I’ve always felt a bit bad, spamming this blog with photography. So I had an idea of creating an extra, photo blog, which would mainly showcase my photography and would be updated more often.

In decided to do it in a simple manner.

• I wanted a simple, dark design, emphasising photographs.
• I wanted Flickr to be the source of my photos, so I don’t need to reupload them.
• More precisely, I want to be able to make a post right from flickr photo page.
• I decided on using an online blogging platform to avoid the hassle of management and software updates.

In the end, I decided to use Blogger, as it allows me to create my own template and can comply with the above needs.

The result of a couple of hours work:
Proudly presenting Dušan Smolnikar: Photo Journal.

I haven’t written in a while. Mainly because I didn’t have much to write about, or was just too lazy to do it. So to anyone interested, here are a few bits that have happened to me lately.

I’m done with my 3rd year in faculty. Well, sort of. I still have to collect a few signatures (oh the paper work …). And there’s this little piece of an album I have to do for photography class.
What have I learned this year? Besides the usual, “learn and forget” stuff, two classes stood out:

• Photography - mostly for reviving this old hobby of mine. I couldn’t say I learned much in the class, but it was a good enough reason to buy my first digital camera and go out and shoot. So to anyone who hasn’t seen it, I’m proud to present my photostream. And if you’d like to see me in action, here’s a 5 am shot :).
• Typography - For a while now, I’ve wanted to devote some time to the art of type. So this class came in quite handy. For a change, the lectures were great, thanks to Klementina Možina, who introduced typography to us students. But I guess I still have much to learn and have to change a few of my writing habits in order to claim “I can do typography”.

While talking faculty, I am also being exhibited throughout the summer, along with a few colleagues at the typography class. The works being shown are my study calendar and the corporate identity for Fora d. o. o.. So if you find yourself in a big purple building, see my works in the 2^nd or 3^rd floor (not sure where exactly). Here’s my version of the invitation poster, which was sadly too poor to be exhibited. Come to think of it, I have another version, which I’m not too ashamed to show here.

For those who’ve seen my post Introducing web accessibility, let me point out that the 2^nd, more technical part has been published as well. The first part has gotten a lot of feedback - from the “I don’t wanna do it, it takes time and brings no money”, to the “Hey thanks, this is what we all needed”. Strangely enough, the second part has gotten almost no feedback. Maybe not provocative enough? Should I take is as a good thing, that no one has anything to complain about it?

And what’s new on the www scene? Let’s see that in an unordered list …

• Some influential British people started laying out a standard for accessibility. Hooray for that. I wonder how many referendums we would need to get that in Slovenia …
• Opera presented a Web Standards Curriculum, a series of articles to help beginners as well as more experienced developers to understand HTML better. I only skimmed trough the articles, but didn’t fully agree with them in some aspects. In short - I don’t fully agree with strict doctype being the only rational choice, not until we get an alternative to target=”_blank”. And yes, I know you and me don’t need it, but I can assure you that my aunt needs it, as not to lose that page she was reading. Nevertheless I do recommend reading these articles.
• It’s still too early to use the modern web technologies, like css 3, alpha transparency in png files, svg, …, since a bunch of people are still using the 7-year old IE6.
• Firefox, Opera and Safari are coming along quite nicely in delivering fine browsers. Seems like the competition is doing us all a great favor.

To finish of, I’d just like to link to a blog I’ve found recently (but has been running for a while). It’s the Photoshop disasters blog. It’s quite fun to read but also teaches you about some common mistakes you should be aware of when photoshopping.

A bunch of irrelevant thoughts thrown into one post. It’s just my way of saying “don’t blog about every stupid thing that happens in your life”. Blog about five of them together ;)

I can barely call this a redesign, hence, just an update.

Two things were bugging me with my old blog/portfolio design:

• No integration between the blog and portfolio
• No sidebar on the blog

So I decided to fix this. With my lack of time I went for just a little refreshment, not a whole new thing like I used to do every year or so. I really wanted to use nice typography in the design so I downloaded the anivers font by Jos Buivenga. I love it. This means though, that my title fonts are all images. It’s bad for accessibility, but I did my best to do it properly. So all image fonts are big enough to read comfortably and all the images have proper alt texts.

Some other enhancements are:

• Photography is now in the portfolio
• Blog also includes two most recent flickr photos
• I’m now using tags properly in Wordpress. This means I can have tag clouds. Yay! :)
• Blogroll.

I hope you like the design. Comments (positive as well as negative) are welcome.

My old host was getting slower and slower. It could take up to ten seconds to get any response, so it was rather annoying. But I got an offer with this new server, which seems much speedier. :) Along with it I’m changing the domain to dusan.fora.si (New blog URL is dusan.fora.si/blog). I’m making a redirect from my old domain as soon as I finish this post, so visiting dusan.livecd.net should bring you here as well. If everything goes as planned, DNS records should also get updated within a few days.

