In my view the #Occupy movement is at its core about one thing: Democracy. And though the issues focused on may and should differ from country to country, the one persistent message is clear: Every man, woman and child has a voice and has an equal right to speak, be heard, and be part of society. The problem is that right now, especially in North America, only the rich and powerful get heard while the vast majority get overlooked or ignored.

Occupy Canada – issues for Canadians

One of the dangers of the #Occupy movement is that it may try to transplant issues from one country to another. This will not only erode the cause itself but make the movement seem ill informed. This is especially important as #Occupy events are ramping up in Canada. So if you plan on taking part in the events starting on October 15th in Canada, take up the cause of democratic issues we all face in Canada.

To help with this I’ve created three posters focusing on three important Canadian democratic issues: Electoral reform, control of telecommunications and cross-media ownership. I’ve also attached a short blurb about each of the issues so you can see why they matter and why you should make one of them (or all) your slogan as you #Occupy your city.

Proportional Representation Now!

Canada has an electoral system that has been referred to as a “sham democracy”. The first-past-the-post system does not reflect the popular vote but stacks parliament based on artificial electoral districts and simple majority rules. The result is that parliamentary composition rarely reflects the popular vote.

Case in point, the current Harper government. Whereas the Conservatives have a Parliamentary majority of 54.2% they only got 39.6% of the popular vote. In other words, based on popular vote the Canadian government would be a coalition of the NDP, Liberals and the Bloc with the Conservatives as official opposition. So when Harper claims he has a “strong majority mandate” he is really talking about an artificially inflated mandate based on an antiquated and undemocratic electoral system. Needless to say something must be done about this.

The solution is some form of proportional representation, employed by most western nations in the world. This would ensure that the popular vote is represented in parliament.

Download the poster in PDF format. JPEG version on Flickr.

Reform the CRTC

The CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission ) is the government watchdog and regulatory body for all radio, television and telecommunications in Canada. In other words they are the ones that decide who and what can be aired or sent over the internet and by whom this information is carried. The CRTC regulates the four big Canadian telecoms (Shaw, Telus, Bell and Rogers) who collectively stand for nearly 100% of all broadcasting and telecommunications.

The problem with the CRTC is that unlike in other western countries (the USA excluded) their mandate does not include the Canadian people nor consumer rights. The job of the CRTC is to protect the big telecoms from each other. This becomes problematic when you learn that the board of the CRTC is stacked with former heads of the four big telecoms.

Because of the weird mandate of the CRTC the four big telecoms can agree among each other to ramp up prices, cut services and lock competition out as long as all of them agree. As a result you, the consumer, gets screwed ever time. Ever wonder why your cell phone bill or cable bill is so high or why you don’t have the same streaming video services they have in other countries? The CRTC is to blame.

To solve this and make the telecoms act fairly and treat consumers with respect the mandate of the CRTC must be reformed to include consumer rights.

Download the poster in PDF format. JPEG version on Flickr.

Cross Media Ownership Kills the Free Word

On the topic of the four big telecoms, did you know that almost all Canadian broadcasters are owned by the same telecoms that provide the cable signal in your house? Or that most Canadian news outlets are owned by the same big corporations? In Vancouver, both the major news papers The Vancouver Sun and The Vancouver Province are owned by the same company.

The result of such cross-media ownership is that the free word is quashed in favour of corporate interests. When one or a few corporations control the media entirely, the corporate philosophies and political views become the predominant voice in the media landscape. This is further complicated when the broadcasters are owned by the same companies that bring the broadcast signal to your home.

The bottom line is that cross-media ownership results in censorship of opinion and the free word. You see the result in the USA, especially with FOX News, but also in general with the media blackout over the #Occupy movement. And Canada is just inches away from being in that same situation unless the Government starts cracking down on cross-media ownership and passes legislation to prevent it from spreading.

Download the poster in PDF format. JPEG version on Flickr.

Final words

If you’re going to one of the #Occupy protests keep this in mind: If you want someone to change their mind you have to make them understand your case first. If you just shout at them, or try to force them, you will get nowhere. Communication is the key to everything.

