Theme Playground

If you’ve been reading my writing for any period of time, you will know that I am a freak when it comes to organization. I love knowing things are in their proper place. So it’s no wonder that I have gone nuts over 37signals products Basecamp, Highrise, and Backpack for project and contact management. I love these things.

Here’s a quick little trick I’ve been using for a little while to back up my WordPress databases and at the same time keep them cleared from my computer and emails.

First you will need a Backpack account. It’s easy to set one up (by the way, if you do because of this post, please be so kind as to use this referral link. I promise I will let you know when I drop these links in.), just head over to the Basecamp homepage and get one.

Notice that each Backpack page has a unique email address at the bottom of the page. This is fully explained at the Backpack home site, but basically you can email content to your pages by shooting emails to these addresses. This is how we’re going to send your database backups to a Backpack page for safe keeping.

Now let’s move on to the Plugin you will need to make this magic happen: WordPress Database Backup. This nifty little Plugin creates backups for you based on your preferences (either to your hard drive, server, or email) and at designated intervals.

Head over to the Plugin homepage, download it, and install it to your WordPress installation. Then, of course, activate it from the Manage Plugins page on your Dashboard.

It looks like I need to upgrade my Plugin.

Under Manage, Backup, you will want to scroll down to the section titled Scheduled Backup. Pick an interval for your backups: once hourly, once daily, or once weekly. I would suggest once daily, depending on how often you update your blog.

In the dialog to the right (labeled Email backup to) you will want to put the email address of the Backpack page you want these backups to appear on. Hit Submit and you are good to go.

After a couple of weeks you may notice your Backpack page filling up with these backups. Solution? Designate a single page to be your blog backup “receiver”. After it reaches its limit (be it around 100 emails or so) simply trash the page and create a new one. This saves the hassle of trying to keep the page clear by deleting each old backup as it comes in. Remember, though, that you will want to change the Email backup to email in the WordPress Dashboard to make sure the backups get sent to the right place.

Hopefully this process helped (or will help) you organize a bit more and keep your backups in a safe place. Anyone else have a unique way of using 37signals products, or any other products meant to keep us organized, with WordPress? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Any fans of Alex King’s work with Share This, a popular WordPress Plugin used to share pages via email, is now available in version two. This version allows for sharing via IM and texting. It looks really cool, with some backend customization options and stat tracking as well. Look for more coverage of it in the next few days.

Since early on WordPress blogs have offered an automated image resizing feature on their blogs. For every image that is uploaded to a WordPress sytem, an image is created in the same location at a smaller size.

The advantage of this is that the image is of a smaller file size, which means it will take less time to load. It’s also handy for those bloggers who don’t have image editing software, in that it allows them to post smaller, bite-size version of images in an easy way.

Being pretty picky about things like size and clarity, though, I have a problem with using these thumbnails all that often. My issue with them is that they’re a bit small, usually, to be useful. I’ve found that, when posting screenshots for example (as I do in every WordPress theme review), the size just isn’t enough to see anything of substance.

A solid use of images as thumbnails (slightly resized).

On the other hand, oftentimes photographs display well as WordPress thumbnails. Recently on a site design for a local party planning business (site not live yet) I created a Javascript image gallery for their home page. It was nothing too extreme, but it suited their purposes. Anyway: each of the small images is a WordPress-generated thumbnail. And it works perfectly.

I would never suggest not using a feature such as this. It clearly has utility, when used correctly. I only stress the importance of not thumbnail-ing (since that’s a word) every image on your site. It won’t do you as much good as you think.

So how and when do you use WordPress thumbnails, assuming you do use them?

WordPress Candy and Liquidcity have released a PDF with lots of quick reference tags and calls for WordPress.

After yesterday’s video blog announcing I will be entering Design Vitality’s theme design competition that I mentioned a couple of weeks back, it’s about time to get some specifics laid out. There are a number of prizes involved, but the best part: the winner is chosen by a vote. So, ideally, by making Theme Playground’s entry a sort of community project, I might have a good chance to grab it!

About This Project

For those who didn’t tune in yesterday (or who didn’t want to watch the video) I will be entering the competition and designing the theme, for the next ten days, in full view of you, the readers of Theme Playground. This will include video blogs, screencasts, the posting of images, and a period of live interaction with portions of the site in order to allow for some great feedback.

Some Competition Specifics

I didn’t go into this in too much detail yesterday, so I wanted to cover it today.

• The competition is being hosted by Design Vitality and the competition info is here.
• The competition deadline has been moved to November 30.
• The theme must be brand new, not posted anywhere else on the web.
• The most popular theme will win $1,000, the second place an iPhone, and third place some hosting.

Some Competition Worries

After looking a little more closely at the competition details a few days ago, I was worried that I might break the rules by having you see the theme as it is being made. So, I checked in with Mustafa, big dog at Design Vitality. Here’s what he had to say:

The site can also be up from beginning to mid creation, but the final stages or the finished theme cannot be up.

So I can have you involved in the creation of the theme, I just have to be sure you never see the whole thing. No problem.

My Theme Concept

First sketch I did for this concept.

I will be attempting a newspaper theme. Notice that my recent series has been on magazine themes – I have carefully named the style newspaper because this will be a lot like a newspaper and not a magazine. If you can imagine a newspaper on the web, truly on the web and using it to its potential, that is what this theme will be like.

While I was sketching these up I spent some time looking into newspaper designs in my area and others. I used to be the editor for my high school’s paper, as well as the designer of the style guide. I’m pretty familiar with print design, although I don’t get to do it quite so much anymore. In this case, I think that background will really help me out.

There are a couple of things I know to a near certainty with this theme. I know…

• It will be a two column theme (I find three columns cluttered) with at best an option for three columns
• It will have feature positions based on categories
• Certain elements such as photo credits and captions will have a distinct feel
• Authors will be displayed appropriately
• The masthead will be used in the way that newspapers use them

Hopefully these ideas get you as excited as it gets me. And hopefully you have some ideas to add? After all, that’s the point of all of this!

The top left has some ideas for a different project.

I will be attempting to synthesize some of the elements of great magazine themes that (I think) were the reason they were so excellent. Of course there is always room for improvement, and hopefully we can take care of those things. As I use techniques from these other designers or have inspiration from their direction, I will be sure to let you know. I will also be explaining each step in the process, from design (color palettes and icon choices) to implementation (code techniques and best practices) with screencasting and videos, along with the usual tutorials.

I have been playing with some names, and I’m pretty sure I know what I want to call it. I will wait to show it off until later today, probably tonight, when I publish a screencast on the topic and the initial graphic design of the theme. After that I will let you know what address you can watch the live progress on (as the theme is developed on a test server).

Conclusion

Three cheers for moleskin notebooks anyone? I love the things, especially now as I see that I can scan the pages without seeing through to the other ones.

All thoughts, comments, and encouragement is welcome. This is fairly new ground, as far as I know, so I’m getting really excited. Tell your friends!