So I am going to keep this brief in a question and answer format.

I finished the book… now what?

If you liked the book you can add your twitter and facebook information (or whatever info you want… perhaps a blog URL or email address) to the inside cover with a date. Then leave the book in a public place. Hopefully the next person who finds the book and likes it will friend you and me up as we have things we like in common.

I love the book. Can I keep it?

Well you could… I mean you have it and I don’t know who you are, but the point of the experiment is really to find a lot of people that like the book. I encourage you to add your twitter and facebook information on the inside cover and leave the book somewhere for the next person to find. All the books are available on Amazon so if you really like it, I would suggest picking it up and supporting the author.

I hated the book. What a waste of time.

Sorry you feel that way. If you don’t mind just leaving the book somewhere, perhaps someone else might like it.

Where should I leave the book?

Up to you. I typically leave them at Starbucks, restaurants with internet, etc.  Someplace where a person might go and sit down and have a chance to browse it. I wouldn’t suggest a bookstore or library as the person taking the book might get accused of stealing and the whole point is for someone to be able to read it for free.

Sounds like a great idea… Can I leave books too?

Of course!

What books have you left places?

I have left copies of the:

• The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual
• Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable
• The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
• In the Beginning…was the Command Line
• The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
• The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
• The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World
• Free Culture

Do you want your books back? Don’t you miss them?

Actually I own a Amazon Kindle and have these books in electronic format now so the hardcopies are books I got before that and or books that I have picked up used/cheap for this experiment. Short answer, no, I don’t want/expect them back.

What is this Twitter and Facebook of which you speak?

I won’t get into what they are, you can find out on their pages, but the info in the inside cover is a listing of twitter user names and Facebook ID numbers of people who read and liked the book. So if you like it, you may want to add them as friend as you may have something in common.

TWITTER : http://www.twitter.com/USERNAME  – The user name is what should be in the inside cover. In my case this is lwallenstein so the URL would be http://www.twitter.com/lwallenstein

Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=IDNUMBER – The IDNUMBER is what should be in the inside cover. In my case this is 500092293 so the url would be http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=500092293

Thanks for taking part in my social experiment. Feel free to friend me up on Goodreads,  Twitter or Facebook… or just leave a comment letting me know you found my book and which one… just cause I am interested.

My requirements:

• Had to run Ruby on Rails
• Had to support a web server with virtual hosts
• Had to be able to run Wordpress
• Had to be accessible via Windows
• Had to be remotely manageable

Now I have been using linux for a long time, so I didn’t evaluate other solutions. It is free, reliable and Ubuntu is relatively painless to administer. That being said, if you have never used linux before I wouldn’t recommend it for a production environment for a beginner, I would however suggest you get a linux box and familiarize yourself with it for down the road.

So with my requirements outlined, I identified that I needed a linux desktop running Apache, MySQL with PHP and Passenger (modrails for Ruby). There are other web servers and database servers (the latest version of passenger runs under nginx) but I wanted to use something that was super well documented and had tons of tools available for any need I might possibly have. Basically I stuck with your standard heavy hitters.

Ubuntu Installation

Ok, so the first thing I did was download Ubuntu 9.04 from www.ubuntu.com. It was an ISO image and I burned it to a dvd. I used the 64 bit version as my development server is 64 it, but I don’t think anything I did should be different with the 32 bit. One thing I do with all my development servers is I remove all the unnecessary hardware. This server is never an actual desktop for me so I took out the soundcard, an extra DVD writer and an extra USB card. I do this just because I am never going to use these features with this machine and the less hardware the less problems with installation/maintenance. I stuck my dvd and went through the default Ubuntu install… nothing special.

Updates

Once I got Ubuntu up and running the first thing I do is update it to include all the latest patches/updates. Bring up a terminal (Under Applications > Accessories) and type the following commands:

sudo apt-get update

and once that is complete:

sudo apt-get upgrade

Now my machine is all up to date.

IP Address

By default your machine should/will probably pick up an IP address from DHCP from your router or some other method. You will want to pick out a static IP address and setup your machine so you can use Apache and name based virtual domains. This is a little tricky to follow so let me break it down:

1. I want a domain name for each of my client projects that is online all the time (I don’t want to share like 3 generic web servers and upload and download all the time).
2. I want that domain accessible from any machine inside my network.
3. I want to have an unlimited amount of domains.

