leaner height, better colour scheme (particularly for display in different environments/media) and because I feel it just looks much nicer.

Well, that about sums up the changes. Thanks again to everyone who has visited recently and put up with our mess. We are working hard at getting the boxes unpacked and the pictures back on the shelf. We appreciate your patience.

WordPress 3.0 has some features that have been in high demand for some time, and that theme developers have had to muddle their way around when using WordPress as a project’s CMS. Namely:

• Custom backgrounds & headers (no more custom fields and php wizardry needed)
• Shortlinks (our tweets thank you)
• Menus (I can’t tell you how exited I am to retire the rather massive PHP function I use to do this now)
• Custom Post types and taxonomies (more and more like Drupal, this is a good thing)

WP 3.0 also features the long-awaited merge of WPMU and WordPress, allowing any install to serve up the power for running one blog or a million. This feature alone is sure to jump WP into the toolbox of many developers who now are forced to use a more robust CMS to do the same thing.

Check out the video:

That said, an encoding bug has been the bane of the plugin’s existence and desperately needed squashing. So, hopefully it’s squashed (huge hat tip to JM Simonet, who released a patched version of the plugin in the support forum ages ago, for which I’m very grateful).

Grab SEOSimple v1.4 from the SEOSimple homepage. And please report any problems you have either on the SEO Simple Support Forum, or in the comments on the SEOSimple home page (preferably the support forum, as the # of comments is a bit unwieldy).

Oh! And remember to vote for the plugin at the Joomla Extensions site. Please do this if for no other reason than it appears these dudes ripped off this plugin, are calling it their own, are making people pay for it, and have more votes than SEOSimple does.

The song lays out, with some slick verse, the importance of Web standards and proper design — both for how it relates to the look of the site, and the way the site gets indexed by search engines. Check it out and see the lyrics below:

Design Coding

by SEO Rapper
Your site design is the first thing people see
it should be reflective of you and the industry
easy to look at with a nice navigation
when you can’t find what you want it causes frustration
a clear Call to action to increase the temptation
use appealing graphics they create motivation
if you have animation
use with moderation
cause search engines can’t index the information
display the logos of all your associations
highlight your contact info that’s an obligation
create a clean design you can use some decoration
but to try to prevent any client hesitation
every page that they click should provide and explanation
should be easy to understand like having a conversation
when you design the style go ahead and use your imagination
but make sure you use correct color combinations
do some investigation, look at other organizations
but don’t duplicate or you might face a litigation
design done, congratulations but it’s time to start construction
follow these instructions when you move into production
your photoshop functions then slice that design
do your layout with divs make sure that it’s aligned
please don’t use tables even though they work fine
when it come to indexing they give searches a hard time
make it easy for the spiders to crawl what you provide
remove font type, font color and font size
no background colors, keep your coding real neat,
tag your look and feel on a separate style sheet
better results with xml and css
now you making progress, a lil closer to success
describe your doctype so the browser can relate
make sure you do it great or it won’t validate
check in all browsers, I do it directly
gotta make sure that it renders correctly
some use IE, some others use Flock
some use AOL, I use Firefox
title everything including links and images
don’t use italics, use emphasis
don’t use bold, please use strong
if you use bold that’s old and wrong
when you use CSS, you page will load quicker
client satisfied like they eating on a snicker
they stuck on your page like you made it with a sticker
and then they convert now that’s the real kicker
make you a lil richer, your site a lil slicker
design and code right man I hope you get the picture
what I’m telling you is true man it should be a scripture
if it’s built right you’ll be the pick of the litter
everyone will want to follow you like twitter
competition will get bitter and you’ll shine like glitter
if you trying to grow your company will get bigger
design and code right man can you get with it

Site Description: Electric Bike Denmark specializes in advising on and selling e-bikes. All products are the result of several years of development, and bikes are exclusively composed of components from leading manufacturers.

Project Profile: Electric Bike Denmark approached us to create for them a clean and professional design, the ability to add, remove and update content easily via a user-friendly interface and the power to expand as the company grows. To deliver this we employed a completely custom template laid over the powerful Joomla CMS framework.

Visit www.El-Cykel.net

My favourites:

• They describe themselves as an expert. This space is so new and changing so rapidly it’s impossible to be an expert, at Wolfstar we only claim to be ahead of the curve.
• The first thing they talk about isn’t how to integrate social media into overall corporate communications strategy or public relations plan. Just like traditional public relations or marketing communications you’ve got to focus on the business objectives and what communications can do to achieve them.
• The first thing they advise is you should start a blog or Facebook group. Focus on the business and what you want to achieve and then think about the tools and the technology.
• They promise you quick results and instant success. Online, social media and social networks are all representative of how society and the economy is changing, you’ve got to be in it for the long haul.

Be sure to check out all 10.