While at it, I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.3. Can’t see much difference, except for the new “tags” input field while writing this post. I still have to figure out how this differs from categories, though.

And for those wondering, how one moves a blog to a new domain, here are the steps I took:

1. Get a new host & a new domain, have your php and mysql set up.
2. Download WordPress and follow the simple installation process.
3. At this point you could just import the whole database, but I took a different approach. Open the administration pages of your old blog. Click Manage -> Export and export your blog into a file. Now in your new installation, go to Manage -> Import to import this file. I selected to move all my posts to the newly created admin user.
4. Now go to users to edit the admin user.
5. Delete the demo post (Manage -> Posts) and the default about page (Manage -> Pages). If you get a “No permission” error, try the AJAX Referer Fix plugin.
6. While in administration, go to options and personalize them.
7. Use the Search and Replace plugin to replace all instances of the old domain with the new one. This will fix any links to uploaded files.
8. Make the wp-content/uploads directory writable to the web server and copy the contents of the folder from the old server.
9. Move your theme to wp-content/themes directory and enable it in administration pages (Presentation -> Themes).
10. See if everything works.
11. Make sure to redirect to the new domain correctly. Fix the DNS records, or use your web server’s redirect functions. How to redirect visitors to a new page? - See the “To Move an entire site” part.

It’s probably obvious from the URL, but I’m kindly hosted by Fora d.o.o.. Thank you Fora! :)

One of the main things to consider when designing a blog is most certainly the post layout. This usually consists of the following parts:

• Post title
• Date & time
• Tags / categories
• Author (not always)
• Comments link
• The post itself

So, we have to decide how to combine all these to make it as nice and usable as possible. And here comes the problem - where do I put everything? Most commonly people seem to place things where they look best, regardless of their usability. That’s wrong, I tell you.

First we should consider what we are telling the user with our elements and in what order he wants to collect the information. Let’s go step by step.

First of all, before reading anything else, a potential reader of our post will want to know what we’re writing about. He’ll look for the heading, hence that is why it is always on top. Another thing of great interest is the post date. This helps user to determine if the information is still relevant. For example, if I’m looking for reviews of the Ars Electronica 2007, a blog post from 2005 is not what I want to read.

So now the user knows briefly what he’s reading. Let’s ease his life up a bit more. Give him some keywords, tags, or categories. however you want to call them, just give your post some context. Some put these bellow the post, but what are they telling there? After I’ve finished reading it, I already know what the post was about.

Some people tend to throw the comments link below the title as well. Why? I haven’t even read the entry, why would I want to comment on it? Or read what others thought of it? First show me the article please, then I’ll comment. I often notice this. After reading a blog entry I’d like to drop my opinion. But instead of simply clicking the link where it should be, I have to find the top of the article to click “comment”. It gets annoying.

I’m indifferent about where to put the post author though. On one hand it’s nice to know who’s writing, if you know the author, but on the other hand your name on the bottom acts like signing a letter, and is a nice traditional approach to writing. But if you’re the only author of entries on your blog, you don’t really have to put your name besides every post. It’s probably in your header anyway.

Of course there may be other things to consider, or cases where the above opinions are totally irrelevant. But the thing I’m saying here is, don’t just throw everything where there’s empty space. Think of where you would expect things to be and at what point they are important for the reader.

One thing my blog is missing right now is the “blogs I read” list (I’ll have to add that some day…). So here are some of them, which you might find interesting:

• BannerBlog - We all hate banners. But a few of them are really original so we like them. BannerBlog collects such banners. Example.
• Dave Shea’s mezzoblue - Author of the famous css Zen Garden. He doesn’t post often, but when he does his entries are very thorough and informative.
• QuirksBlog by Peter-Paul Koch - Any time I need css or javascript help, google takes me to his resources page. This guy is good. Also see what he links from Elsewhere on the ‘Net.
• journal // hicksdesign by John Hicks - A designer, the author of Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird logos. He’s always fun to read. Also see the sidenotes.
• Mark Boulton | Journal - A css and typography expert. Has quite a few nice tips.
• Snook.ca - “tips, tricks, and bookmarks on web development”. He has some nice tips there. I also love the comments system on his blog.
• Smashing Magazine - A variety of information to consider when designing.
• The Web Standards Project - Not really a blog, but the recent buzz does offer some interesting reading on web standards.
• A list Apart - Again, not a blog, but a collection of some great articles.
• Digital web magazine - Another place where to find some interesting articles on web developement.

I have all these in Google Reader, which is a great way to track many websites at once (to the more tech-savvy readers, it’s an RSS reader).