Luckily I can have it all for the bargain price of 8 bucks a year from godaddy. I ran over to go daddy and bought the domain milabs.org (as in My Labs). Call it whatever you want, it doesn’t matter … noone will ever see it but you. NOTE: If you don’t happen to mind having your development server at 192.168.2.15, you can actually use my domain “milabs.org”, but I will get into that in a moment. I registered the domain and used MediaTemple to point a wildcard DNS entry for *.milabs.org to 192.168.2.15, which is the IP address I have chosen for my development machine. Now 192.168.2.* is my internal network so my browser inside my network resolves the domain just fine and points it to my development server, noone else in the world can get to it. Infact if you try to, it will just resolve internally to your own network (that is if you use 192.168.2.* as your network). This is why if we all used 192.168.2.* as our networks and all had our development machines at 192.168.2.15 we could all use the same domains… and hey if you buy a domain and happen to use some other variation like 192.168.1.2 for example, you can post your domain here and others can share that and save a couple of bucks.

SO anyway, I go under System > Preferences > Network Connections and I set my server to use a static IP address of 192.168.2.15

Remote Desktop

I use a primarily windows environment for my “front end”, plus my development server is actually not even plugged into a monitor 99% of the time, so I want to remotely be able to administrate it. I can do so using good old VNC. You can set it up on the server by going to System > Preferences > Remote Desktop and check “Allow other users to view your desktop” and UNCHECK “You must confirm each access to this machine”. Now using windows or mac or whatever environment you want you can a VNC client from many different sources… I would surf around google… there are tons of free ones and each one has some custom features that you may want. I just stick with RealVNC cause it is free and simple.

Once you have your VNC client installed, just fire it up, type in your IP address and you should be able to remotely administer your linux box.

File Sharing with Samba

Ok so now I want to get a share on my windows server that I can do my work on my windows apps (photoshop, illustrator, e) but write to my linux machine so the “work” can be “used” by apache or rails or whatever I am working on. Using Samba you can make linux shares accessible to windows (and vice versa, but I am not going to cover that here).

My configuration:

• My ubuntu user name is lwallenstein
• I want to share my home directory as all my work goes into a directory called workspace under my home.

To install samba, run the following command from your terminal:

sudo apt-get install samba smbfs

Once you have completed the installation, you now need to add a samba user and configure that user for access.

sudo gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf

and search for:

;  security = user

and replace (uncomment and add an additional line) it with:

security = user
username map = /etc/samba/smbusers

Save the file.

Next we need to add a samba user. I suggest to keep things simple, you use your ubuntu user name for your samba user name. My user name is lwallenstein, you will obviously want to replace this with your user:

sudo smbpasswd -a lwallenstein

We then need to add a user map to tell it “this samba user is the same as this ubuntu user”. This is why I use the same user name, it makes things simple.

sudo gedit /etc/samba/smbusers

Add your user account in the format <ubuntuusername> = “<samba username>”, so for example mine would look like:

lwallenstein = "lwallenstein"

Save the file.

Last thing we need to do is share our home directory on linux for the windows servers to be able to find:

sudo gedit/etc/samba/smb.conf

Find and uncomment below three lines

[homes]
comment = Home Directories
browseable = yes

and add the following line directly underneath browseable = yes:

 writable = yes

Save the file.

Thats it. All we need to do now is restart Samba and you should be able to see your shares under your Network on your windows machine:

sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart

Ruby On Rails

So I have many Ruby on Rails projects going on. I don’t want to run mongrel or thin for each one, but just like with my client web servers I want them to be “on” all the time. So this is super easy to do with Apache and Passenger, but before I get there, I have to install Ruby, Rubygems and Rails:

sudo apt-get install ruby irb rdoc ruby1.8-dev libopenssl-ruby imagemagick curl
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/55066/rubygems-1.3.2.tgz
tar xzvf rubygems-1.3.2.tgz
cd rubygems-1.3.2
sudo ruby setup.rb
cd /usr/bin
sudo ln -s gem1.8 gem
sudo gem update --system
sudo gem install rails passenger mongrel capistrano

This simply installs Ruby, gets rubygems, installs rubygems, does a symlink for the command gem1.8 so it accessible by the command “gem” and then installs the rails, passenger, mongrel and capistrano gems.