The design is simple: Emblazoned on the silhouette of the iconic Oslo City Hall are the names of all the sections (bydeler) in Oslo. The design is red and white and is printed on a blue shirt to correspond with the colours in the Norwegian flag.

To get the shirt printed it has to be voted through. So now it’s up to you, dear followers, to go to Threadless and vote for my Oslo design.

I believe you need an account to vote. Luckily accounts are free and do not require you to buy anything. Of course once my shirt does get approved you will want to buy it because it will be your doing, but that’s down the road. For now, just vote!

Code Your Art Out – Doing some good with your code

In conjunction with the Open Source conference Make Web Not War put on by Microsoft in Vancouver on May 6th and 7th this year the team has also launched a contest named Code Your Art Out. The contest is an extension and maturing of last year’s FTW (For The Web) contest which focussed on using oData in applications. This year the main focus is on using the web to do good – more specifically helping charitable organizations and non-profits reach out to their communities in new ways. From the website:

“Code Your Art Out” is about helping non-profits harness the power of technology in order to better serve its communities and members. It’s also about blending Microsoft technologies with other technologies to create applications that connect people, data, and diverse systems in new ways; bringing it all together in one ground breaking application.

Code Your Art Out brings to light an interesting conundrum in today’s rapidly evolving online environment: There are data sets, applications, solutions and technologies out there that can be of great benefit to individuals, organizations and companies, but the know-how and understanding necessary to utilize these often lie beyond the grasp of those who need it the most. The contest serves to build a bridge between those who would benefit from these technologies and those who understand and can build on these technologies. And for that alone I think it’s well worth it to take an active approach and submit an entry.

Not to mention that there are some serious prizes to be had including a trip to Toronto in June and some serious cash ($10,000 for the winner and $5,000 for the runner up).

Code Your Art Out runs from March 1st to June 1st. For all the details visit the site and get coding!

Dev:Unplugged – release the power of the web

We are entering a new era where web code is concerned. The introduction of HTML5, CSS3, SVG and other related technologies are opening new and previously uncharted teritories for designers, developers and everyone else playing around on the web. The IE9 team is heavily invested in furthering this technology and is doing what it can to encourage early adoption and ground breaking work on the code front.

Enter Dev:Unplugged, a contest built on the premise of pushing the new HTML5 standard to its limits and create web apps that are “unplugged” as in not reliant on plug-ins. From the website:

We believe that HTML5 and related technologies, in conjunction with faster and faster browsers, finally give developers the tools they need to create experiences that are just as vivid, interactive and high-fidelity as what you have come to expect from native applications without the need for plug-ins. We want to see what you can do unplugged.

What is truly interesting about Dev:Unplugged is that even though it’s a contest put on by Microsoft and the IE9 team this is not a contest centered around Microsoft technologies – it’s centered around the new common markup languages of the web. To accentuate this the rules state, and I quote: “The submission has to work across IE9 RC, Chrome Beta and Firefox Beta.” For Microsoft haters this might come as a bit of a suprise, but it’s part of the new “we’re all in this together” approach adopted by the company over the last few years. After all, the web doesn’t care what platform you’re on or what browser you use, so why should coders?

The Dev:Unplugged contest itself is split into two main categories: Games and Music. Entrants are asked to build innovative gaming and music applications using only HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript centered around material provided by the contest. You can read a full breakdown of how all this fits together over at the Internet Explorer blog and at the Dev:Unplugged website. Entering the contest you’ll be working with material from the animated series HellBoy and bands Awolnation and Ra Ra Riot.

As with Code Your Art Out there are some awesome prizes to be had including a trip to the Future of Web Apps conference in Las Vegas in June, cash, computers and other cool stuff.

All entries for Dev:Unplugged must be submitted through the website by May 8th, 2011 so get crackin!

