Kimb’s adventures in MS WebMatrix

You read that right: Microsoft are all up in OpenSource now. Kimb (@mkjones) had tried it previously but after a great talk by @androidrobb last month, he decided to try it again. His objectives were as follows:

• Install WordPress on a classic ASP server.
• Do it without using XAMP etc.

The WebMatrix installer seemed very ‘Microsoft’: i.e. It offered to install lots of confusing things with very ‘branding’ sounding names. He ended up installing a lot of things that he didn’t actually know what they were. Kym works in a MS-heavy environment (the NHS), so to someone who’s not played in MS-land for years, it’s a little confusing. The good news is that unlike his previous experiences, installing the web platform did not seem to meddle with existing IIS settings.

One benefit of this whole process is that for IT bods who do not trust OpenSource stuff, they’re more likely to let it through if it’s actually being installed by legit MS software.

(Around this time Jag brought up a reference to the film ‘Magnolia’. I don’t think anyone understood.)

Installing WordPress however is simple. When you choose to install WordPress it automatically prompts you to install MySQL. It will even prompt you to choose a root password, all in within the nice (well, functional) GUI. The process is smart enough that, when you come to install a second WordPress website, it knows if you’ve already got MySQL installed. You choose where on the HDD to install it and there you go. Well, not quite. You’re dumped in the browser at the first of the famous 5 minute install™ but your config.php is populated with all the right stuff. In many ways, this is a lot like the infamous scourge of the cheap web-hosts: Fantastico. Kimb suggested that you do this process twice: once on the web host and once on your local machine. As he showed us a screenshot of his environment, complete with IE7, there was a burst of excitement and jealousy from fellow NHS workers. They’re all still on IE6. What a hellish existence (Chrome 11, represent).

As I said during @AndroidRobb‘s talk, the WebMatrix database editor interface looks pretty good. No need to dip into PHPMyAdmin. With some playing about with permissions he got the db editor to talk to his external server with a similar Web Matrix setup. That said, I use the very pretty Sequel Pro, so that’s not so much of an issue for me but I think it’s pretty nice to have everything together and I guess that’s exactly what MS are going for (and what Adobe would probably go for with DW if they didn’t have the Photoshop empire to rely on).

During his talk he used the word ‘synergised’ once. He did not make coffee this time though. 7/10.

Chris Hart on Post formats

The septagon was one shape that Chris sadly did not utilise

As Chris (@ch8rt) brought up his first slide it was clear that he’s forged a career as a designer. It featured 3 shapes: a circle, a square and a triangle. His presentation was about the new WordPress post formats, but his attitude was that of a Factory Records era Mancunian artwork revisit. Or something.

Initially post types seemed pretty cool. We’ve all been mucking around with categories for ages now, to try and theme posts depending on the type of post, ala Tumblr. Unfortunately WordPress only gives you a limited number of available post-type formats (aside, gallery, link, image, quote etc…) and this is not expandable. That’s not a very WordPress way to go about things imho. These are activated by ‘add_theme_support’ which is in our friend the functions file and at least we can choose which of these to use (so the whole load are not forced on you). Theming is simple with has_post_format(‘video’) or you can drop the post_class() in for your stylesheets to utilise.

The chosen posts formats are displayed in the ‘Posts’ admin menu, which is one nice advantage.

This direction is a little lacking and feels like a somewhat undeveloped and immature solution. People didn’t seem that keen, but it must be remembered that we’re all hardcore WordPress devs here (ha!) at #sywp but we could build systems for our clients using post formats that would be a lot easier than the whole categories nonsense we often subject people to.

He’s made his talk, shapes and all, available here.

Next month…

People were obviously very keen to talk about gallery plug-ins, which conflicts with my fear of plug-ins and love of complete control over your markup. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong. Once again, events plug-ins were mentioned. People just want to find an events plug-in that works, but other more cynical people (well, me) say sod it. Just use Eventbrite.

We also talked about the 3.2 Release Client and decided the most interesting thing was the distraction-free writer which might be aimed at iPad owning, iA Writer using Stephen Fry fans. Possibly.

People want me to give a talk, but I’m so left-field, I’d probably do it on Expression Engine. Forgive me, SYWP.

No more ctrl-tabbing

To enable, type about:flags into url bar and then enable Tab Overview (it’s probably the top option in Chrome 10.0.648). Alternatively, if you have less than 3 fingers or no trackpad, then try Ctrl – Cmd – T.

Via advice on Reddit

Google Analyticator puts stats on your WordPress dashboard

Yes, embaressing stats. But I do get the odd spike every now and again. Honest! The Google Analyticator plug-in for WordPress requires authentication with Google. This is the 2nd piece of software I’ve used which has taken advantage of the GA API in such a way; the first one being the very pretty Ego for the iPhone, which allows you to keep track of some basic stats across your sites on one convenient page.

Grab Google Analyticator for you blog now. It works with most themes.

Everything Google does makes me nervous.

They are basically the search engine. What else is there? Cuil? Get outta here! Yahoo!? What! About! The! Shouting!? MSN Live search, the search engine of ‘soccer moms’ everywhere? Nah, Google are it. Even on a little site like this where I pimp myself out to the odd social network and I have readers coming in from RSS; Google brings in the bulk of traffic. Anything they change effects all webmasters. If it doesn’t, then I don’t think they’re very good webmasters. This is something that could potentially alter current SEO thinking.

Visual clutter.

Now this is being fussy, perhaps the designer in me speaking, but I think a large part of the reason why people use Google over other services is that it just does the job well without much visual clutter. Try looking at the initial Google search page compared with the Yahoo one. It’s a lot tidier. These new buttons next to every search result makes the whole thing a lot busier.

They’ll kill what I love.

Currently you only see the changes that you make using the search wiki but things can change. I find most of the best stuff on the web through services like reddit, Stumbleupon and digg (well, less so digg these days). If google decide they want the user-generated rankings to effect the global search rankings than this could effectively kill off the other guys.

Obviously it’s early days for this feature and I’ll be honest; I personally feel uncomfortable using it. If a search result isn’t in the top #10 then it’s for a reason. I don’t want to change anything. Lets see if in a few months if I’m any less reactionary about it.

The Official Google blog offers a announcement here, with an explanatory video featuring their chirpy as usual engineers.

Unfortunately, it seems like it’s only El Reg who have noticed this.

People are calling Chrome a cloud operating system because it is a “platform for running web apps”. It renders HTML and interprets Javascript, you know, like every fucking browser made since 1995. It’s also got Google Gears built in. Great. I’ll alert Tim Berners-Lee.

They are completely right. The gushing over Chrome by otherwise insightful blogs like Techcrunch about it being a challenger to WIndows is ridiculous. I wish it was, but it’s simply not. Get a grip people!

I wonder if I can get away with sneaking stuff like this into my clients work, as an aid to my occasional frustration.

The other good news is that OSX will support ZFS (presumably this will lead to better interaction with linux machines) and they finally got rid of that horrible brushed metal effect. It always reminded me of my primary school serving counters at lunchtime. Ugh. I used to shudder as cheap cutlery slid across the surface. Regardless, I’m thinking of doing that unspeakable, bighting the bullet and buying a Macbook so although I feel a little dirty, all this Mac progression is all good. I just got to make sure I don’t turn into one of those Mac rumour-mill fan-boy types.

I’m now going to go do a little bit of fixing elsewhere. Previously, I wouldn’t have been arsed to bother with it had Firebug not made re-understanding previously forgotten old tag soup so easy.

Get Firebug here. If not for me, then for your own sanity!