Apache

Ok so now we have our machine, with its nice shares and RoR running. Of course the power in this setup is the ability to have customer web sites so that like if I have customers Apple, Bannanas and Orange I can get to their sites at http://apple.milabs.org, http://bannanas.milabs.org and http://orange.milabs.org. So next we need to install and configure apache (with PHP and Passenger/Modrails):

sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 libapache2-mod-php5 apache2-prefork-dev libapr1-dev
sudo passenger-install-apache2-module

Next we need to configure Apache to load the Passenger module (and use a development environment as Passenger uses a production environment by default):

sudo gedit /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/passenger.load

and add the following lines to the blank file:

LoadModule passenger_module /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.1/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.1
PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby1.8
RailsEnv development

Save the file.

Restart Apache so it will load Passenger:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

You may get some errors about not reliably being able to determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, you can ignore them. They are just warnings and are benign.

Now we are done with Apache, but before I go into configuring client environments, lets get MySQL installed and out of way.

MySQL

MySQL is pretty simple to straight forward to setup. I setup MySQL in my development environment using the user root with a blank password:

sudo apt-get install mysql-server libmysql-ruby php5-mysql

Virtual Hosts/Client Configurations

Ok, this is what makes it all worth while. For each client we want a development environment so that we can use:

http://clientname.domainname.com

to access their files, whether it be a static web site, a ruby project, a wordpress installation… basically a web project.

Now we configured the server to a static IP address and registered a domain name and using a wildcard DNS entry we pointed the domain to the server. This mean *.domainname.com will resolve to our development server. * being anything. So using the wild card we never have to think about DNS again… it just resolves anything I type in to the server and NOW Apache will decide if there is data configured for that domain name and respond if there is.

For each of my clients I need to setup a virtual host configuration. This is fairly simple:

cd /etc/apache2/sites-enabled

For each of my clients I need to create a virtual host file using and tell Apache what domain name I want to use and where to point it. For my example I am going to make a virtual host for a company I work with called Kiobo. So I create the file:

sudo gedit kiobo

and in the file I am going to tell it to respond to kiobo.milabs.org and point it to my kiobo files in /home/lwallenstein/workspace/clients/kiobo/www

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName kiobo.milabs.org
DocumentRoot /home/lwallenstein/workspace/clients/kiobo/www/
</VirtualHost>

Save the file.

Restart Apache for the new virtual host to be loaded (ignore the warnings)

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now if I use my browser on my windows box and go to http://kiobo.milabs.org I now see my web site I created for Kiobo. I can edit the files using my E text editor on Windows and Apache will use PHP or Passenger/Modrails to do any development processing.

Thats It!

Attend Speeches By the Speaker not the Content

Noone at SXSW is going to tell you anything you probably didn’t know. We are in the age of RSS when someone blogs their thoughts before the thought is even done. For me SXSW is being inspired. Seeing people who are inspiring speakers is a way better experience then worrying if the content directly applies to you. For example, I am not really interested in Wine or Video Blogging, but Gary Vaynerchuck’s speeach on the topic was the most inspiring speech there and was the topic of conversation for many of my discussions with others.

People Will Not Bite

We are geeks, we all have a little social anxiety… but your here. SXSW is a social convention. Don’t expect a library of quiet geeks tapping away at their computers. If you come to the convention you are basically putting yourself out there as someone who wants to be social. If you see someone who you admire, follow their work, is talking about something cool or is just a random person that doesn’t smell, say “Hi”. A simple “I really like what you are doing with X” will totally make their day and you don’t have to go all fanboy on them. These people are not movie stars, they aren’t celebs. They REALLY DO their own shopping at Target and Walmart just like you. The fact that you recognize them enough and appreciate them enough to say hi will give them a really big kick and they will most likely be really nice… and if they aren’t, at least you know who to unsubscribe to when you get home.

Bring Money

SXSW is expensive. The conference is expensive, the cabs are expensive, the drinks are expensive, the food is expensive, hell at 4 bucks a bottle the water is expensive. There are a couple of things you can do like buying your own water and Whole Foods that can help. Hopping party to party for free drinks will also keep your bar tab a little lower, but do keep in mind that free drinks = line to get in. This isn’t a conference to attend if you are on super tight purse strings.

