Nicolas Demers – Page 24 – Web, photos and assorted geekery

The New Look

Well, that took a lot longer than I expected. But then these things usually do, right?

The design really only came together in the last couple of months. I remember at Northern Voice I was still struggling with placing a daily photo on the front page, with all the headaches that would entail. I still think it’s a cool idea, but I just couldn’t make it work. On the other hand, I’ve still got Sunset Beach and the West End in my header image. Right now it’s a static photo, but with a bit of thought I’m sure I could make it dynamic…

The other thing that pulled everything together was playing with Twenty Ten. As soon as 3.0 came out I dove right in and started building a new child theme. In hindsight Twenty Ten might not have been the best place to start, since a lot of my layout ideas came from a beautiful theme called Erudite.Though the documentation for Erudite mentions specifically that it’s for writers, I’ve found that it does pretty well for any content. (Hell, my inspiration, the lovely Life For Beginners, is very photo-heavy, and it works quite well.) I was attracted to Erudite’s clean and open layout, with minimal content in the sidebar, and had decided then that blogrolls, category archives, or what have you, could either go in the footer or just disappear.

Mind you, Twenty Ten is a great learning tool, so it certainly wasn’t wasted time. At WordCamp one of the speakers said you should try to develop your themes from scratch, because when adapting existing themes you may wind up with unknown design issues or unnecessary features. True enough (for example, I’m not using half of its widget areas): but I’d never gotten so deep into a theme before, and at least now I have first-hand experience of all these features I may or may not need.

What else? A lot of little things: threaded comments, gravatars, an honest-to-gosh contact form, courtesy of the excellent Contact Form 7 plugin. A redone blog archive page, inspired by that of Equivocality, and using the same plugin, Smart Archives.

Also, I decided to drop categories and go with tags. For a while I thought about using both, but every category scheme I came up with was either (a) so broad it became useless, or (b) so fine-grained it might as well be a tag cloud.

And finally, a portfolio! I’ve been talking about my volunteer web design projects for a while now, so why not show them off?

Movie Review: The Last Airbender

Against my better judgment I went to see The Last Airbender. Ohmygod, that was bad. I blame the heat wave and needing to spend an afternoon in an air-conditioned theatre. Plus, let’s be honest, a sick train-wreck curiosity. I just had to see if the movie was as bad as everybody said.

I loved the original TV show. It had a great story, well-developed characters, cool mythology, amazing visuals and exciting action. This movie… has none of that. The acting is sub-par, the martial arts and special effects are just about decent, the writing is awkward and painfully expository, the characters are boring and one-dimensional, with none of the zip and fun of the TV show. Shyamalan claims to be a fan, so I hear, but nothing about this movie tells me he really respects the source material. None of what made the show really come alive was translated to the big screen.

Part of the problem, I’ll admit, is that Shyamalan decided to condense all of season one into 1 hour and 45 minutes of movie. Fair enough, I guess, though it does mean dropping a lot of excellent characters and world-building, not to mention development of the characters that remain. The Kyoshi warriors? King Bumi? the “sexyfine” Haru? Jet? Jeong Jeong? Bato? The mechanist community? Master Pakku? Avatar Roku? Fucking Koh the Face Stealer? All gone, sorry. Gone also is the chemistry between Aang and Katara, gone is Katara’s growth into Team Mom and badass waterbending fighter, gone is Iroh’s sweetness and coolness, gone is most of the world’s mythology, the Avatar’s history and their relationship with the spirit world.

What’s left? The bare bones of the first season story arc: the premiere (Aang is found and captured, escapes, and head north with Sokka and Katara, pursued by Zuko and Zhao); a bit of The Southern Air Temple, where Aang deals with the loss of all his friends and his culture; a bit of Imprisoned, which begins a fairly irrelevant subplot of the Gaang fomenting rebellion in Earth Kingdom villages; most of The Blue Spirit, where Aang is captured by Zhao and broken out by Zuko; and the finale, where the Fire Nation attacks the Northern Water Tribe city (more about that later). In between all that we get told some of Aang and Zuko’s backstories, in flashbacks and amazingly awkward exposition.

