Disegno come arte: Rhythm

So, after reflecting on my entry “Visual Harmony in Webdesign”, I got to thinking. It is all well and good to complain bitterly about the lack of artisitic principles that are found in some of todays design, but what does it really accomplish?

Nothing. So today I am starting a multi-part series covering some of the priciples found in the world of fine art, that can be applied to our web design. First up is Rhythm, or Art Rhythm.

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Gearing up for Leopard

If you are a web designer/developer type, and you use the mac as your dev platform of choice, and you are planning on upgrading to Leopard when it drops later today, knowing a couple of things before-hand will be helpful. Namely your shiny new OS now sports Apache 2.2.x and and PHP 5.2.x. This is a huge change.

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Off to Ohio Linux

As you read this, I am on the road, driving the benz to Columbus to speak at the Ohio Linux Fest. It has been strange preparing for this engagement, since for the first time, my slides won't have any code in them!

All the talks I have given to date have been covering specific types of technology (XSLT) or methods for using technology (Apache 2 on MacOS X). Never have I spoken about trends, and philosophies in conjunction with technology. This certainly should be interesting.

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Hacking the MU

So yeah, I bet you didn't see this one coming. I am back with a new series on hacking WordPress. This time we are going to focus on WordPress MU. Fasten your safety belts people, it may be a bumpy ride.

Setting the stage

So, while I have left behind WordPress in favor of Habari for my personal sites, I still use WP in some of my professional endeavors. I have found that WordPress MU specifically is a great platform to build on for a number of situations.

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CJD Quick Post 0.1

I have really become a fan of the "quick post" inline aside thing. It really has played well into the type of blogging I have the time for at the moment.

It began to be a pain to load the admin area and go to the post page, just to write two sentences. So I started brainstorming some ways to make things a little easier on myself.

The solution was pretty straightforward, and with Habari, suprisingly simple to implement.

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Asides with Habari

So I thought I would outline the process I used to achieve the inline asides effect you are seeing on Sillyness. This was one of those moments where I just love how Habari handles things.

So lets set the stage

So this is what we are going to do. First we choose a tag that we will use to identify our asides. I chose "quickie". Once we have settled on a tag that will be used, we create at least one entry that uses the tag.

Once we have some content to test with, we move on to some PHP goodness. Habari returns an array of tags within the $post object. Normally we would make a call to the tags like so:

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Quick Posts

Inline asides, whatever you want to call them, prompted by Kristin enabling them on her site, this is how you do it with Habari.

There are a couple of things to look at before we get into the actual code:

1. Habari doesn't use categories like WP or MT, we use tags.
2. We need to choose a tag that will identify our inline asides.
3. The Habari loop is much simpler than what you are used to from something like WP.

Okay, with that out of the way, let talk through what we are going to do to achieve the quickie/inline asides that you see on this site.

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