Get a Hotel Withing Walking Distance of the Convention Center

Due to bad planning, we ended up at a hotel near the airport. I would say our cab bills are probably near 500 bucks. That is almost the same amount as our hotel. If we took the 500 bucks and put it back into our “hotel” fund we would have been staying at a pimp suite right next to the convention center where we wouldn’t have had to coordinate cabs, waking up, going to bed… everyone could have just don’t their own thing. Just do it, thank me later.

Plan Downtime

You will constantly hear “it is a marathon, not a sprint” and it is so true. You are not going to be able to keep up the pace of conferences, partying, lack of sleep and honestly just people. It isn’t even a matter of getting tired, people constantly buzzing in your ear all the time will drive you insane. Take a look at your schedule, figure out what you absolutely can’t miss and plan a early evening in the mix and then some more chill activies. We went to the Alamo Drafthouse twice, a movie theater that serves food and liquor at your seats. Still social, but everyone STFUing for a couple hours was of great help. I also found myself after day 2 missing music, and not just music but a chance to zone. I found myself waking up at 7 am (like now) to have a couple of minutes to myself without having to talk. I love my friends, but the lack of “centering” time can make you insane.

Room With Someone Who Is Like You

If you can’t afford rooming alone, make sure whomever you room with has similar habbits. I love Mikey, but his need for all the lights out, freezing cold temeratures (which I like while asleep, just not when I am awake) and complete lack of noise, completely conflict with my lifestyle. I think this sort of thing wears on you as well and makes you  a bit snappy. I think this also goes for just hanging out with your friends, especially people you don’t actually live with. People all have crazy habbits, and everyone is out of their element. It is hard to go with the flow for 5 days, especially when hung over, give your friends some space. Cut people a break, take a break from them and just mix it up a bit.

You Don’t Have to Be Everywhere Your Friends Are

This is actually mostly my fault. I spent a good deal of the beginning of the conference trying to coordinate fun for my group. You are not joined at the hip, you don’t need to see the same speeches as your friends, infact I would encourage that you first look at the schedule and see what you want to see and plan what you want to do, before looking at social schedule tools like Sched and surfing your friends plans… if stuff overlaps that is cool as you will have stuff to talk about, but I think some of my programmer friends missed some good speeches cause I wasn’t interested in going and I didn’t go to a couple of things I probably would have because I was going with them to stuff. At the same point, don’t stress about it as it will all be on podcast.

Follow Up With Your Connections

All those cool people you met the night before will remember you for a couple of days… and you them. Send the emails, facebook connects and twitter followings quickly! Unless completely smashed (and in that case maybe it is better off you don’t reconnect), we all remember who we partied with for a couple of days, after that people just become ‘that guy who did/said that thing at that party at some convention’. Connections don’t cost anything and usually are pretty passive… connect with your new friends immediately and then involve yourself in the conversation when appropriate. Yes maybe in 6 months that awesome flash guy you spoke to for 20 minutes at a bar might not recognize you, but knowing that you are his facebook friend gives you way more credit then random stranger when involving yourself in a conversation.

That all being said, SXSW was a great conference and I am off to plan my next one already!

• How to Rawk SXSW
• Working Alone Sucks: Join the Coworking Revolution
• Scailing Rails Applications in the Cloud
• Making Whuffie: Raising Social Capital in Online Communities
• CSS3: What’s Now, What’s New and What’s Not?
• Video Blogging: Turning Wine into Gold
• Browser Wars III: The Platform Wins
• Quitter: How to Leave Your Perfectly Good Job
• Bruce Sterling Session

Twitter – Good old twitter… I can tweet my experiences, follow the #sxsw hash tag and get the up to the minute happenings. 

Facebook – I will be adding people I meet to my social network. 

my.sxsw.com –  I have selected all the events I plan to attend and now I have a personalized calendar that is integrated with my google calendar and in turn is viewable on my phone. Also has a private sort of twitter app, although I think I will probably just use twitter

BrightKite –  I will be posting my locations so that people looking for me can find me easily as well as be able to see which of my friends are where.

Viddler – I will be posting videos so that my friends and family who aren’t able to make it can “play along”. 

DropCard – A service where I setup a “business card” and then when I meet people I just txt message Dropcard their email and it sends them my business card.

It is amazing how I ever did a conference without this stuff! I will have a follow up post about what worked, what didn’t, etc.

So Google has released their new Latitude location service, and I have to say I am kind of excited. Now location services aren’t anything new, Yahoo’s FireEagle was released last year and BrightKite has been around for a while, but Latitude is the first example of location services with indivdual controls based on your existing social network (FireEagle being completely independant of your social connections and BrightKite requiring you to make a new one).