1. Go to http://stopthemeter.ca and sign the petition
2. Send all your friends, family, frenemies, school aquaintences and your neighbour’s cat to the same site and get them to sign the petition (well, maybe not the cat)
3. Share the link on Facebook, Twitter and everywhere else you think someone may see it
4. Go to OpenMedia.ca and educate yourself on this very important issue.
5. Contact your local and government representatives and demand that the CRTC start protecting the rights of consumers, not just the rights of corporations
6. Call your Internet Service Provider and tell them point blank you are not happy with what they are doing and that you want your internet to remain free, clear and uncapped
7. Tell your friends about this issue and get them involved

And here’s why:

You may have heard some of your geeky friends talk about the major internet service providers in Canada pushing for new legislation to allow them to cap internet use and demand pay for “overages”. And you may have heard the CRTC – the decision making body put in place to ensure fair trade and practice in the communications space – has made some decisions in this regard that in no way favour consumers. What you may not know is that this move is the first step in what could become a stifling of the internet, a blockage of services and you ending up with a web that just isn’t what it used to be.

Why it matters to you

The crux of the situation is this: Up until the last few weeks your cable internet connection has been open meaning you pay the same if you download 5kb or 300 GB per month. The Internet Service Providers (Bell, Rogers, Telus and Shaw) don’t like this. They want to charge you a base fee for a capped service (say 20GB per month) and then charge you overages (say $1 per GB) when you exceed that cap. That may sound fair but in reality it’s not. And what’s worse, it may just be the first step in an attempt to stifle the web and force you to use paid services rather than the free ones that are currently available.

Although it might not seem like such a big deal right now, capping the web will become a very big deal very soon. New services like Netflix and other streaming media are popping up everywhere, and with them come new ways of using the web. No longer can you only surf web sites. You can download or stream movies and TV when you want where you want, you can use Skype to have video conversations with multiple people at the same time, you can stream music from a myriad of services. And as quality and compression improves these services put more and more loads on your connection. As a result, whereas right now you may only use 5GB per month and get your movies at the local video rental shop, a year from now you may use 60GB per month and watch your favourite TV shows and movies from a streaming service like Netflix, XBOX Live or iTunes. And if you do, your Internet Service Provider will stuff it’s big hands deep into  your pockets and pull out all your cash.

Here’s Strombo explaining it:

But isn’t that fair? Shouldn’t we pay for what we use?

This may sound fair, but in reality it’s not. As Netflix points out the actual cost of a GB of data transfer over wired lines is about 1¢, not $1 like they want to charge. And there is no real reason to cap downloads because the capacity is there. This is just a good old fashioned moneygrab. But there may also be a more sinister reason behind it, and it relates to the Net Neutrality debate that has been raging in the US.

The Internet Service Providers have a not-so-hidden agenda – to force you to keep using their services. It’s simple really: All the major Canadian ISPs also offer TV and video-on-demand services through their cable boxes. But now companies like Netflix infringe on this market. Why watch a pay-per-view movie on Shaw for $3.99 when you can watch all the movies you want on Netflix for $8.99 per month? The trick here is to make Netflix unavailable, or too expensive, so that people are forced to stick with the old content providers. It’s as simple as that.

Net Neutrality at risk

But there’s more to it than simply trying to force people to stick with their old cable plan. This move may be the first step in an all out attack on Net Neutrality. And that’s worrysome to say the least. Net Neutrality simply means that you pay the same price regardless of what type of content you download. So reading your email, checking updates on Facebook, downloading documents from work and watching videos on YouTube and Netflix are all bundled into your internet package. In short you pay for the use of the web, not its services. In the world ISPs wants you pay based on what services you use. So if you want to use just email and facebook you pay one fee, but if you want to watch streaming video on YouTube or use your internet connection for gaming you have to pay an extra fee. And when it comes to music, TV and video the many services out there are simply blocked and you are forced to use the services authorized by the cable providers.

Sounds insane, right? Well, it’s excatly what the ISPs in the US tried to do. And it’s exactly what the ISPs here in Canada will try to do if they get the chance. The bottom line is they want to make money, and the free and open internet is preventing them from doing so so they want to shut it down. Disturbing, right? Well, it gets worse!