What’s also left, of course, is the magical kung fu, but that mostly falls flat. The FX are competently done, and so are the martial arts (I guess; I’m not an expert), but together they just don’t work. The connection between physical movements and elemental effects are broken because for some reason, Benders need to do various moves for a few seconds (to “warm up” their ch’i, I guess) before anything happens. These moves are usually too quick and small to really look good on screen. The end result isn’t cool, it’s not pretty, it’s just really distracting. Maybe it was a mistake to translate an animated show to live action, or maybe a better director could have made it work, I don’t know.

Shyamalan’s failure as a writer is most obvious in the climactic battle between the Fire Nation and the Northern Water Tribe: almost all of the amazingly epic scenes in the series were either left out of the movie, or simply ruined. Not just done badly: done wrong. Zhao killing the Moon Spirit, Iroh unloading a can of whoop-ass, Yue’s sacrifice, Aang saving the day, Zhao’s death, every single one of them was a middle finger aimed at the fans. I honestly can’t understand how Shyamalan could think his changes are an improvement on the series. I’ll just highlight a couple:

In the TV series, Yue’s farewell scene was touching and wonderfully done. She becomes the new Moon Spirit, ascending to a higher plane of existence, and even has time for a final ethereal kiss with Sokka. In the movie she just… dies. Her life energy flows into the Koi fish, and her body stays floating in the pool. Lame.

In the TV series, Aang merges with the Ocean Spirit to lay some righteous smackdown on the Fire Nation fleet, in an awesome spectacle that combined stunning visuals, lovely music, and epic action. In the movie, Aang was never near the spirit pool. But that’s okay, I thought, he doesn’t need the Ocean Spirit. Yeah, he’s in the Avatar State now, that’s awesome! And summoning a tidal wave, like he almost did a couple of times before. He wasn’t ready then, but “water is the element of acceptance,” so let your emotions flow, and unleash all your rage and grief at the Fire Nation fleet!

…

… any minute now…

…

No? You’re just going to… hold it there? Oh, you’re waiting for the fleet to turn and run? Huh. Okay. I was hoping for some epic kickassery, but whatever floats your boat, I guess.

The movie ends with Aang accepting his destiny and the Firelord expositing about Sozin’s comet, thus setting up the rest of the trilogy. But with the horrible reviews this movie’s getting I’d be very surprised to see the sequel. Good thing, too. The last thing I want to see is Shyamalan fucking up Toph, Azula, Zuko’s change(s) of heart, and all the shadowy, creepy plots in Ba Sing Se.

Mind you, if he does make that movie, I have a feeling I might go see it. Because I am weak that way. Though if it’s any comfort, I promise I’ll feel really bad about it.

My Adventures With WordPress 3.0, Part 2: Featured Images

I’ve been playing around with the Twenty Ten theme, which incorporates a wonderful feature called Featured Images. Those have actually been around since 2.9 (where they were called “thumbnails”), but I’ve never gotten around to exploring them. Mark Jaquith explains all about thumbnails / featured images, but here’s the bottom line: FI’s are just like any other attachment, except a given post or page has at most one. Thus they can be used to visually represent that post in archives and search pages (as a thumbnail), or displayed in the post itself (full size), in any number of ways—inserted in the post body, for example, or maybe used as a custom header image like Twenty Ten does. I’m sure there are a million other options.

And all without mucking about with custom fields! All you need to enable this feature is to add three lines to your functions.php file:

add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );
set_post_thumbnail_size( 50, 50, true ); 
add_image_size( 'single-post-thumbnail', 400, 9999 )

The second and third lines set the dimensions for the image either as a thumbnail, or in the single post. From doing a bit of experimenting, it looks like only the first two are required. As the name implies, add_image_size() registers different image sizes, to be used in different contexts: search pages, main page, what have you. set_post_thumbnail_size()‘s third, optional, argument (and add_image_size() fourth argument) determine whether or not the image is hard-cropped (by default, it is not). WordPress’s editor UI lets you determine the cropping for images that don’t fit the preset proportions, easy as pie.

Note that the switch in terminology from “thumbnail” to “featured image” only happened in the last few months, and is still ongoing even in the official documentation.

This is a wonderfully easy-to-use, yet very versatile, feature; I’m working on a project for which it’ll be absolutely perfect. Stay tuned…

What I learned from managing the COMP 1950 project

COMP 1950 — Intermediate Web Design & Development. I decided to take this course because, though I’ve been doing Web design for years, it was all self-taught, and I figured there were some gaps in my knowledge and methodology.

