Stop Crying You Babies

If any of you know who I am and what I usually say, I try to maintain some decent levels of class and sophistication while expressing my opinion or view about a particular subject because I know what backlash is, however, today I will allow myself to be rather unrestrained. Today I shall be attacking the loud voice of supposed web designers who are bitching about the difficulties of designing for Drupal or any other CMS that exists. This is the movement of the future

Things to know about me, I am not the God’s gift to webdesign, I am not a PHP developer by trade, I do not claim to be the last word in any of the advances to technology, but I have been using these CMS platforms for about 4 years and I think I have a reasonable idea about what is possible and how you let the medium be your guide when working in web. Plus after I am done bitching I will attach some resources for you.

I have been designing and developing in the web for quite some time now and I don’t think that there is any reason for anyone who wants to start, or has started, to ever wince at the thought of using the tools that are available to them. Having been in the middle of several debates and pushes to change the standards for various parts of Drupal, I have heard this unified cry from the “designers” that PHP is scary and that they should have to worry about it. STFUYFB! I started out with the chicken-shit designer method of copying pasting and re-wrapping existing code in divs to get it to my bidding, and it worked. My level of impact was really low at that time but then I began to copy functions and edit them to get the results that I wanted. From that moment on the dynamics of what I was doing changed. There was no longer a fear that the white screen would kill all my work.

Of course you won’t know everything to start with. But you can go about learning these things in a way that is tailored to your style. I like videos and hands on tutorial instruction. The more I physically perform an action the more I connect that action with its purpose. Some of my friends just read through the books and they totally get how to accomplish these things. Different strokes for different folks. But saying that you can’t understand or learn something means that either you are incompetent or you refuse to allow yourself to learn.

Ugly Garland is no longer an excuse, bitches! Every CMS starts with the ugliest pre-installed theme that could be possibly packaged with it for 2 reasons; 1. This is what the developers were using while developing and or 2. The developers didn’t have a designer to create a decent starter theme with. All complaints about Drupal’s boxiness to me is white noise. As designers, we (you and I) have the power to create something that can be free and airy or cramped and claustrophobic. Your art style, be it minimalist or texture crazy, can work in any arena. Our responsibility is to create something that fits the purpose and medium it will be presented in.

If you design for print, you need to know what can be accomplished and how to use the press/paper/inks/etc to accomplish it. Know your tools or start learning about them so that you can create the results that you want. Don’t blame the medium for your lack of understanding. (X)HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP are now the foundations for open source web-design and development. If you don’t have any concept of what these things are or even a vague idea of how they work together to create a website, then you either need to find out about it or STOP DESIGNING FOR THE WEB. You arrogant lazy assholes that keep saying how much you don’t like webdesign because its too restrictive, please stop bidding against me. You are using up my creative air and its really annoying.

Sure, there are many things that can become better and in the case of the open source world, it is the designers and developers that dictate that change. Voice your opinion and help create solutions. The web is full of bitching.

As for your growth here are some basic things to consider;

Design Resources: 960grid, webdesignledger, smashingmagazine, tutsplus, drupal, wordpress, alistapart, w3schools

If you are ready to take of that summer dress and get on board with the rest of us;

Development Resources: drupal api, wordpress codex, PHP

Best of luck.

Zach “attack”

d4d Boston RDF

MIT Campus, Cambridge Mass. The time is 2:00pm and the delay of hardware issues is hindering our presenter, Ben , @i3iviivi, on Resource Description Framework(s) or RDFa.

So far the highlight of our Design for Drupal event for me is this very topic. The idea categories and mark up can be just as importnat as the information inside of it. This is not Micro-Format. This information mapping system that will define for computers and search engines what data is being read.

Definitively creating definitions for intelligent search, that creates relationships between data and the people that publish it. Having this sort of definition set will make information (webpages) act more like mini databases and make the people who publish information more responsible for what they do. Or at least, that is the intent. Some might look at this as a way to pry open the door to ambiguity or user privacy.

EVOC a module, for Drupal, that was developed to create the relationship of data on your website to standards in RDF that are already defined on the web. openspring.org Originally, Drupal had been designed output both RSS and RDFa content.

FUZZ is a Firefox plug in that will display the available RFDa info from a page that has RDF meta information embedded.

Here is a link to Ben’s Session at D4D.

http://agaric.com/rdfa

the Wiki for RDFa

interesting thoughts about the future of data. Zach

Redirecting Pain

Moving a website can be simple, but often the thing I find most troubling is the thing that I am most afraid of dealing with. Like 301 re-directs. There seem to be very few constants about dealing with the beautifully documented and clear examples of how to create “a” 301 re-direct in the LAMP environment.

Anyone new to this process please learn from my mistakes. I do all of my work from the MAMP perspective, so my inexperience with certain tools often leads to issues. Everything about the file transfer and relocation of source worked out just fine but as I began adding redirects to the htaccess file the server would send me 500 Internal Error screens.

Panicked and unsure of what I had done wrong, I began a long stretch of testing and experimenting with different combination(s) of re-direct formats to solve the error. One such resource was the ndesign-studio site. After a night of testing the issue that I couldn’t seem to overcome was simply this; if I add more than one redirect line at a time to the htaccess file before updating it on the site, there would be an error. No matter if the formatting was identical from line to line. In a fit of desperate frustration, I entered all of the redirects one at a time to eliminate the error screens.

This morning I asked DataBoy as well as my good friend Seth Gerard about this, and both of them suggested that using the standard application TextEdit was the issue. Apparently, it was not inserting the proper line break character so the server was reading one long line and then grinding to a halt.  Both of them suggested that by merely changing the editor that I was using, this issue should not appear again. TextMate entered the conversation but I think that I will continue to use Coda and stop relying on the simple text editor to do all those little dirty jobs.

Note for future web people, don’t use TextEditor to adjust your redirects, or you will have some trouble.

Zach