(To see a great exlanation of Net Neutrality go to www.theopeninter.net)

The CRTC is not here to help you (!?!?)

Last year I reported Shaw Cablesystems to the CRTC for willfully crippling HD broadcasts on their regular cable. My argument was simple: You can get CBC, CTV, Global, CityTV and Omni in HD for free if you attach a clothes hanger to a cable and hang it out your windiw. But if you have Shaw cable you get a cropped SD version of these same channels and you have to pay for an expensive HD box to get access to the free HD signal. Furthermore this was around the same time the cable companies were trying to force these same over-the-air channels to pay for the privilege of being broadcast on the cable systems. You may remember it as the “Save Local” campaign and it was one ugly piece of corporate greed, willful misinformation and outright lies on both sides.

Anyway, I contacted the CRTC and after a lot of back and forth I got one of their representatives on the phone. What he told me was truly mindboggling: When I asked him why the CRTC was not acting in the best interest of the consumers he told me point blank “That’s not our job.” He went on to tell me, and I’m paraphrasing here, that the job of the CRTC is to ensure that the cable providers follow Canadian law and act in a fair way in the market. In other words that they don’t enter into price gouging and undercutting against each other. “So you’re saying if they all just agree to raise prices to an insane level, stifle service and generally screw over the consumers, the CRTC is OK with that?” I asked. And his reply? “Yes”.

The reality is that unless I was misinformed by this CRTC employee and I’m unaware of some other government entity that has oversight over this, the Canadian consumers are not being protected from price fixing by four companies who are basically allowed to run the show on their own. It’s kind of like the mafia really. And taking this into account things really start to make sense: Why our cell phone services are crappy and more expensive than anywhere else on the planet, why we pay more for cable than our neighbours to the south, why we can’t get Netflix, Zune Marketplace, Hulu and a whole pile of other services in Canada and why we, the consumers, are being screwed over again and again without anyone standing up and saying something about it.

Time for action

Not to be blunt or anything, but this bullshit has got to stop. Canadians are far too polite when it comes to issues like this, and the big corporations take advantage of that compliance. This is one of those cases where unless you stand up, let your voice be heard and tell your elected officials they are screwing things up for everyone, we are all going to pay for it down the road. Unfortunately I’m a mere resident of this country and I have no right to vote so I’m at the mercy of those with the power of citizenship in the matter. So here’s what you should do, right now:

1. Go to http://stopthemeter.ca and sign the petition
2. Send all your friends, family, frenemies, school aquaintences and your neighbour’s cat to the same site and get them to sign the petition (well, maybe not the cat)
3. Share the link on Facebook, Twitter and everywhere else you think someone may see it
4. Go to OpenMedia.ca and educate yourself on this very important issue.
5. Contact your local and government representatives and demand that the CRTC start protecting the rights of consumers, not just the rights of corporations
6. Call your Internet Service Provider and tell them point blank you are not happy with what they are doing and that you want your internet to remain free, clear and uncapped
7. Tell your friends about this issue and get them involved

We are at a turning point in time. Up until now the internet has been free, clear and uncapped and as a result we have seen a massive emergence of new companies, new services and new ways of communicating, sharing and enjoying content. If the ISPs get their way, those days will soon be over and we’ll be moving backwards. That’s not acceptable. Stand up for your rights and take action!

Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Expression 4 in 24 Hours

Earlier this summer Microsoft released version 4 of Expression Studio. The new version brough major upgrades to Expression Web and as a result my hugely popular book Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Expression Web 4 in 24 Hours had to be updated. That meant I had to go through every nook and cranny of the new version to find all the new goodies, come up with new examples to show them off and then rewrite whole chapters to reflect these changes. It may come as a surprise, but revising a book like this is almost as much work as writing it from scratch. Which means once v5 comes out I am likely to do a complete rewrite. But that’s a different story.