• Windows 7: We heard it’s a lucky number
• Windows 7: Like Windows 6 — wait, there was no Windows 6
• Windows 7: Correct iterations be damned!
• Windows 7: Apparently 13 versions of Windows + 1 = 7
• Windows 7: Experience crashes and bad architecture under a classic name
• Windows 7: Vista 2 coming soon
• Windows 7: Please ignore all that stuff we’ve been doing for the past decade
• Windows 7: DOS 12.1182
• Windows 7: If it looks like Vista, and smells like Vista…
• Windows 7: If that’s the price, it might be worth it
• Windows 7: Give that marketer a promotion
• Windows 7: Because f**k it
• Windows 7: On the path to catch up with Mac OS X…in 3 iterations. So 15 years.
• Windows 7: When we hit 0, we’ll call it DOS again
• Windows 7: Oops, we thought we were naming our Mobile OS
• Windows 7: We’re way ahead of Linux (in numbers)
• Windows 7: The Vista Menace
• Windows 7: You may want to hold off on the Vista purchase
• Windows 7: How long until the first Service Pack?
• Windows 7: I can’t believe it’s not Vista

Specifically I want to display the comment’s author (as a link) and be able to customize the number of recent comments that are displayed.

A search of Drupal.org revealed a number of comments.module hacks, but I hate hacking core modules and particularly try to avoid it on client sites.

Fortunately, the rather amazing Views module will allow me to do exactly what I need. Here’s how to implement a (more) customized Recent Comments block using the Views module (click to enlarge any of the screenshots):

1. Download, install and activate the Views module (just as you would any Drupal module).
2. Under the SITE BUILDING (/admin/build) menu you’ll now have a “Views” option. Click it.
3. You should see a list of Default Views. We’re going to override the “comments_recent” default view by creating a new view with the same name. Click the ADD tab and insert comments_recent as the name, like so:
   
4. Next, scroll down to the BLOCK sub-section and fill out like so:
   
   You can change the Title field to whatever you’d like the block to display as its title. Also, adjust the Nodes per Block setting to the number of recent comments you wish to display.
5. Now we need to tell Views which fields to display. You can configure this a number of different ways, but I’m going to stick with my original purpose – getting the author’s name displayed:
   
   You’ll notice that I’ve set some labels for the 2nd and 3rd fields. I’ve used this to add “said:” and ” – ” to the block.
6. The final thing we need to add is a Sort Criteria. Scroll down to the Sort Criteria section and add a new criteria called “Comment – Created Time”, then set the order to “Descending”, as so:
   
   This assumes you wish to show the most recent comments at the top. If you want to go from oldest to newest, select “Ascending”.
7. Click SAVE.

The only step left is replacing the Recent Comments block with the new block. Go to your Blocks page (/admin/build/block) and you should see a block called “comments_recent”. Select the region where you want the block displayed, save, and you should see the new Recent Comments block appear on your site.

Optionally, you might want to style things a bit differently. The new Views-generated block puts each field you inserted into its own DIV, making it pretty easy to adjust things with a bit of CSS. Here’s the CSS I used:

#block-views-comments_recent .view-item-comments-recent div {display:inline;}

This makes the individual DIVs for each field (the name, the subject, and the field labels) run as a continuous line, rather than the (default) block each on its own line. For additional styling, simply apply CSS styles to the relevant classes (view the source or use a dom inspector).

Well, I hope that helps any out there who, like me, need a more versatile and customizable Recent Comments block in Drupal.

Well, my loathing of Internet Explorer has not lessened, but I have begun employing a much easier way of notifying my visitors about their poor choice of browsers.

Before I get to that though, I should say I do understand that many people using the (soon to be decade old) Internet Explorer 6 are doing so because they can’t upgrade (due to Windows Genuine Advantage) and don’t know/understand their alternatives.

So, to you IE6 users, please listen. I know Microsoft is a big multi-gazillion dollar company. I know that it would seem they should be the go-to company for trusted software products. But I also know that when it comes to Internet browsers – they are just way off the mark.

Sure, upgrading to a new browser may seem like a big scary thing, but it’s not. Hell, you don’t even need to uninstall your copy of Internet Explorer if you’re that attached to it (but I promise after using any of the alternatives for more than a day you’ll forget it’s even on your hard drive).

Now – go grab yourself a copy of Firefox, Opera, Safari or Google Chrome and do the world a favour by helping put down the sickly animal that is IE6.

Got a site? Spread the word:

As I mentioned before my little diatribe, I am now inserting a tad of code into my Web sites to gently let visitors know about their (perhaps innocent use of a) pathetic browser.

The code makes use of conditional comments.

By simply placing the following right after your <body> tag, you’ll insert a nice little notice at the top of your page for anyone browsing your site with Internet Explorer 6 or less:

<!--[if lte IE 6]><div class="notice"><strong>Notice:</strong> You're using an out of date browser (released more than 7 years ago). To view this page properly, we recommend using a modern, standards-compliant browser - such as <a href="http://www.firefox.com">Firefox</a>, <a href="http://www.opera.com/">Opera</a>, <a href="http://www.apple.com/safari/">Safari</a> or <a href="http://www.google.com/chrome">Google Chrome</a>. All of which are 100% free.</div><![endif]-->

Now, you’ll notice that the main container div above has a class called “notice”, that’s because I’m a man who digs a bit of style. By throwing the following line in your site’s CSS file (or between <style> tags in your page’s head) it’ll pretty the notice up a bit:

.notice {margin:5px 0;padding:10px;border:1px solid #dedeb9;background:#ffffd4;text-align:center;}

The result:

And if you REALLY want to spread the word

Here’s a little button you can throw on your Web site to help encourage others to do the same: