FoxyUtils

For those of you who are more technical here is some more info.

If you are not backed up and don’t know how, find somebody to set you up!

If your computers are important to you, you can back up functionality as well as your data.

I keep my main files on two separate computers. That way my data is in two places plus if a computer breaks down I can just start using the other. This recently happened and I purchase the computer below to replace it. Of course I didn’t need the keyboard, mouse and so forth since I’m replacing a broken machine. It was only 200.00! I added a 1 Terabyte disk drive for 129.00 and we’re good to go!

The Good

• You can see lots of articles on the front page and it isn’t cluttered.
• Front page automatically adds a picture from each post.
• It has many different formats for each post (Standard, Aside, Audio, Gallery, Image, Link, Video). This has bearing on how the individual post looks as well as the front page excerpt.
• The custom menus allows you to micromanage pages and categories. Even sub pages and sub categories.

The Bad

• There’s an extra step when adding a category or page to the navigation in the header. You have to keep pages and categories in a custom menu which must be updated separately. This isn’t all that bad because the flexibility is quite a strong point. You can still list your pages or categories with a widget in the sidebar of course.  This is barely a bad point by the way.

The Ugly

• When you view a post, the Categories and Tags are not always shown. They show for this blog but not for Siteware, EndlessLift or Mambohead.
• Pagination (paging) doesn’t work properly. Off the main page you can can click the “next” button (at the bottom). It works the first time but if you use it again you’re returned to the home page. This blocks access to the older posts. You can observe this issue at EndlessLift (until I either fix it or find another them). You can also observe the issue at this site but there aren’t as many articles to require much pagination. Same issue occurs when you are doing next within a category.
• Paging issues will damage SEO (Search Engine Optimization) since the crawlers are going to get stuck in a loop and may not see all your content. I didn’t study it too deeply but it might create some bogus duplicate URLs leading to the same content.

Magazine Basic Verdict

In this case the ugly wins.  The problems are too serious for me to recommend the theme.

I went into the forum and found other people are having the same problem. One said they paid 35.00 hoping for better support but nothing happened. I sent a note to the maker through Twitter. Hopefully they get back to me. I found their Twitter address an an article on pagination they wrote. I noticed some more chatter about it. A mention of a paging plugin but it didn’t work when I installed it.

Magazine Basic Theme Pagination Problems

I found this fix. I’m just trying it and will report back.

Small bug fix in functions.php. Go to this line and delete it:

$pagination['add_args'] = array( ‘pw_post_layout’ => get_query_var( ‘pw_post_layout’ )

This may be working. I’m puzzled why the template ships with this bug. It’s the template author who posted the bug fix so why isn’t it in the template?

Magazine Basic Categories and Tags Display in Posts

I have not been able to get this to work. In the four installations I tried Tags are displayed at the bottom of each post but Categories are not.

generalsocial.com: Does not work. Shows tags but not categories. Plugins: akismet, Google+, Google Analytics for WordPress, Share and Follow, Youtube Brackets

siteware.com: Does not work. Shows tags but not categories. Plugins: akismet, Google Analytics for WordPress, Share and Follow, Syntax Highlighter Evolved

mambhhead.com: Does not work. Shows tags but not categories. Plugins: akismet, faster Image Insert, Google+,  Google Analytics for WordPress, Google News, Share and Follow, Syntax Highlighter Evolved, Watemark RELOADED

endlesslift.com: Does not work. Shows tags but not categories.  Plugins: akismet, faster Image Insert, Google Analytics for WordPress, Google Analytics Popular Posts, Share and Follow

Saturday, December 3rd, 2011
Free – City Hall, Champlain Room

Sign up.

Open Data Hackfest Ottawa from RDV Productions on Vimeo.

== Tell me more! ==

As population densities increase, neighbours stop talking and start becoming estranged. Isn’t that weird and interesting?

Join user experience & interaction designers, indie video game developers, musicians, urban planners, citizens, librarians, data wranglers, debutantes and government officials in dreaming up and prototyping ways to change the way we interact with our neighbours using public data. This event is basically a party inside of city hall where we talk, draw on giant pieces of paper and make real, working stuff.

What kind of stuff are we talking about here? Think along the lines of impromptu supper clubs for your block that investigate local eateries and vernisages/gallery openings together. Pull knowledge of new places opening from the city’s health inspection reports and arts & events news streams, push it to a tiny Facebook group, and you’re done! Or are you?

Everyone curious is welcome. No skill sets necessary. Show up curious and we’ll take care of you.

Happy Holidays,

For the past 3 years instead of Holiday DemoCamp, we’ve sponsored and attended HoHoTO.

“Fortune favors the connected entrepreneur.” @jcal7 #trueuniversity via @hnshah

We challenge high tech entrepreneurs, designers, marketers and others to be an active part of the community. We often joke about startups being “ramen profitable”, but for many this is not a choice. We are working with HoHoTO and the Daily Bread Food Bank we hope to improve Toronto. And we hope that the readers of StartupNorth and the attendees of DemoCamp can give back and support others in Toronto.

It’s easy to sponsor, it’s easy to attend, it’s easy to donate. And we hope to see you at HoHoTO on December 15.

What is HoHoTO?