The new book, scheduled to be released end of October, features updated and extended examples, new features, removal of deprecated features. New content worth noting is an extended chapter on the new and improved Expression Web SuperPreview which now includes full support for IE6, 7, 8 (compatibility mode) and 8 as well as a new feature called Remote Browser Testing that allows for testing on external browsers like Safari for Mac and an entire chapter on the new Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Checker tool.

Expression Studio 4 and Expression Web 4 comes as a free upgrade if you already own version 3. That means if you have version 3 you should upgrade right away. And if you alredy have my version 3 book you should get the new version once it comes out. I’m not saying this because I want to sell more books but because there are some new features in there that are important to understand and get the full use out of.

Microsoft Expression Web 4 LiveLessons (Video Training)

In addition to the book I’ve also created a colossal 27 lesson video series clocking in at around 5 hourscalled Microsoft Expression Web 4 LiveLessons (Video Training) for those of you who either don’t want to read a book or who want more hands-on training using Expression Web. The LiveLessons series features an entirely new example project based on the 12×12 Vancouver Photo Marathon website and provides a best-practice model for how to create professional, rock solid and stylish websites using standards-based HTML and CSS. The LiveLessons series is complementary to the Sams book so there are things that are covered in the videos that are not covered in the book and vice versa. Thus even though you’ll get a lot out of each item alone you’ll get a much better and more in-depth understanding by getting them both. Again, this is not a sales pitch – I’m being honest here. The combo really is the better deal.

The video series will be available on DVD early October and I believe it will also be available for download or online viewing on InformIT’s website (tba).

12×12 Vancouver Photo Marathon 2010

Because I don’t already have way too much on my plate I decided to start a huge photography event/contest last year called the 12×12 Vancouver Photo Marathon. In a nutshell it’s a contest where 60 photographers show up on a set date, pick up a 12 exposure 35mm film and then at the top of every hour for 12 hours are given one theme to interpret in one photo. At the end of 12 hours the films are returned, developed, judged and finally put up in a huge exhibit. In the end we end up with 720 photos divided into 60 sequences of 12 consecutive themes. The 2009 event was a massive success with over 300 people showing up for the gallery exhibit and we expect this year’s event to get even bigger.

In the runup to the even (and to kill two birds with one stone) I developed a new site for the marathon and used this site as the demo project for the Expression Web 4 LiveLessons series. As a result the site features some pretty fancy elements like a transparent CSS-only drop-down menu with multiple in-button styles, CSS3 drop-shadows and rounded corners and tons of other fancy schmancy style elements.

The 2010 12×12 Vancouver Photo Marathon takes place on Sunday September 12 from 8am to 8pm in downtown Vancouver with a home base at Blenz Coffee in Yaletown. Tickets for participation (60 in all) are $24 per person and cover all expenses. Tickets go for sale Thursday, August 12 at 8pm and are expected to sell out fast. The following art exhibit will be held at Vancouver Photo Workshops on the 16th of October.

New in Expression Web 4

There is a long list of new features in Expression Web 4 but here I’m only going to mention three – because they are the most important ones.

In-app SEO reporting

Like the name suggests Expression Web 4 provides a full SEO report for selected pages or the entire site. Gone are the days of trying to remember all the SEO rules or using 3rd party apps to make sure your site gets listed on Google and Bing. With the click of a button Expression Web 4 will give you a list of everything you forgot to add to your site, like a title tag, proper description, keywords or broken links. But more interestingly it also gives you tips, in the form of warnings, that are not so obvious. During beta testing I ran the SEO reports on some of my existing sites and got feedback like “title is too general” and “description is too general”. This might seem like weird error reporting but it’s actually vitally important if you want your site to be noticed in the search environment: To be noticed your pages need proper titles that tell the visitor what’s on them. And the descriptions have to be specific enough to stand out. There are tons of other such warnings that, if heeded, will not only increase your SEO but will also teach you to write your code in an SEO friendly way the first time around. Which is exactly why I like Expression Web so much – it teaches you through its use to do things the right way.

More SuperPreview

I’ve raved about SuperPreview – the in-app or stand-alone cross-browser compatability tester that was introduced with Expression Web 3 – before. With Expression Web 4 SuperPreview has been enhanced and improved to include more browsers (IE 6, IE 7, IE 8 Compatibility Mode, IE 8 etc), more file inputs and most importantly an online component that lets you test your pages against the Mac version of Safari. It’s the same application with onion skinning, active areas, DOM view and all that great stuff, only improved for broader functionality.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: SuperPreview by itself is reason enough to buy Expression Web.

Publish Current Page

For people like me who tend to work on multiple disjointed pages and do live updates to sites all the time the process of saving a page, going to the publishing panel and then uploading the pages to the external server is extremely cumbersome. The obvious solution to this problem would be to have a button or function that lets you publish the current or all open pages to the server right away. I requested this feature at some point in the pre-beta process of Expression Web 4 and I’m happy to say it’s now included in the app making publishing of your latest and greatest errors updates a one-click process. It may seem like a small and insignifficant upgrade but it really isn’t: After working with an early beta and going back to Expression Web 3 I kept swearing at my computer because I couldn’t just push my files straight to the server but had to go through the publishing panel. That quick one-click or shortcut process is a huge timesaver and a hugely important addition to an already excellent application.

If you have version 3, version 4 is a free upgrade

Yes, that’s right: If you already purchased Expression Web 3 or Expression Studio 3, Expression Studio 4 is a free upgrade. That means you get all the cool new stuff at no cost. Very cool.

More to come

I’m hard at work writing tutorials and other stuff (TBA) about Expression Web 4 so stay tuned to this blog for all the updates and other useful tips!

Further reading

I’ll try to compile a list of all the news on this exciting new app as they get in. If you have a link, dump it in the comments below and I’ll post it:

Microsoft Press Release
Official Microsoft Expression site
Paul Laberge’s post
Tim Heuer
Yahoo! News

In conjunction with the launch of the new site we’ve also launched a Facebook page on which we’ll post updates on our work and keep our fans informed about what’s happening and what we’re working on. The combination of the new site, Design is Philosophy and the Facebook page will also be a great marketing tool for our many customers as we will be featuring each and every one of them on all platforms. And as always you can continue receiving Morten’s rants and raves by following him on Twitter @Mor10.

The site is done, the Facebook page is up, Pink & Yellow Media is open for business!

Several months and many hours of nit picking code later and Frugalbits is now finally live to the world. It’s a labour of love for me as well as the crew behind the site and it is a project I am exceedingly proud to have been a part of. So, without further ado, let me walk you through some of the interesting elements of the site:

A Carousel of Stories

Early on in the process the request came in to have a featured story carousel at the top of the front page. Unlike many other such sites the Frugalbits team didn’t want to have multiple text stories on the front page but requested instead one main story, named The Daily Deal, to be featured and then have a carousel with the latest 8 stories displayed at the top. Over the years I’ve worked with many different featured story plugins and carousels and as with pretty much every other plugin I come into contact with I’ve hated them all. For this one I decided I’d go out and find something that could be customized down to the last pixel and that ran independently of the whole WordPress plugin regime. And after a lot of searching I finally found a JavaScript based carousel I could take apart and put together exactly the way I wanted it.

The carousel requested would feature 8 stories (4 and 4) and would have a square story picture, a tagline on a translucent banner and the story title itself. In addition the coloured banner the story title would go on should change depending on the category the story belonged to. This meant I needed to create a loop in which 4 fields were queried for each story: thumbnail, tagline, category and title. It quickly became apparent that apart from the title the rest of the fields had to be customized for each story. To solve this I created 3 custom fields; thumbnail, cat and tagline, and the story editor filled out each of these taglines with the appropriate content. It worked quite well and I was satisfied that this solution would work

But. After a beta launch one of the editors brought up a point I never considered: The first entry of the carousel would always be the same as the story on the front page. And since the front page only had one story this was to put it midly somewhat redundant. Fortunately WordPress has an answer for this type of situation: offset.