So why all the huff and puff? Locations services are bringing reality back into the internet. When I first started “using” the internet one of the greatest appeals was that I could connect with people with similar interests no matter where they were. For certain things this still holds true… for really geeky things, the likely hood that I will find a Ruby on Rails developer in my housing community isn’t particularly high, so it is great the internet is there to connect me with my friends in Austin and Las Vegas. There are some things however that are so common or are better done in person, take photography for example. It is much easier to discuss taking photos when you can do real life examples or sit down with someone and share tips on gear.

Now meetups and jellys and everything are awesome, but a lot of times you don’t want to have to setup a formal event or group just to do a activity. With location services you can do more on the fly things with your friends, keeping track of their proximity and status. Now your reasoning doesn’t always have to be so alturistic as a photography meetup, maybe you just want to get hammered at a bar or go see a movie. With location services you can see who is around, who is doing what and even figure out where is the central point to meet based on current location.With the tie into your cellular phone for tracking, you don’t even need to remember to update it, it all just happens. You live your life and just do what you do.

It basically boils down to the more you are informed, the more you can do. I am sure we will see a plethora of location service apps that can do things like:

• schedule impromtu meetups based on a trigger of a count of people being withing a radius (example: send an IM to everyone if more then 10 people are withing a 10 block radius and are marked available).
• send out alerts when your best friends come are near
• create a meeting place and then give you appromiate arrival times of yoru friends based on their current location
• find central meeting locations based on current location
• eliminate “where you at?” phone calls
• Find the nearest X (dentist, doctor, car repair) in an emergency

Now with the control that Google ads to show different levels of information, even a fake address if you like, to different friends, I think the “big brother” stigma of being constantly under observation is one less thing you have to fear. Embarassed you are at your ex’s for that midnight booty call? Just lie and say you are a church. Don’t want your boss knowing exactly where you are? Say that he can only see your region.

I am really excited about location services and I think we are finally tieing the internet back into our real lives… it has finally come full circle!

As it stands Embark will include the following features:

• User Management
  • User SignUp
    • Standard SignUp
    • OpenID SignUp
    • Facebook Connect SignUp
  • Retrieve Password
  • Edit Profile
  • Delete Account
  • User Page
• Administrative Tool
  • Dashboard Report (How Many Users)
  • Query Tables
  • Delete Accounts
• oAuth Integration
• Capistrano Recipes for deployment and maintenance

We are looking to you the community to see what other sorts of standard things… things you would find in 90% of the web apps out there, to include in our framework. So leave a comment and let us know if there is anything you would like to see or feel free to follow the project and contribute!

I am a web designer that works primarily with interfaces for web apps. This means most of my job entails making the cool things the developers make look pretty. Having worked on many different types of web apps I have picked up a couple of habits from the development community that carry nicely over into my design life, making not only my life easier, but also my clients.

Using a Work Methodology

Design is development. It may not necessarily include code, but it is definitely creation. If you are creating something for someone else, hopefully a paying client, there is a certain set of rules and protocols that you communicate with in terms of feedback, revisions, deadlines and deliverable. Some designers have created a custom process that they try and communicate with their client regarding expectations and some designers just shoot from the hip and hope things go smoothly. Either way, you can save yourself a lot of time, headache and hassle by adopting an existing work methodology as it is documented, tested and proven (plus it is also buzzword worthy when it comes to pitching clients “Oh we use an agile design process”).

Not familiar with work methodologies? No problem. Basically you are just defining a process of how you work, the priority of what you work on (bugs versus features) and the communication process for feedback on your work. Work methodologies such as Agile, Lean and Waterfall even break down into more specific types such as Agile’s Extreme Programming versus Scrum. Confused yet? Don’t worry, the bark is worse then the bite. To figure out what methodology works best for you, just think about how you want to work with your clients. Ask yourself the following questions:

1. What is the best way for clients to provide me requirements?
2. How am I most comfortable with breaking down a project into manageable chunks? (Time? Milestones? Features?)
3. How do I want to handle feedback from my clients?
4. How should change orders/estimates/quotes be handled?
5. How are releases handled?
6. How do you manage bugs/problems/changes?