HoHoTO is a Holiday party to raise sorely-needed funds for Toronto’s Daily Bread Food Bank. It brings together the hyper-connected tech, marketing, PR, social media and startup communities to raise attention and support areound a core idea:

“People in our town are hungry – damnit – and we can make a difference.”

The links you see on Web pages are also known as Anchor tags. The HTML code for an anchor is the letter A.

So a link to a Web page may look like this on the actual Web page: Model Plane

The actual code for such a link could be:

<a href="http://www.rubber-power.com">Model Plane</a>

So the code <a> and </a> form the link. The text between this pair code is what the user sees as the link. The initial <a> tag has the attribute href=”". You simply add this attribute inside the <a> tag and that controls where the user goes when the link is clicked.

Hyperlinks within a page

You can also link to a specific place within a page. For instance, when the user arrives at the page, they will be automatically scrolled down to specific content.

For this we need to place a marker in the page so the system knows where to scroll the user down to. The markers are invisible to the user and the code to create one is:

<a name="bananas">

In this example, we created a marker called “bananas” somewhere on a page.

To link to this marker, we need to include the name of the marker in whatever link brought us to the page. We do that using the # symbol in the link.

<a href="http://www.rubber-power.com#bananas">Model Plane</a>

So the above link would go to the Rubber-Power Web site. Since it has a #bananas at the end of the address, if there is a marker called bananas at the site, you will be scrolled down to it.

But I just came across a truck with the word FoxPro on it. Is this the new Foxpro?

In the beginning we were taught about the waterfall method and eventually we have moved on to more agile methods which permit iterations and a more client involved process.

To be frank, even in the days of waterfall methodology (where a project is divided in segments which are done in turn), I was aware of and permitted overlap between the phases. I understood that the method was approximate.

More recently this has become very important as pioneers create systems in uncharted spaces such as social tools and social media systems.

For instance when Twitter was developed, the designers did not know or predict how users would actually use their system. They may have had ideas but they acknowledged that they didn’t know. When users engaged in various hacks to do stuff the system was not designed to do (such as the meme surrounding the use of the “@” symbol), the designers came back and modified the system to accommodate the new meme.

This video says it all. I especially like the quote ”

A painting has a life of it’s own. I try to let it live. — Jackson Pollack

What does this mean for your software project?

I think it’s a common mistake for people to “get busy” too early in a project.

For instance with a short project which is a couple of months of work, a novice developer may be tempted to conduct an interview to determine requirements then run off to create the system. The thinking is that they can come back towards the end of the project timeline with something that’s close to the specification.  Then hey can spend the last 10 percent of the project adapting it to client requirements. This is a profoundly wrong approach which can make your project take 10 times as long or never finish. Or never work properly for your business.

A more experienced developer will want to spend a good portion of the project timeline understanding the business and requirement surrounding the proposed system and may not “get busy” with the development process until sixty or seventy percent of the timeline has expired. This is an unnerving thought for clients who want to see half their project a the half way point or novice developers who want to “get busy” since they are insecure about how to solve the various components of the project.

Know Your Toolbox

The key is to know what your development toolbox is and isn’t. Make an inventory of what you know how to do. Then design the system using that toolbox. Then when you are developing the system you are only assembling the system and not researching to solve issues with uncharted methods.

For instance, with Microsoft Access, we know that the system can handle relationships a certain way and that the form design system has certain characteristics. If you can work within that framework it can serve you well. If you wish to use a technique that isn’t supported by the system as-is, make sure you have mastered the method before bringing it forward on a project.

Practices

Also, it pays to follow practices. Relational database theory, naming conventions, meeting notes, quality assurance methods and tools, backups, version control are all things you should have in your habits.

Database structure is an area that I feel has a high impact on a project. The right choices in your database schema can make a project more extendable and flexible.  You need a good understanding of the entities in your business problem so you can make sure you have the right data schema at normalized level.

Having an inventory of what the system needs to do is important and this list can be used to check your data structure.

I have a practice of having this list on hand during the database design activity. The idea is that you need to be able to produce the queries from your data structure to satisfy every interface and question from your inventory of system function.

Fact is, that a computer system is a layered system and there is some benefit to ordering the construction of the layers when economy is in mind.

Customer is always right?

Your client is very important and their behavior can jeopardize a project. If they are inexperienced with software development methodologies you may not be able to manage their expectations.

For example in a 2 year project to build a bridge, a novice client may want to drive his car 1/2 way across the bridge to validate the work to date. This is a serious issue since we all know that you can’t drive on the bridge until it is nearly 100 percent complete. At the 1/2 way point, there may not even a foundation.

Your client may also need help with understanding their own business problem. It’s important to have contact with as many stakeholders as possible within a project. Make sure you make a list of all the contact for your project. Make sure your client wants to give you access to all those people as well.

On that note, don’t assume that every contact is within the clients walls. For instance if you are working on a taxi dispatch system, consider talking to somebody who works for the city. They may enlighten you to reporting requirements or municipal laws that can make a difference for your project. Taxi drivers may be able to enlighten you too.

Matthew Taylor: Matthew lives in Australia. I’ve been referring to his CSS column templates for some time now (it must be a few years). They’re great starting points for Web designers! http://matthewjamestaylor.com/

Thirty things to memorize: 30 things.