<?php query_posts('posts_per_page=8&offset=1'); ?>

An explanation: The carousel is populated using the standard query_posts() function. By using the offset variable in conjuction with posts_per_page I can define how many posts the query should “skip” before starting the list. And since I just wanted to skip the first (front page) post, that value should be 1. Problem solved.

Adding an Author Box

Because Frugalbits is a magazine it has both “normal” articles and also columns written by a select group of columnists. The request was that for these columns there be a box at the top right under the title with a photo, name and a short bio for that columnist. WordPress doesn’t have a standard function to add such an author box and though there are plugins that do it they are clunky, full of garbage code and not easy to style. I chose to go hard core on this one and just write it right into the single template using a conditional custom field. The result was the nice chunk of code below which produces a nice CSS styled box with the author Gravatar, category name, author name and WordPress user bio when activated with a custom field with the name “author” and the value “true”:

<?php if((get_post_meta($post->ID, 'author', true))) { ?>
	<div id="authorbox">  
		<?php if (function_exists('get_avatar')) { echo get_avatar( get_the_author_email(), '80' ); }?>  
		<div class="authortext">  
			<h4><?php the_category(' '); ?> is by <?php the_author_posts_link(); ?></h4>  
			<p><?php the_author_description(); ?></p>  
		</div>  <!-- END #authortext -->
	</div>  <!-- END #authorbox -->
<?php } ?>

Custom templates

One of the most important features of the Frugalbits site is actually something you hardly notice: The custom templates. Depending on where you are in the site the layout changes subtly. The front page features the carousel, the single post pages have the optional author box, the category pages have only the right sidebar and show thumbnails for each story and the legal pages have an entirely different sidebar from the rest. To top it off the F Spot category has an entirely separate tempalte that looks nothing like the other ones. All this is done by using conditional statements and creating custom theme files for individual pages and categories.

Now that it’s launched I’m looking forward to hearing what people have to say about Frugalbits and it’s functions. Feel free to leave your questions and comments below and please visit the site and learn how to be frugal yourself!

Targeting (and hooking in) the pros

Twitter phishing attacks are nothing new but this one is a bit different – and all the more disturbing for it: It targets and manages to hook in Twitter power users more than any other exploit before it. This is done by taking advantage of the fact that most heavy Twitter users don’t actually use the regular Twitter.com page but rather a Twitter manager like TweetDeck or HootSuite. And whereas a person just using Twitter.com would immediately know something was up when they were redirected to the login page even though they were already logged in, a TweetDeck or HootSuite user would probably not be logged in and could potentially enter their information in a momentary lapse of reason.

Unknown agenda

Another thing that is disturbing about this particular attack is that unlike most other attacks which immediately start spamming people with badly disguised ads for teeth whitening, weight loss or other affilliate marketing junk, this one – at least for no – is only out to perpetuate itself sending out the same message over and over. This means there is probably some larger plan in progress, and so far we don’t know what that plan is.

Even more disturbing a lot of people use the same password for many things including their social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and whatever other timewaster fits their fancy. That means if someone gets a hold of their Twitter password they are likely to also have access to their other accounts, not to mention Gmail or Hotmail accounts!

How to aviod being phished (and what to do if you are a victim)

Twitter.com’s help has a comprehensive breakdown of how to reset your password, sever connections and get your account back if you are the victim of a phishing attack or your account has been hacked. If you think your account has been compromised it is paramount that you follow these steps immediately to protect your online identity. That link again is here.

Here are a few simple steps to avoid becoming a victim of a Twitter hijacking:

• Have a complicated password. If you can’t think of one, here are a few ideas: Do like Mulder from The X-Files and swap out words with numbers. His password was “trustno1″ where the word “one” was exchanged for the number 1. Do like my friend Craig and show your support for a sports team. He’s a big fan of the Vancouver Canucks and hates the Toronto Maple Leafs. His password is “canucks>leafs” i.e. Canucks bigger than Leafs.
• Change your password regularly. By “regularly” I mean every 6 months or so.
• If anything unusual happens, change your password immediately.
• Don’t use the same password for everything. That may sound like a lot of work but I use an algorithm based on the site name that changes the first and last character of my password so it’s not that hard.
• Don’t give your password away.
• Check the URL in the address bar before you enter your password. If it doesn’t say Twitter.com but something else, it’s not Twitter.com.