Most of the course wasn’t too challenging to me. XHTML? CSS? No problemo (though it was a useful refresher on some advanced CSS techniques I’d read about but never used, like attribute selectors). The class on development methodology was a good formalising of techniques I’d been trying to use on my own, and the jQuery class was quite useful.

I admit I got a little overconfident about the midterm, and flubbed a couple of questions I could have answered if I’d studied a little more. Or, y’know, at all.

Then came the final project: five of us doing a small site mockup and design. It wasn’t a terribly big job, but it would be a good exercise to apply everything we’d learned so far. I could have let someone else take the reins, but since I knew the most Web design of my team, I figured I was here to learn, so I focused on another one of my gaps: I volunteered to be the manager and spokesman.

What did I learn?

I learned not to micromanage. Several times I was tempted to take charge, tell my teammates How Things Should Be Done, but I heroically resisted. This was their project too, and they had to learn by doing. I helped them along by mentoring and advising, and keeping track of the big picture.
I learned I had to plan. Realistically, it wasn’t much of an option, because we only had a couple of weeks together as a team. We got the job done, sure, but it probably wasn’t that efficient.
I learned I had to get to know my teammates. Before we got together, I’d only spoken to two of them (my immediate neighbours). I knew the skills of one of them, and that’s it. In our one team meeting we divided up tasks pretty well, mostly by volunteering, so that turned out okay.
I learned I could do it. And that’s a big deal, because I’d never been in a leadership position before, and wasn’t sure I had it in me to do it. And sure, things didn’t go as smoothly as I would have liked, but we finished the project on time, didn’t kill each other, and I got praise from some of my teammates for my managing. So hey, mission accomplished!

You Can’t Take The Sky From Me

Hey, who’d have thought I’d be back at the planetarium so soon?

This Saturday I went to Can’t Stop The Serenity, a fundraiser by the BC Browncoats to benefit Equality Now and the BC Women’s Hospital & Health Centre.

Hey, who’d have thought I’d be back at the planetarium so soon?

This Saturday I went to Can’t Stop The Serenity, a fundraiser by the BC Browncoats to benefit Equality Now and the BC Women’s Hospital & Health Centre. There was a silent auction, an evil laughs contest, and a whole lot of Whedon- and Firefly-related things to watch. Including a few costumes, though not as many as I expected. There was a fair number of Jayne hats, a group of three people (including at least one girl) dressed as cowboys (i.e.: Bad Horse’s chorus), and one woman dressed like a Vulcan in a blue TOS uniform. Huh. Didn’t see that coming. But I’ll say this for the Firefly/Serenity crowd, they’re pretty ecumenical. The auction items ranged all over the sci-fi spectrum, from an awesome foot-high plush Dalek to signed Stargate: Atlantis posters.

First up was Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. I actually hadn’t watched it in its entirety in a long time, which is a shame because it’s a damn good story with damn good songs. (Usually I just watch “Brand New Day” because it’s catchy and evil Neil Patrick Harris is fucking sexy. Well, sexier.)

Browncoats: Redemption is a fan-made film set shortly after the events of Serenity, and starring the crew of yet another freelance transport. It’s got a neat plot, so-so acting, and crappy special effects, but hey, I’m not going to make a big deal about that.

We also watched Whedon’s acceptance speech, from when he received an award from Equality Now (“Honoring Men on the Front Line”) back in 2006. And… okay, I’m going to be contrary here, but this is what I think:

Whedon isn’t all that. There, I said it.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, he’s done some good TV. I love Buffy (well, mostly the first 3 seasons, though it only started sucking in seasons 6 and 7) and quite liked Angel though I kind of lost interest about halfway through. Firefly is hella fun, though there’s a lot more style than substance. And I fucking adore Dr. Horrible. (Never watched Dollhouse.)

But his Equality Now acceptance speech really got my dander up. The way he went on and on about creating strong female characters seemed incredibly smug and self-congratulatory. Buffy is strong, yes, in that she can beat up any living creature and most nonliving ones. But when you get right down to it I don’t see how that makes her really special, or even especially feminist. It certainly doesn’t make her revolutionary, because William Moulton Marston has Whedon beat by 50 years.

Not to mention that whatever character development Buffy had was absolutely demolished in the later seasons, what with her creepily abusive relationship with Spike, turning into a one-dimensional cold bitch to the Potential Slayers, Brother Caleb’s over-the-top (and not in a good way) misogyny, and here’s the kicker: discovering that Slayer power really came from primordial male wizards, who created the original Slayer in a weird act of magical borderline rape. Wow, way to crap on seven years’ worth of female-centered mythos there, Joss.

The only comparable characters (that I know of) in his other shows are the badass warrior Zoe, and—here’s a better match—River, who rather like Buffy is a small, harmless-looking girl that had her powers thrust upon her against her will (in this case, nasty medical experiments). Huh. Never saw that pattern before.

No, I don’t think Whedon was trying to make any kind of statement with Buffy, or any of his later characters. I think he just lucked into a character that (with great writing and a fine supporting cast) got picked up as a feminist icon. That said, I’ll give him props for:

Being a feminist man, and using his fame to campaign for women’s equality. It is a big deal, in real life as well as fiction.
Being brutally honest. In his speech, one of his many answers to “Why do you always write these strong women characters?” was “because it’s hot”. (Incidentally, Marston’s bondage fetish formed a big part of the early Wonder Woman mythos).
Writing at least one series with something close to gender parity. Of Firefly’s 9 main characters, 4 are women. Actually, since the two who died in Serenity were men, that brings us to a female majority. A nice variety of characters, too, from the hardened warrior to the sweet wrench-wielding nerd to the crazy psychic dancing timebomb, to the—oh, let’s be honest, Inara is 100% fetish fuel.

Well, enough contrariness. Sorry, had to get that off my chest. I really did have a great time Saturday, and I’ll be sure to go next year.

My Adventure With WordPress 3.0, Part 1: The Install

They say the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. With that in mind, this is the first of a series of posts about me exploring Wordpress 3.0. I’m working on a new project involving a fresh 3.0 install, so I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts on the install process.

They say the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. With that in mind, this is the first of a series of posts about me exploring WordPress 3.0. I’m working on a new project involving a fresh 3.0 install, so I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts on the install process.

For one, it’s dead easy. Granted, Dreamhost lets you the one-click install thing, which takes care of all the messy db details, but I still remember going through a few more screens when I initially installed WP (granted, that was a few years ago, so maybe I’m wrong).

One interesting aspect of the one-screen config process is that you get to choose your admin account name, a great security feature

Another interesting tidbit (very bottom of the initial config screen) is the option to block search engines. For the moment I am blocking them, because this site is obviously not ready for prime time. Site visibility is managed in the Settings > Privacy page.

Mind you, that setting’s not unique to 3.0, I’d just never noticed it before.

Next up: probably something about child themes, or custom post types. I’ll be working with both those features.

Vancouver WordCamp

So I’m finally blogging about WordCamp. I had a great time, met some cool people, and learned so much I almost needed an extra brain. Well, I had my iPhone, does that count? Now I just need to digest everything I’ve absorbed and apply it to my present and future projects.

It was such a beautiful day. I strolled down to Vanier Park via Burrard Bridge, unused to getting up so early on a Saturday, but not really minding, because the streets were peaceful and quiet. Then I got a little lost, because I wasn’t too clear on just where the Vancouver Museum was. Turns out, it’s attached to the Planetarium. Huh. How long has that been going on?

Socializing Your WordPress Blog

The first presentation was by Nadia Aly, showing various social media tools to add to your blog. Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Stumbleupon, all these and more should be used to bring more readers in, and add value for your established readers.

Tweetmeme, a retweet button. Also shows how many times a post has been tweeted. Available as a WordPress plugin or standalone as a bit of Javascript code.
Facebook share. Same as above, but with Facebook.
Social Bookmarking Reloaded adds a series of graphical links to all kinds of social media sites, from Facebook to Delicious to… a whole bunch I’ve never heard of. Seriously, there are over 60 options.
Flickr Photo Album, a plugin that allows you to insert Flickr photo sets or individual photos in your posts
WP Followme adds a Twitter “Follow Me” badge to your blog
Facebook Like button plugin: exactly what it says on the tin
Twitoaster automatically tweets your posts as they’re published.

And that’s only the tools Nadia explicitly recommended, I’m sure there are a million more.