The internet is definitely not short of information on this subject and a little research will yield you a matching methodology for how you want to work not only helping you cement a process, but also allow you to communicate the process more clearly with your client. Here are a couple of links to get you started:

• Agile Manifesto
• Getting Real About Agile Design
• The Agile Web Design Manifesto
• Extreme Programming
• Lean Development
• Scrum
  

User Stories

Getting requirements from clients is one of the hardest parts as a designer. There is the simple technical requirements of what the output file type is and basic descriptive elements such as size, bandwidth, browser support, resolution, etc, but what about the more conceptual requirements of how your deliverable should work. All products work, even things that have no interaction do work. If I see a photograph and the photo makes me want to buy something, it did its “work”. As designers we tend to fall back to te use of descriptive words such as “I want the product to make people feel young when they see it”, “it should look modern” or “I want the design to be elegant”. These descriptive words, while helpful, leave a lot to interpretation.

Now your clients aren’t designers, if they were, they wouldn’t have hired you. You can’t expect them to know the technical details about what you should make (fonts, colors, code, etc), but you can expect them to know how they think the experience should go. Enter user stories. User stories are used by developers by to provide requirements without having the client have to get into the specifics but also focusing the work to accomplish a goal. Ever designed the most beautiful web site layout only to find that your 5 item top navigation is really a 40 branch tree? What about a homepage designed for a couple of sentences that needs to hold 10 paragraphs? User stories can help. A user story is typically one or two sentences about a function of the output. It should be short and discuss what the product does, but not how it does it.

Examples

Load the Web Site Homepage
The homepage of the site should show all our products and a link to our customer service. Contact information should be in plain sight.

Our Logo
Our logo should include some sort of graphic element as well as our company tag line. It should work well in color and black and white.

Product Photography
The photos should emphasize the sexiness of the product, but also show how compact and portable they are. Key features of the product should be highlighted.

See how much specific information we now have about our work without asking the clients for lengthy requirement documents or mock up drawings? The more specifics you ask for from a client, the more they will formulate a precise vision in their mind which may not necessarily be the best solution. This is not to say that your clients shouldn’t think about what they want, but emphasizing that you are the expert and that they should let you come up with some concepts and not just be a monkey with a paint brush. You will save your clients time and allow your creativity to shine making everyone happier.

Use Existing Components

One thing I often see designers doing is starting from scratch with every project or relying only on their own work as a building block for a resource. This is a newbie mistake. When a client hires you they aren’t only hiring you for what you can do, but also what you know. Using existing components such as CSS Frameworks (960.gs, BluePrint CSS, YUI), Resets (Eric Meyer’s Reset CSS), JavaScript libraries (jQuery, Prototype, Mootools) and standard graphics (Feed Icons) doesn’t devalue your work because you didn’t author it. Knowing it exists and how to use it is just as much a commodity as having written it yourself. You will of course want to check with your clients ahead of time in case licensing is an issue, but barring something like redistribution problems, you will save yourself time from redoing proven/tested work and allow you to concentrate on adding the creative spice to the project that makes the difference between you and every other designer out there.

Test! Test! Test!

Developers have it beaten into their heads that they need to test. There are automated tools for testing, testing methodologies, bug tracking tools and even specific staff assigned to testing. Designers I have noticed “dabble” in testing. When you ask a designer if they have tested out their work, the first thing they will probably start with is browser testing (Browser Shots, LitmusApp) and an even more savvy designer may start talking about user testing (SilverBack App, Userfly). Now these are both important things, but they are only part of testing. You need to be creative when you test. Think about all the ways at which your work is gong to be viewed and try and see how it will appear.

• Making a web site? Print it out. Use the zoom features on your browser to see what happens. Try different resolutions. Bookmark the site. Check the site performance (size of files for bandwidth).
• Designing a logo? Try with different color backgrounds. Print it out. Check it out at business card size.
• Making a WordPress theme? Try it on a blog with 100 posts. Try it with threaded comments. Try it with different sorts of content in the post.
• Providing deliverables? Make sure you know how the clients want the work delivered. Do they expect you to ftp the work to their web server? Does their printer want the file in a format? Create a quick mock-up and test out your delivery methods before you hit that midnight deadline only to find out you have the wrong FTP password or that your client gave you the wrong requirement for the bleed on a brochure.

Testing CAN AND SHOULD take up a chunk of time in your process and you should build that time into your deadlines and quotes.

