Bluelime Media Vancouver Web Development

Stop climate change by optimizing your website

Christine — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:47:23 +0000

Climate change has no regional boundaries and threatens more than the environment. If we continue on this path, famine, flooding, war, and millions of refugees are the likely outcome. Given the urgency of the issue and the upcoming international climate negotiations in Copenhagen later this year, it’s only natural that this years’ topic for Blog Action Day, is climate change.

All throughout the day, you’ll no doubt be reading on the many actions you can take to help stop climate change. But did you know that if you are using WordPress, you could be making minor adjustments that also help? Making your website “green” is as easy as reducing the number of of calls to your database. Let me show you how.

WordPress is a database driven website. All of your content, posts and page information resides in a database and every time someone visits your site, a call (SQL query) is made. Reducing the number of calls will not only green your website, it will also speed it up.

Obvious ways to reduce the number of calls are by:

optimizing your images and make them as small as possible
displaying a few posts on your page instead of hundreds
cleaning up your css and reducing the file size
minimizing the use of plugins

Something that may not be as obvious is to remove calls to the database located in your template files.

For example the header.php template is usually made up of the following code:





<?php if (is_home()) : ?><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> - <?php bloginfo('description'); ?>
<?php else : ?><?php wp_title('', 'false'); ?> - <?php bloginfo('name'); ?>
<?php endif; ?>

You can eliminate 5 calls to the database simply by replacing the meta http-equiv tag with:

the feed with:

the pingback link with:

and the style sheet link with:

It’s not much, but any reduction in energy use is better than nothing.

Is WordCamp the conference for you?

Christine — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 17:16:10 +0000

I had the pleasure of attending my first WordCamp conference this weekend in Portland. Yes, I know, first WordCamp, how is that possible for a WordPress focused web developer like you? I guess I just wasn’t organized enough to attend previous ones.

I was also not expecting much. As the saying goes, you get what you pay for, so how good can a $20 conference be? WordCamp PDX proved to be exceptional and went beyond my expectations.

The first scheduled speaker, Jason Grigsby started the conference with a bang and demonstrated how important and easy it is to speed up your WordPress installation. His presentation consisted of information that was easy enough for bloggers to grasp and yet didn’t belittle hard-core developers.

Matt Mullenweg opted for a casual question and answer session instead of a presentation which gave the audience an opportunity to pick his brain. Having heard Matt speak in the past, it was great to see him answer people’s question and chat with them casually afterward.

Saturday ended with another great presentation by Tyler Sticka who talked about WordPress powered portfolios and provided us with code samples that we can use and customize to our liking. Once again, the talk was slightly technical, but Tyler managed to present in a way, which I think wasn’t too intimidating to non-coders.

Sunday’s presenters were equally stellar. John Hawkins and Will Norris gave us great advice on how to build plugins and what not to do, while Scott Porad, Cheezburger Technology Officer of Pet Holdings, Inc., the company behind the hugely popular I Can Has Cheezburger? and Failblog.org gave quite a high-level presentation explaining how his company operates and shared tips on how to be more efficient when programming.

Overall, I was very impressed with the information I gathered during the weekend. I was expecting discussions on CSS, content organizing, problems with installation, etc.., but instead, was confronted with SQL queries and plugin development code. I learned a great deal and now have plenty of advice to follow and put in place.

As most WordCamps go, the model is based on the unconference. As a result, during the scheduled talks, other discussions were taking place here and there. People simply wrote topics on the board and initiated the discussions. A group of realtors even gathered on the roof deck on Sunday afternoon to discuss matters that relate to them. How awesome is that?

As Matt pointed out during his Q&A session, WordPress has become popular because of people like you and me who attend and organize WordCamps. Regardless if your a blogger or hard-core coder, WordPress is a great platform and there’s bound to be something for you at WordCamp. So check it out and see if there’s a conference near you.

Incorporate Cufón in WordPress

Christine — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 16:08:53 +0000

Every once in a while comes a project where using a font other than verdana, arial, trebuchet or tahoma would be nice. I recently finished a website for Tod Maffin where, Rob, the designer chose Sansa Condensed as the font of choice for headings. I could have created images for all of the page headings, but I wanted to give Tod the ability to update them if he chose to and more importantly, I also wanted to use the same font for the headings of blog posts. After reading about the alternatives, I decided to give cufón a try and was quite surprised to discover how easy it is.

Here are the steps required to integrate cufón in your wordPress site:

Step 1 – Get cufón
Visit the cufón website and download the YUI-compressed version of cufón. Save this js file in a js folder in your wordPress theme.

Step 2 – Generate your font file
Follow the steps on the Cufón website and add the generated js file to your js folder in your wordPress theme. You’ll be required to upload your font files and thus you need to have purchased them as well as verified that your fonts are legal to use in font embedding. Upload your js folder in your wordPress theme via FTP.

Step 3 – Add the code to your wordPress template
To use cufón, simply add the following lines of code to your header.php file.

These few lines of code will convert all of your h1 and h2 into my selected font. That’s it.