WordPress Dev Environments: MAMP and WAMP

Wouldn’t it be great if you could set up a WordPress install right on your own machine, to poke and tweak and experiment to your heart’s content, play with the most unstable beta builds without worrying about taking down your live site? John Biehler introduced us* to MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP), a completely self-contained environment separate from the existing Apache server on MacOS. Wish I’d known about this before; in the future I won’t have to set up a subdomain with a separate WordPress build to test new themes. Hey, live and learn.

(* Well, me, at least)

WordPress As CMS

A panel of three speakers (Cameron Cavers, Christine Rondeau and Dave Zille) discussed how WordPress can be used as a CMS, using some great examples of “non-WordPress-looking” sites. Here’s one. And here’s another. They argued that it’s even appropriate for small static sites, because though it may take a little more time to set up, updating becomes much easier. Plus, you’ve got things like the versioning process, to help clients not panick. With the coming of WordPress 3.0, with its custom post types and menuing system, CMS usage will become even easier, though still limited. For instance, there’s no built-in approval process, though there are kludgy workarounds (e.g.: conditional displays on certain custom fields, each one acting as a signoff).

Some interesting CMS-related plugins mentioned in this discussion:

Improved include page: lets you display multiple subpages on a template. Great for reusing snippets of text without mucking about with widgets!
Pagetree lets you view your pages in a tree structure, in the admin panel. Great if you have a complex page hierarchy!

Being Curious for a Living

Why ask why? Lauren Bacon argues that asking questions of your clients leads to better sites and loyal clients because you get to the meat of what they really need instead of what they think they want. You want a new widget? What purpose will it serve, exactly? How will this fit in your business strategy? WHY DO YOU WANT THIS NEW FEATURE? Answers like “Everybody’s doing it” are not acceptable.

Instead of writing from my notes, why don’t I link you to Lauren’s post on her own presentation?

Designing For WordPress

Colin Ligertwood is the speaker here (and I am just totally in love with his logo). Among other things, he coaches designers in working with WordPress. Unfortunately I didn’t take extensive notes for this talk; I think it’s because not a whole lot was new to me.

He advised designers to create our themes from scratch. The problem with adapting existing themes is that there may be unknown design issues, unnecessary features, or may not be appropriate to the content
Speaking of, content may be unpredictable, so we should design accordingly. Allow for both very short and very long posts
Keep navigation simple
The 960 grid system is really awesome, and I can vouch for it. I’ve already used it a bit for some quick prototyping.

WordPress and Drupal

WordPress is:
joyful, resourceful, quick

Drupal is:
flexible, dragon-slaying, comprehensive

Amye Scavarda comes to us all the way from Portland, to talk about how to decide between WordPress and Drupal for a given project. What sets Drupal apart from WordPress is that it’s so powerful. It is a sword, and if configured right it will slay any dragon you want; but use it wrong and it will cut you.

Will you need many different user roles? Are you building a large content-heavy multisite? What do user needs? How much training?

The dividing line between WordPress and Drupal is blurring just a tiny bit, though; with its new features, WP 3.0 is becoming a pretty robust CMS (as we’ve already seen). This cross-pollination is a good thing in the end. It shouldn’t be WordPress versus Drupal, both have different strengths and different niches.

Here are the slides for Amye’s talk

Parent-Child Themes And Frameworks in WP 3.0

The bottom line here, say Tris Hussey and Catherine Winters, is that WP 3.0 is an evolutionary, not revolutionary, update. Custom post types, just to pick one example, were around in 2.9, there just wasn’t any real front-end to manage them. Still you’ve got a lot of really neat stuff in this version, like custom menus and child themes.

Child themes are great. Tris gave a simple example of a child of Twenty Ten, the new default WordPress theme. All it took was one CSS file, consisting of two lines, in addition to a few bits to refer to the parent: one overriding the header graphic, and one to show a new font. Simple, but it got the point across. It looks like all you need in child themes is to add whatever styles (and templates? I’m not too clear on that) you want to override. Easy-peasy.

Get Found Easier: SEO Tips For WordPress

Tell you what, I’ll just link to Mark McLaren’s site, McBuzz.com. It’s got the slides for his talk. Bottom line, WordPress is already quite good at SEO, with its customisable permalinks, post description, etc… Of course, you have to choose good keywords (and figure out which keywords will actually lead people to your site), but WordPress can’t do everything, eh? There are other tools to help you along, such as:

Closing: Art and Technology are Old Pals

Goddamn, but Dave Olson is fucking hilarious. Oh, also smart and insightful. He took us on a roller-coaster ride through his past, mixing and matching metaphors with the greatest of ease, from the bottom of the Grand Canyon to Moab, Utah, from floppy disks to WordPerfect to CB radio to blogs. Art and technology together, open technologies and open data, people chatting with each other as equals, they’ve been around for a lot longer than I (for one) thought. And we, valiant WordPressers, are continuing that proud tradition.