Use Source Control and Versioning

If I had to choose only one thing from this article to walk away with, using source control would be it. Source control is seen as a code thing or perhaps something you use when working with others. While these are good reasons to use source control, they definitely aren’t the only ones.

The benefits of source control include:

• versioning and the ability to go back to older versions/revisions of your work without having to have directories of files with dates in them
• the ability to search what was edited and when using comments on work
• compare changes for debugging
• a real timeline of time/effort put in to complete a project – helps in estimating new projects and billing complete ones.
• easy backups (if using a remotely hosted source control solution)
• remote access to all your client work (if using an internet accessible hosted source control)
• when working with others, having accountability for who changed what
• help provide the clients with a deliverable (if using an internet accessible hosted source control)
• recover from accidental deletions or even a corrupt computing system (if using a backed up system)
• open up old projects and jump right in by reading in your comments what you already did and where you left off.
• take risks with changes knowing that you can always restore a project to a point in time… feel free to edit those 100 files to see if you can make that awesome change!

Now I won’t go into which source control and how to use it, again, there is tons of information (Github,Git, Subversion, Beanstalk) on the internet about how to do it, including self hosted, professionally hosted, free and paid for software solutions. There are also versioning features built into design tools like Adobe Photoshop’s Layer Comp feature and some text editors even have versioning built into the editors themselves.

• Wordpress Themes
• Web Site Inspiration Galleries
• Color Inspiration
• Icons
• Tutorials
• Adobe Photoshop Brushes
• Firefox Extensions
• Visualizations
• Fonts
• Flash
• JavaScript

You can find all my delicious bookmarks at http://www.delicious.com/lwallenstein

Also, when I start a project I use one of the following “frameworks”:

• Standard Web Project
• Wordpress Web Project

Hope this helps!

NOTE: This theme is still very beta … I would love to get some feedback across multiple operating systems and multiple browsers. Please feel free to contribute any changes in Github.

Like many designers a good chunk of my projects involve Wordpress and customizing Wordpress themes. My coding process typically starts with taking the default theme and coding in my new design. The default Wordpress theme, Kubrick, was designed by Michael Heilemann many years ago and the Wordpress team adopted it and it now gets included with every version of Wordpress that you download. Unfortunately this theme isn’t maintained what so ever, infact Mr Heilemann doesn’t even use Wordpress anymore.

I can see why Kubrick was chosen as the Wordpress default. It is clean, modern and simple. Unfortunately from a design perspective, I find it a nightmare to work with. This is probably because of the age of the code, but the lack of things like resets, the structure of the page and just some bizzarre code choices force me to do a lot of work before I even start my design work.

I am fed up with it.

The Theme

So here is Designers Default. It is a modification of Kubrick, designed to look and function just like Kubrick but “updated” in concepts and code. If you aren’t a designer, you aren’t going to appreciate this, because beyond some small visual changes, it will look just like Kubrick from the outside.

From a coder perspective, that is a whole other story.

Designers Default includes things like …

• Eric Meyer’s Reset template included ( http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/)
• 960 Grid Template (http://960.gs/)) added for easy sizing control.
• Print stylesheet added for cleaner blog printing – hides useless components when you print like footer and sidebar
• CSS Templates added for IE6 and IE7 Exceptions
• IE6 Transparent PNG fix included.
• Debugging CSS Added (Commented Out) for easy theme debugging
• Post content broken out into seperate template to reduce repetition
• Navigation content broken out into seperate template to reduce repetition
• About template broken out to make it easier for beginners to edit.
• XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype
• Moved About Post data into definition lists
• Comments put on each template so you can tell what to edit by looking at the source.
• Comments put in the CSS source for quick changes.
• Header broken into layered transparent images so you can change the color with a simple hex or upload an image to be the background.
• Page frame broken into layered transparent images so you can change the color of the background with a simple hex
• Added RSS Icons to footer.
• Added Calendar and Tag Cloud added to sidebar and styled – just so you can see it is there.
• Page width expanded to 1024px which is the standard in page width.
• Line height on paragraph increased to 1.5em
• Includes PSD for graphics

This all being said, I think it is a great start point template. It was not built with performance in mind, meaning the code isn’t optimized or compressed as its intentions are for designers to dig in and code. If you want to compress the code at the end, go ahead… thats your business.

Right now the theme is still very beta, I probably will need to use it for a couple of client jobs and fine tune it, but it is mostly there so I figured I would share