Anyway, I finally started building the site this week. I’ve decided to build on the fly – completely live – instead of doing it offline and perfecting it (because I’ve discovered this means projects never get finished!) The plan is to use a WordPress back-end so that I can bum off their functioning user management as well as using custom content types to power the tagged locations and reviews. Nothing actually works at the minute and there is no design – hey, I’m juggling a toddler and a full time job here – but I want to get feedback now. Lo, Feeding Friendly.co.uk

If you’re interesting in contributing to the project … ideas, reviews, suggestions, whatever, please let me know. I will especially need mums who go out and about a lot to work with me tagging & rating places to begin with, so we can get some bare bones data up there. Comment here or e-mail me: jem@jemjabella.co.uk.

Updates as follows:

• compressed and optimised badword checking; checking name field too
• more easily customisable required fields
• added more known bots to isBots() function
• disable Send button on successful mail send to help prevent spam
• removed carriage return char from header to prevent bad header errors in gmail

As usual, although extensive checking and bug testing has occurred, it’s up to you to let me know if I’ve missed anything. Do leave a comment or fire me an e-mail if you come across any problems.

• Developing bespoke WordPress plugins for a work client — this one was a bit odd to write as I’m not used to such a strict editorial process. Apparently you’re not allowed to swear on professional blogs; who knew?!
• Creating a Custom WordPress Shortcode: making a basic WordPress plugin displayed via shortcode

Have also got a spin-off of the shortcode tutorial in the works which will enable folks to write their own basic Formspring plugin (to display answered questions on your WP blog). Keep your eyes peeled…

Of course I’ve not done any benchmarks so I’m not entirely sure how much of this is psychological (ooh shiny new product must be faster, that sort of thing) and how much is actual, but there we go.

My biggest gripes so far:

• Support for browser.tab.tabMaxWidth and browser.tab.tabMinWidth has been deprecated. It took rather a lot of Googling to discover that a) it now needs to be done in userChrome.css and most importantly you need to set browser.tabs.animate to false otherwise you end up with ghost tabs. See: Firefox 4 Beta: Tab width CSS for more information
• You can’t trial personas by hovering over the images on the Persona page now. You have to install, and then remove if you don’t like it. It’s not a major pain in the butt, just a bit of added inconvenience.

Err, and that’s about it. Not bad so far.

• WordPress Plugin Development: Style Your Message Boxes: keeping plugin message boxes consistent with WP
• How To Design And Style Your WordPress Plugin Admin Panel: how to achieve the standard WP admin panel look with existing CSS classes etc
• WordPress Codex Developer Documentation: standard WP docs
• WordPress user registration template and custom user profile fields: does what it says on the tin

As I find the notes I scribbled these URLs down in, I’ll add to this post.

One thing I did note, however, is that some of the guides etc I came across were using deprecated WP functions. (Obligatory disclaimer…) it’s definitely worth getting to grips with the codex, and checking pages for hooks that you’re unfamiliar with before blindly copy-pasting someone else’s code (not to mention the possibility for security holes, yadda yadda).

I suggested WordPress to Aitch as a user-friendly and easily extendible content management system. Following a nod of approval, the original blog data was imported and the pages built around original Joomla content. I converted the site style to a WordPress theme, built features into bespoke widgets and linked all of the pages together.

Following an early new year release, I agreed to get BabyLedWeaning ‘out there’ and so began creating a social media profile on Twitter and Facebook. The site’s popularity did the rest of the work for me and within 24 hours of release, the Twitter/Facebook followers were in triple figures!

Going forward, I plan on creating and integrating a custom plugin to allow BLW.com regulars to submit and update their own recipes which should boost the content and pull in visitors from outside of the current site niche. Working with Aitch and the baby led weaning site has been a pleasure, long may it continue…

However, one of our work clients has put in a request for an interesting addition to their site which is currently not really satisfied by any decent/up-to-date plugins. Part of the project involves extending the user-side of WordPress with full profiles, account history etc. It’s very “web 2.0″ (now there’s a buzzword I’ve not heard in a while).

The advantage of this, beyond increasing my WordPress knowledge and experience, is that it’s given me the inspiration/kick up the arse needed to turn my free PHP mail form into a WordPress plugin!

The point of a search engine is to deliver relevant results to the user. User enters a search term, search engine goes through it’s index and delivers the content it thinks is best to User. The search engines want to be seen as the best at delivering the ‘right’ content, so it’s important that only decent content ranks highly (especially as beyond a certain point in the SERPs, users either change their search terms or use another engine).

Throw enough money at a page and you can get it ranked high enough to deliver the much-wanted sales. However, if your outgoing expenditure on SEO or advertising is greater than that of the returned sales, you’re wasting time and money.

In my experience, the key is to turn that around on it’s head, putting yourself in the shoes of the user (or in fact the search engine). Spend time and money on improving the relevance of a page, and the relevance of your site overall, and all of a sudden you’ll find you’re working with the search engines instead of against them. In turn, this improves the experience for the user, which is much more likely to result in the kind of sales (and positive experiences) that clients really want.

I happened upon Dive into HTML5 quite by coincidence and flicked through the first few chapters online. Already, it feels like somebody made HTML all yummy!

The proposed changes to web forms, namely placeholder text and additional input types, have the potential to make front-end web development a) quicker and b) easier. It seems to be opening doors for client-side validation without compromising accessibility (as JavaScript so easily can). What’s more, because of the graceful fallback to type=”text” in browsers behind the times, I don’t even have to wait to start implementing changes.

I can continue coding well-formed, semantically correct HTML as I would for a faux-XHTML page (as I do under a Strict HTML4 doctype anyway) but with juicy extras and an HTML5 doctype. There’s already an HTML5 reset stylesheet to cobble together appropriate display behaviour for new elements if I decide to get adventurous with <nav> etc. (Albeit unsupported — without JavaScript workarounds anyway — in Internet Explorer; no surprise there!)

So, I guess now all I need to do is wait for decent browser support… I won’t hold my breath.