WordCamp ended around 4:00, with a social on Granville Island at 6:00. How to kill a couple of hours? Well, first, I could explore the Museum of Vancouver. They were kind enough to give WordCamp attendees the run of the place for free, so I got to look at some fascinating exhibits on Vancouver’s history, and a bit about shoes. Kinda cool, but anyone who knows me would tell you I’m not one for fashion.

Then I went for a walk. The weather was still sunny and fine, so I moseyed along the seawall towards Charleston Park and Stamp’s Landing. Very pretty neighbourhoods, with a spectacular view—close to downtown, close to everything, lots of bike and pedestrian access, what’s not to like? If I’d had my camera I would have taken more pictures, but all I had was was my dying iPhone. Still, here’s something, mostly because it intrigued me:

Ironwork Passage & Foundry Quay

Now those are some weird street names for such a residential neighbourhood. But then I thought back to the history exhibit, especially this map right here (the museum had a colour version). Back in the day, this place, as well as Yaletown, were places of industry. Did you know there used to be a rail bridge linking downtown and what’s now Vanier Park? How things change. Nowadays, the only train you’ll see in Yaletown is the old locomotive in the Roundhouse.

Had another blast from the past in Stamp’s Landing, too, but that’ll have to wait for another day. It’s a much longer story, and not connected to WordCamp.

Progress means…

In the last two years I completed the VGVA.com redesign, to much applause; I began and will soon finish another redesign, which introduced me to an honest-to-gawd CMS (WebGUI, to be precise). And yes, I already knew Wordpress, but I’d only adopted that in the previous year. Recently I’ve begun two more projects, one (volunteer) as part of a team of developers, another as the solo tech guy for a fledgling online commercial venture.

Hey, remember when I wrote

How much do I really know about Web design? Sure, I read a lot of designersâ€™ blogs, but Iâ€™ve got exactly two sites under my belt: this one right here, plus another one for an online RPG Iâ€™m no longer a part of, that I redid maybe six years ago. Thatâ€™s it. Just two. Not a great portfolio. A lot of people will be judging this, and judging me on it. Am I really up for this challenge?

In the last two years I completed the VGVA.com redesign, to much applause; I began and will soon finish another redesign, which introduced me to an honest-to-gawd CMS (WebGUI, to be precise). And yes, I already knew WordPress, but I’d only adopted that in the previous year. Recently I’ve taken on two more projects, one (volunteer) as part of a team of developers, another as the solo tech guy for a fledgling online commercial venture.

I’m fretting especially about project (b), because though it may be possible to implement it in WordPress, we’re still hammering out the requirements and I may have to turn to Drupal. Which would mean learning Drupal. On the other hand I’ve been meaning to do so for a while now, not least of which because it’s an extremely marketable skill, and now I have a good excuse. On the gripping hand it’s intimidating, because the project’s bigger and the stakes are higher.

So yeah, the fears and doubts are still there. The difference is, my comfort zone is much larger now, and I’m getting insecure about bigger and scarier things.

And that, my dears, is progress.

Accentuate the Visual

I’ve been working on a redesign of this blog for a while now, on and off, and it’s finally close to done. At the same time I’m updating a lot of my posts to add more inline photos.

I’ve been working on a redesign of this blog for a while now, on and off, and it’s finally close to done. At the same time I’m updating a lot of my posts to add more inline photos. It hit me, looking at other more photo-intensive blogs (like the lovely Life for Beginners), that my posts are mostly unbroken walls of text. Even those that aren’t, just have a few modest thumbnails linking to their respective Flickr pages.

Well, that just won’t do. Not only will more photos make my brilliant words easier to read, but visitors won’t have to click to another page to get the story. It’s win-win!

I’ll be adding other elements, too, like gravatars and pull quotes. Maybe an abstract for the very long ones. And drop caps, too? We’ll see. Thinking visually is still new to me, but I’m getting the hang of it!

