ChrisDigital.com : Digital Designer Blog by Chris Carvey

After missing a few Wordpress meetups I really wanted to attend, I made time this week to head out to the Wordpress Meetup NYC at it's new location hosted at NYU Poly, and I made sure I RSVP’ed to get a slot. Especially, since in this edition the topic was a hot one, Brad Williams of WebDevStudios presented Intro to WordPress Plugin Development. Brad coincidentally runs the Philly Wordpress meetup and if this presentation was any indication it’s also definitely worth attending on a regular basis as well. Read my recap and check out the bullet points I walked away with… ZCW39BKP6J4Y

Developers these days are finding themselves trying to reach a growing mobile computing audience and it may be their greatest challenge to date. Today’s Web browser is a pretty well known commodity on the Internet, but “traditional” Web browsing is no longer the primary game in town, and hasn’t been for a while. Taking a peek at any Website’s traffic logs will quickly outline new masses of users seeking out text, video and multimedia content using new and different tools such as the iPhone. Devices such as mobile smart phones, laptops, netbooks and the growing popularity of tablet computers (like the iPad) in the consumer market are forcing today’s developers to widen their project scope. More and more questions are asked like,”How will my site look on a mobile phone?” or “How will my application behave when accessed by a handheld device?”…

I went to my first Wordpress NYC Meetup yesterday, and I was pretty excited about it. It was serendipity that my work load started to ease up when this meetup was scheduled, and I wanted to hear directly from others what they were up to with Wordpress. Since I’ve had my head down the last few months fine tuning this blog, I also wanted to know about issues I might run into down the line with the pending release of Wordpress 3.0 coming later this year. At the time of this writing it’s currently in its second beta and a lot is still in flux. This topic was a hot one and it was reported 94 souls braved the rain and schlepped it to mid-town NYC to get some insight into what’s coming next for Wordpress fans….

Now that I’ve launched the Digital Designer blog, I’ve been looking for guidance on what my intrepid visitors are up to when they get here. In addition, I wanted to make sure I was keyword optimizing my pages to attract the right type of visitors from Google and other search engines. There I was, with a lot of questions and in need of serious feedback on my SEO – hoping my visitors are getting good use out of my content. Off I went, venturing out on the Interwebs to find some free SEO tools to help me answer my questions and improve my search engine rankings.

If you’re in a similar situation, hopefully you were smart enough to use a SEO optimized theme for your CMS or blog. If you didn’t, you should switch to one…

Each day HTML5 and CSS3 show up on my radar more and more, like some kind of incessant reality show that dominates the topic of conversation at the office water cooler. But in this case, HTML5 and CSS3 dominate Internet chatter and the trends I follow on Twitter, where HTML5/CSS3-related issues have really been picking up steam. As I alluded to here in my previous post about HTML5, and as evidenced by this article on the coming build of Internet Explorer 9, HTML5 and CSS3, compliance is likely to shift the balance of power in Web development software. Adobe (which is currently the dominant player in Rich Internet Application development) is likely to see their current market presence they’ve enjoyed curtailed by competitors such as Apple, Microsoft and Google who suddenly have a jones for the open standard HTML5/CSS3 offers…

I was like most people when I first heard about Twitter, I didn’t get it and was dismissive. I said things like, “Oh, this is like AIM, only you’re broadcasting to EVERYONE on the planet.” “What’s with this character restriction… 140 characters?” “This is crap.” Then I realized that it was tied to standard mobile texting character limits. “OK cool, but I really don’t get this Web interface, and why are they asking for my mobile number?”

Life happens, and Twitter moved on without me, time passing as Twitter's user base just kept growing. I started to come around slowly and soon found the true power under the hood…

I’m using a theme for my blog called “Journalist”. I wanted something no-nonsense, with a minimalist 2 column layout that I could remix to my taste. Once I read Matt Mullenweg (founder of Automattic) uses it, I was sold. I realized when making this choice, I was using an older theme (optimized for 2.7) and I was aware it didn’t have some of the bells and whistles of some of the more expansive Wordpress theme frameworks. This made me mindful to continually review what I was doing, looking out for conflicts with the latest Wordpress install, and researching features I needed to add myself. I’m glad I stayed on top of this, because a SEO problem was occurring in my header.php file I didn’t catch originally when I was tweaking the theme…