Well, actually the design portion was already handled by Tracy herself. The challenge in that regard lay in taking Tracy’s clean and exact designs and making them appear on the web as they did on paper. As for development the main challenge was that although this was to be an online store she wanted it to look nothing like an online store.  So basically the project consisted of taking a new site concept from a paper mock-up to a fully working website. Exactly the kind of stuff I like to do.

Taking WordPress right to the edge

The result of a lot of hard work is a website that in my view takes WordPress right to the edge of what it is capable of. Every element of the site is custom built from my basic WaveFront theme to create a look, feel and operation that in no way resembles or even hints at WordPress or a regular e-commerce CMS. That said there is no real reason why any site, WordPress blog or otherwise, should look a certain way. A CMS is after all just a HTML generator that spits out whatever you want it to, and once you have the HTML you can use CSS to display it any way you want. The true challenge here was centered around getting the e-commerce portion to look, work and feel less like a boxed e-commerce solution and more like something classy and custom even though it was built on top of the WP eCommerce plugin. So while on the back end this is a fairly standard WordPress installation with pages, a blog (upcoming) and an e-commerce component, on the outside it looks like a custom site with all the bells and whistles built from scratch. Which is exactly what both Tracy and I wanted.

Ultra-clean designs pose unique challenges

Tracy is a designer of my heart: Obsessively detailed and extremely picky. (To be honest I don’t think you can call yourself a designer if you don’t fall into these categories, but that’s just me.) Her designs looked easy enough, but the true challenge lay in matching her static pages created in InDesign to live dynamic pages on the web. With such a rigid frame to work inside all the regular cross-browser problems like padding- and margin widths, positioning, font sizes etc that we normally choose to ignore or just tweak till they fit within acceptible buffer zones were all of a sudden make-it-or-break-it points that had to be done exactly right. The most notable example was that when each page loaded, whatever page content was in the “content” section of the layout had to line up perfectly with the topmost menu item. Sure, that’s easy enough if all the content is the same, but in this case we were working with four fundamentally different types of pages: Plain text pages for general info (home, about etc), dynamic index pages for each product line consisting of a header image plus a series of thumbnails for each product, single product pages with a larger image off the top with product stats and purchase buttons on the right and info underneath and finally shopping cart pages.

This meant the site demanded entirely separate style codes for the different elements depending on the type of page (or more specifically page template) was being displayed. And all these styles had to be flexible enough to be applied to the same item in different ways depending on the current template. Normally this would be easy enough to solve by using custom page templates, but in this case we were using the WP eCommerce plugin which generated all the product indexes, single product pages and shopping carts. As a result I had to dissect the eCommerce plugin pretty much line by line to find where all these elements were generated and how to go about repositioning them. What I found was a plugin that although it looks amazing on the outside was actually quite messy behind the curtain. I won’t write any further on this topic here – suffice it to say if you want WP eCommerce to do something that’s not just basic implementation you better prepare yourself for hours of decrypting bizarre code layouts and counter intuitive solutions. More on that in a different post.

In the end I created multiple theme files for the theme itself as well as the WP eCommerce plugin that allowed for micromanaged control of all the different pages. Not an easy task, but more than doable given enough time and some good background music.

Overall I’d say DesignSchooledKids.com has been my most challenging project to date, not because of the design or development elements of the baisc site but because the WP eCommerce plugin falls short in way too many places. In the end I made it all work the way it should but that was only because I spent an enormous ammount of time fixing or all together rewriting the code in the plugin so it would behave properly. It’s a bit of a disappointment really but now that I know how all the pieces fit together I should be able to reproduce it in the future.

Visit Design Schooled Kids and check out both what WordPress can do and what Tracy has to offer.