Northern Voice 2010

So, Northern Voice: the annual blogging and social media conference, held this year at UBC’s beautiful Life Sciences Centre. It was my first time; in fact I only heard about this event a few weeks ago. It sounded like a great time, and it truly was: two days of learning, nerdery and camaradery! I met some amazing people, attended talks and workshops for all tastes, from the technical to the social to the political to the academic, and overall basked in the presence of my fellow bloggers.

And that was the biggest thrill of all. No blogger is an island, but the fact is I have been pretty isolated, since day one. Sure, I’ve followed a lot of blogs, read a few books and so on, and they’ve taught me all I know. But the flow has always been one-way. I wasn’t interacting with the authors online, let alone in person. But here I was, not just learning but dialoguing and connecting.

And it took me out of my comfort zone, in other ways: I knew very few people there, which was uncomfortable since I’m not the most outgoing guy around (more on that later). However, I did meet up with a couple of people I knew on Twitter, so that was all right. And even by myself, I could dip into the Twitter stream, drink in everybody else’s posts, and once in a while see one of mine retweeted.

Here are some of my thoughts on the talks I attended.

Day One Keynote Speaker: Bryan Alexander

And we’re off! I found this speech kind of rambly, as it meandered back and forth between storytelling, mystery, and how social media are misrepresented in mainstream media. That’s okay, though, because Bryan Alexander is a fantastic speaker, engaging and funny, working the crowd without any PowerPoint slides. A great way to start the conference!

Gov 2.0: Social Media in Canadian Government

How involved is government in social media? The answer, at least at the federal and provincial level, seems to be: not much. Politicians are generally terrified of any risk of “gotcha” journalism, and civil servants are usually set in their ways and don’t want to use newfangled tools. And citizens are left out in the cold, unable to more efficiently engage with the people representing them. Vancouver, however, is a lot more open with its data. The speakers also made the excellent point that it’s not about the tools, but the process. Really using social media means more than just slapping a wiki here or a twitter account there, it means a fundamental rethinking of the entire process of governing and decision-making.

Good Science: It Takes An (Online) Village

Kids today know more about Pokémon than biodiversity. What’s the solution? If you said, “how about a science-based trading card game, to both educate and entertain?” then David Ng is way ahead of you. Behold, Phylo! What an awesome idea!

Finding Your Voice

What do you write about? And how do you write it? That’s something I’m still struggling with, even after years of blogging. Could Monica Hamburg show me the way? Well, sort of. Her main point was, simply “be yourself.” The hard part about that is I to know the self that I’m being. Also that it’s okay to suck at first, and to be unknown. It gives you freedom to experiment. Good stuff, and encouraging to someone who still feels like a beginner at this whole writing thing.

The nuts and bolts of SEO

Kind of interesting, but mostly focused on commercial blogs. Alexandre Brabant gave some numbers on ideal post length and keyword seeding which I’ve forgotten now, and don’t really apply to this here personal blog. On the other hand, they may be useful for other projects I’ve got going on…

Overcoming Social Anxiety

Kimli rocks! Oh, I could totally tell how nervous she was during her talk, but then I would be too. She was powerfully frank about her social anxiety, how it used to cripple her life, and gave some tips on how to deal with it. Basically: events like Northern Voice are pretty good for introverts, since the attention will be on the speakers and not yourself; don’t be intimidated by Big Name Bloggers, since none of us are cooler than others, no matter how many hits we get on our blogs or how many times we’ve been interviewed by the CBC.

She had a few more pieces of advice (you can see her slides here), but that’s mostly what I took out of her talk. I’m still working on the whole no-intimidation thing. And on most of the other stuff, to be honest.

Incidentally: those Justin Bieber masks in her slides are CREEPY with a capital CREEP.

Social Media Buffet

As the name implies, this is a half-dozen little parallel workshops on various technical issues. None of the day’s remaining talks really appealed to me, so I hung out in the atrium and got a bit of free web design and WordPress advice.

Day 2 Keynote Speaker: Chris Messina

Chris is a long-time open web and open source advocate; also, the inventor of the Twitter hash tag. That makes him okay in my book. His speech (also done without PowerPoint!) was focused on the future of the Web, or at least a possible, dark future: with more and more consumer products like the iPad or WebTV discouraging use of the address bar, and with corporations always trying to clamp down on content, people will simply surf in the channels chosen for them. This will lead to a fractured, bland Web. It’s a sobering but not depressing speech; that future doesn’t have to happen, if people like Chris (and you and me) can work to avoid it.

