Design Meme

Feed Me Seymour

If you’re subscribing to the feed for the site, you’ll see some changes today as I’ve started using Feedburner to add some extra features. The feed is now translated on-the-fly into a format (RSS or Atom) compatible with the feed reader you’re using. CSS is also used to change the feed into something a little nicer looking when you preview it in your browser.

I’m happy to see the term “feed” being used more frequently and acronyms like XML, RSS, ATOM (is that an acronym?), RDF and so on being used less. Asa Dotzler from the Mozilla team led sums it up nicely:

I’m encouraged that we’re further distancing browsers from the awful “RSS” as a feature name and icon identifyer. We don’t call web pages “HTML+CSS+JavaScript Pages” and we don’t identify them in the browser using little icons containing “HTML” and “CSS” acronyms; We shouldn’t do it for feeds either.

So we’re beginning to see people standardize on the term “feed” and even on the image used to represent a feed. The Internet Explorer team has decided to use the same icon as you see in Firefox, and FeedIcons.com is providing a wide assortment of graphic formats to help encourage it’s use.

Tags: designmeme, web
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New Years Resolutions for 2006

As 2005 draws to a close, I’ve been thinking about New Year’s Resolutions. I don’t need to lose weight or quit smoking, and even if I did—those wouldn’t be very interesting for you to read about. What would be interesting—and by interesting, I also mean challenging—is to resolve to complete a number of different creative projects and post about them here on my blog.

Creative Project Resolutions

1. Comic
   After having worked with so many comic artists, been involved in a comic collective, helped start a comic printing company, and contributed to a book on comics, it’s somewhat surprising that I’ve never created one of my own.
2. Design
   Redesign this site. Yes, this is an inevitable one…
3. Game
   Over the last year I’ve been doing a lot of reading about game design theory, and working on some ideas for what I think would make a fun board-game. This year I’m going to turn those ideas into a finished game and publish it.
4. Music
   Learn to play some type of musical instrument. The Ukelele is looking like a real contender here.
5. Painting
   At least 2 paintings I feel good enough about to put in frames.
6. Software
   It’s been a while since I’ve done much coding, so in 2006 I’m going to make sure I produce at least one interesting script, plugin, extension, or widget.
7. Video
   It’s been much too long since I shot and edited any video. This year I’m going to finish a 5 minute creative video and submit it to some type of competition or festival.
8. Writing
   Over the next year I’m going to try and improve the quality, quantity and frequency of my writing—both for this website and for other projects—whether they’re technical articles, creative writing, or contributions to collaborative projects.

Let’s see how well I can keep these resolutions. Wish me luck!

See some other people’s 2006resolutions.

Tags: blog, designmeme
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Current Events

Ali G — no not him, this guy—was one of the artists involved in yesterday’s identity theft fiasco. The thieves were trying to pass off his comic as their own creation—but they were just linking to the image files on his server. After looking at his website stats Ali realize something weird was going on and mentioned it to DJ Coffman, who in turn let the rest of us know about it. Today’s HousD comic makes light of the entire strange incident.

My brother Kevin Robertson has also started posting comics. He’s added them to his blog and they’re about whatever happens to be going on in current events. The first two involve Cronulla and the Sydney Race Riots riots and Brokeback Mountain — so it’s probably safe to say he’s going to cover a lot of different things. I lent him my copy of Webcomics : Tools and Techniques for Digital Cartooning a couple of weeks ago and have been giving him some tips on running his blog, so it’s great to see his stuff online so soon.

And while I’m posting about current events, I should mention that the contact form has once again returned to the site. If you were wondering how to email me, now you can.

Tags: designmeme, Family, web, webcomic
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Doppleganger Gang

I’m not sure if this is some sort of strange sub-culture that I’m unaware of—but I just don’t understand why a group of kids would create websites and message boards where they make-believe that they’re myself and some of my friends. I mean, while it’s true that my life is filled with movie premieres and trips to Monte Carlo to play celebrity poker games, and it’s reasonable to expect people would want to day dream they’re doing that too, these kids wouldn’t know any of that. All they know about me is that I’m a web designer, living in Ontario, and I’ve written some articles on CSS.

Instead of pretending to be civil war soldiers or medieval knights, they’ve got some strange type of web designer / font creator / cartoonist / digital artist reenactment group. Fortunately that kind of “fun” goes against the terms of use of most web hosting companies, and those sites are soon shut down.

But the question remains—why would people do this? While it might not be a realistic goal to one day become a movie star or celebrity poker champion like me, they could easily spend the time they’ve wasted on make believing they’re a web designer or cartoonist—to actually become one. Now that I think of it my friends and I have all written articles that would help people do that too.

Tags: designmeme, spooky, web
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Wordpress and Google

After moving the blog to Wordpress there have been a couple of steps involved in trying to get Google to index the site the way it had been with the old system. I’ve noticed quite a few blogs running with the basic install, which gives you confusing URLs and page descriptions in search results. If you’re still running a default Wordpress blog, these two tips might be helpful.

The first thing you should do is setup the Permalinks for your blog. This is under Options > Permalinks, and unless you have a reason to do otherwise you might as well go with the suggested structure of /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

This will change the URLs for your posts from something like this:

http://www.designmeme.com/?p=40

to this:

http://www.designmeme.com/2005/11/29/firefox-15/

Much better for search engines, bookmarks and putting into email.

After Google had reindexed the site I noticed the next problem—every page had the same description metadata, which meant every search result for this site listed the same text. That certainly wasn’t ideal.

I tried a few plugins and settled on using Head Meta Description, which automatically generates a meta tag based on the content of your posts. After Google once again reindexed the blog the search results changed from this:

Design Meme » Firefox 1.5
News, information and tips for designers, developers, and independent media artists.

to this:

Design Meme » Firefox 1.5
Firefox Version 1.5 came out today. If you’re not using it already, you really
should give it a try. Pages …

Again much better for people finding the content they’re looking for on this site.

The next thing I need to consider is the Optimal placement of the blog name in page titles and links.

Would this be better: Firefox 1.5 » Design Meme?

Tags: blog, designmeme, web
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Moving the blog archive

I’ve been moving the archived blog entries over to the new site. While it would make sense to use some type of XML export / import process to move the data the old MovableType database no longer runs well enough to make that possible. That’s not a criticism of MovableType—I’m still very pleased with it. It’s just that the Perl / Berkley DB environment I was running it under wasn’t ideal… and now it doesn’t work.

Looking back over the archive of the past 3 years I can really see that I’ve gotten more comfortable with writing—although I’m still much more concise than I’d like. I still have to force myself not to condence my blog entries too much. Some of my earliest posts weren’t even worth moving over. One entry was literally this short:

Blambot’s Nate Piekos offers a wide range of high-quality comic lettering fonts.

Wow. I type about as much now when I’m adding a bookmark to del.icio.us!

Actually, it’s del.icio.us that inspired me to expand the number of categories I’m using for the site. I’m now using them the same way I use tags on del.icio.us. I think that might help technorati work with the site as well. The benefit to you, is being able to find whatever you’re looking for a bit more easily—whether it’s a tutorial or what I’ve written about webcomics.

Updates to wordpress continue—the Captcha on the comments pages is now gone, and I’ve added a plugin to generate a Google Sitemap.

Tags: designmeme
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