How to use Slimbox plugin to display your portfolio in WordPress

Christine — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 16:59:20 +0000

If you’ve been following the Bluelime Media website you will know that we’ve partnered with Barbara from BlueCitrus on many occasions to develop websites and as the saying goes, “The son of the cobbler has no shoes“, the BlueCitrus website was in need of a facelift. My latest teaching gig at Langara provided me with the opportunity to design and develop a WordPress site for Barbara. The goal of the class was to teach the students how to use WordPress to create a portfolio. So building a site for Barbara was the perfect project.

Barbara laid the ground work and designed the header, navigation and gave me a good indication of how she wanted the site to work, but I was given carte blanche on how to make the portfolio work. After looking at numerous portfolio examples, I came across the stunning work of Koldo Barroso. Koldo’s illustrations are simply marvelous and I could look at them all day. His portfolio section is simple, yet very elegant. On closer examination of his site, I noticed that he uses Slimbox to display his gallery pieces which is just a slimmed down version of the original Lightbox.

A few clicks later, I read a few tutorials on how to use Slimbox and decided to use it to build it Barbara’s portfolio section. If you’re familiar with WordPress plugins, you’ll know that beyond how to install and activate, instructions are usually fairly slim when it comes to how to use them. Since I just finished the site and the steps I took are still fresh in my mind, I thought I’d walk you through on how to set your own gallery using the Slimbox Plugin.

Step 1:
Download the Slimbox plugin, upload it to your plugins folder and activate it.

Step 2:
Get your portfolio images ready. During the design process, I came to the decision of making my large images 500px x 405px and the thumbnails 110px x 80px. In my WordPress admin, under Media, I set the size of my thumbnails to 110px and 80px. I then proceeded to create all of the portfolio images and uploaded them using WordPress’s media tool. During this process, WordPress automatically created corresponding thumbnails and added a -100×80.jpg extension to them. The thumbnails weren’t exactly as Barbara had hoped for, so I downloaded them all, she tweaked them in Photoshop ensuring the the same names were kept, I then re-uploaded them to the server and replaced the old ones.

Step3:
Once the images in the media library, it was time to add them to the WordPress Websites Page. I opted for a unordered list of items to display the thumbnails.

Using the image insert tool, I selected the image to show, fine-tuned the title of the image, ensured that the file url was selected, selected the thumbnail size and clicked insert into post.

Which gave me the following line of code.

In order to activate the lightbox, I then inserted rel=”lightbox” to the anchor tag.

In order to display the caption under the image a title must also be added to the anchor tag.

This code now works perfectly, but you probably want to display more than one image. All you need to do is repeat the process and modify the relative attribute. Instead of using rel=”lightbox” I used rel=”lightbox-website” on all anchor tags. Modifying the relative attribute this way activates the previous and next links on the images.

You’ll notice that on Barbara’s website, once you view the images in the lightbox, you can read the title of the image but also visit the website by clicking the link. To do this, you need to add the link to your title.

So you might be tempted to using something like:

title="Portfolio Piece 1 - visit website"

But you will soon find out that this doesn’t work. What you need to do is swap some of the characters for their html equivalent. For example, quotes (”) would be " and brackets (<) would be <. So your final code will be something like this:

Step4:
Once all your thumbnails are in place, you may want to adjust your style.css. Here’s what I used for the Bluecitrus website.


ul.thumbnails {width:520px; list-style:none; margin:0; padding:0;}
.thumbnails li {float:left; margin:5px 4px 5px 3px;}
.thumbnails img  {width:110px; height:80px; padding:5px; vertical-align:bottom;}
.thumbnails a {border:1px solid #D4D4D4; background:#FFF; display:block; margin-bottom:5px; float:left;}
.thumbnails a:hover img {background:#F9F9F9;}

You can see the final results here.

Social Media works in mysterious ways

Christine — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 03:01:13 +0000

I’ve participated in a few “Ask The Experts” panels in the past few months and couldn’t help but notice that Social Media is quite the hot topic right now. People are very keen in learning how to use Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc… Most attendees are curious about how it works, why anyone would invest the time and energy, what’s the ROI and if it’s the right avenue for their business. These are all good questions and there are simply no easy answer. It really depends on who your audience is and where they are.

A funny thing happened to me last Friday which demonstrates how complicated and unpredictable it is to explain the power of Social Media.

I have a Twitter account and follow mostly designers and WordPress developers. This allows me to find out about latest tips, tutorials and website development news. Cameron Moll posted a tweet to a “mesmerizing” YouTube video which caught my attention. I clicked the link and watched a video taken at Kuroshio Sea which is the 2nd largest aquarium in the world.

(Please open the article to see the flash file or player.)

The video is indeed breathtaking, but I was curious about the music. I watched and listened to the video a couple of times and wanted to find out who was singing. Using my iPhone, I Shazammed it and got the name of the song, band and album. A quick search on YouTube led me to a video of Barcelona singing live in San Diego. I watched a few more videos and decided to visit Barcelona’s page on MySpace. Listened to a few more clips and then I was off to iTunes and bought the album.

I’m not sure that a marketer could have predicted this, but I’m convinced that Social Media is worth investing in.