How To Do Good on the Web

Mahatma Gandhi said: “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” But what does that mean? What is good? And how do you do “good” online? Darren Barefoot, in this funny and inspiring talk, gives a few answers. Doing good on the Web, he says, can be as simple as clicking “Like” on something your really like on Facebook, or as complex as setting up something like Kiva.

He gave us a few practical ideas for doing good, such as Nabuur.com, which I’ve signed up for, and Procrasdonate, which I’ve installed on my browser. Should be interesting.

(Also, I think it’s during this talk that I installed Evernote, which totally rocks.)

Coping With Social Media

It’s addictive, isn’t it? There’s so much good stuff out there, a constant stream of tweets and posts and lovely information, that twenty-four hours aren’t enough to sample it all! How does one cope? Well, Alexandra Samuel argues, social media doesn’t have to be the problem. There are ways to make it work as a coping mechanism. For example, cleaning out your inbox can seem overwhelming, but it actually forces you to sort through your contacts, establish filters and rules, and make some hard decisions about what you let in. Tough, but it’s transformative!

Location sharing sites

What’s interesting is that the producers of location-sharing services like Gowalla, Foursquare, etc… don’t have any idea what they’re really for. And apparently, neither do users. Are they games? Are they a way to mark your travels? Connect with other people? They can be all that and more.

Sometimes a lot more. Last month a 54-year old North Vancouver man was accused of sexually assaulting a 15-year old boy who he apparently tracked down through Grindr. This just goes to show the risks inherent in letting other people know your past or present whereabouts. Issues of privacy and personal risk will probably multiply now that Facebook is about to roll out geolocation.

Art and Social Media

I’m not an artist, but I loved the four speakers’ stories of using social media to find, and connect with, their audience. Mainly, it involves taking people behind the scenes, see part of the creative process, etc… That sort of thing is apparently very popular, and I see why. You get to connect with artists as people, not just producers of art. And who doesn’t love a good behind-the-scenes documentary?

I wonder if I could do something similar, for my occasional graphics design work. Who know, it might put me in a different mental space, and help the creative process. Gawd knows I could use some help with that, when it comes to graphics.

If Machiavelli and Montaigne Grew Mushrooms

And what better way to end the conference than with some high-falutin’ abstract talks on the principles of social media?

Dave Cormier started us out by connecting Socrates, Machiavelli and Montaigne, how they related to books, and how this can teach us about books and social media today. Now, Socrates hated books (which I guess were still kinda new in the 5th century BCE), because to him, the only real way to develop and communicate philosophical ideas was through personal discourse. Books not only froze ideas, but broke the entire discussion process. Machiavelli, however, loved his books. He wrote something to the effect that in his library, he could commune with the Ancients. Maybe Socrates was amongst those Ancients; if so, I don’t think he would have appreciated the irony. Montaigne also loved his books and went one step further by scribbling notes in them, actively dialoguing with the authors. Was it vandalism, or 16th century blogging? Montaigne saw that books were instruments of communication that were meant to be used, not venerated on a pedestal.

Tyranny of the moment… and the past. Future technology imagined in terms of the present. A lovely steampunk moment.

Thing is, Socrates was right. As necessary as books are, they do have their own tyranny. What can social media do about that? What sets them apart from traditional media is not the content, but the connection between bits of content, and between reader and author. This is the metaphor of the rhizome, connected shoots that have no centre, like knowledge spreading out in all directions.

Though, not to be pedantic, I don’t think mushrooms fit the metaphor. Unless they all grow rhizomes. But whatever, the alliteration’s nice.

Jon Beasley-Murray’s talk, “Knowledge 3.0”, was depressing and frustrating. He saw a drop in the level of critical thinking and quality of education offered by universities and newspapers, and essentially blamed social media for it. Okay, I’m putting words in his mouth, I know. He never actually said anything more than social media being “complicit” in this process, but he never discussed any other factors. The democratisation and physical scattering of knowledge and education is a complex thing, and may cause problems of its own, but I’m convinced that social media is not to blame for sloppy education and news. Correllation is not causation.

So that was a bit of a sour note. But everything else was gold. I can’t wait for next year!