I’ve recently completed the replacement of the wordpress theme for the personal blog site of a successful journalist at Chicken and Cheese. It’s based on Wordpress, with a little graphic work, search engine optimisation, and a some carefully chosen plugins.

I first looked at Posterous a year or so ago – just after they launched. At the time Leo Laporte was evangelising them on This Week in Tech, and they won awards left right and centre. I was impressed then, and visiting today I have been impressed further – enough to make their service the origin of my contributions to the greater part of the internet (read: my personal blog, tumblr, Flickr, Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter, Identica, etc).

Hang on a minute though – what is Posterous?

At it’s core, Posterous is perhaps the most simple blogging solution available online. By posting an email to post@posterous.com, if you do not already have a blog, they will make you one, and the email will become your first post. You never have to do any more than that if you choose… any emails to post@posterous.com will become new posts on your blog.

Following that, if you wish you can head over to the posterous website and grab a short snappy name for your blog – mine is now jonbeckett.posterous.com. You can fill out a profile, and explore other member’s writing.

The real power of posterous isn’t immediately apparent. The boffins behind posterous have been integrating the service with all of the popular social networks. We’re talking Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LiveJournal, Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube, and many more. Through one email, you can post to everywhere you have accounts – and the integrations are wonderfully done.

Photos attached to an email get turned into an album on Facebook, uploaded, captioned, and a note posted to inform friends. Links are posted to the likes of Delicious, drawing more and more traffic in your direction. New photos will appear in Flickr, captioned.

Instead of being just a simple blogging solution, Posterous has become a seemless distribution engine. It’s impressive.

There’s more too. You’re probably thinking “what if I don’t want to post to everything – what if I want a subset?” – posterous has that handled to. If you want to post to a specific service, you just email service@posterous.com – e.g. twitter@posterous.com, or facebook@posterous.com. You can also seperate service names with plus symbols – e.g. twitter+facebook+delicious@posterous.com. Clever.

If you’ve not tried Posterous out for yourself yet, send an email to post@posterous.com and see what happens.

Following repeated requests from members of the long since deceased community, I have planted a new seed.

The new incarnation of ThoughtCafe runs on the Drupal content management system, and will serve as a great reference platform to bring my skills back up to date on it (I’ve used Drupal before).

Why not head on over to www.thoughtcafe.net and take a look!

A new incarnation of the Deltascheme website was launched on the web recently after a re-think of their online presence. I helped design, develop and launch the site as a freelance project, and will be continuing on as a consultant to the future development of the site.

Where the company previously had a static magazine style website, the new one is very much more dynamic, covering industry news, developments, and professional opinion – hopefully forming the basis of a marketing platform for the future.

To take a look around, visit www.deltascheme.com

After several months surviving on the net with a hand-me-down theme borrowed from my personal blog, I finally got around to building a bespoke wordpress theme for Bag of Spanners this week.

It borrows from the look and feel of Beckett Web Design, but has some interesting extensions;

Custom Search

Searching for content within Bag of Spanners will result in a Google style search result. Much better than the default Wordpress posts view.

Custom Archives

The archives at Bag of Spanners depart completely from the default Wordpress view of the world, and presents you with links to months, a tag cloud, and recent posts.

The theme will of course receive more spit and polish as time goes on, and will one day become available in a downloads section here at Beckett Web Design (along with a few other freebies).

The official site records the following account of Drupal’s history…

In 2000, permanent Internet connections were at a premium for University of Antwerp students, so Dries Buytaert and Hans Snijder set up a wireless bridge between their student dorms to share Hans’s ADSL modem connection among eight students. While this was an extremely luxurious situation at that time, something was missing: There was no means to discuss or share simple things.

This inspired Dries to work on a small news site with a built-in web board, allowing the group of friends to leave each other notes about the status of the network, to announce where they were having dinner, or to share some noteworthy news items.

The software did not have a name until the day after Dries moved out after graduation. The group decided to put the internal website online so they could stay in touch, keep sharing interesting findings, and narrate snippets of their personal lives. While looking for a suitable domain name, Dries settled for ‘drop.org’ after he made a typo to see if the the name ‘dorp.org’ was still available. Dorp is the Dutch word for ‘village’, which was considered a fitting name for the small community.

Once drop.org was established on the Web, its audience changed as the members began talking about new web technologies, such as moderation, syndication, rating, and distributed authentication. Drop.org slowly turned into a personal experimentation environment, driven by the discussions and flow of ideas. The discussions about these web technologies were tried out on drop.org itself as new additions to the software running the site.

It was only later, in January 2001, that Dries decided to release the software behind drop.org as “Drupal.” The purpose was to enable others to use and extend the experimentation platform so that more people could explore new paths for development. The name Drupal, pronounced “droo-puhl,” derives from the English pronunciation of the Dutch word “druppel,” which means “drop.”

From my own perspective as a professional developer, like any other solution, Drupal has benefits and costs associated with it. Rather than try to come up with a detailed list, I’m going to make a few basic statements;

• Drupal is more flexible than Wordpress or Joomla
• Drupal is more powerful (through flexibility) than Wordpress or Joomla
• Drupal is more complex from an engineering and administrative perspective than Wordpress or Joomla
• Drupal has a much smaller community than Wordpress

It comes down to the view that if you want a feature rich, flexibly and powerful system, you pay for that in terms of it’s inherent complexity. Just to make your platform decision more complex, you cannot really say that Drupal, Wordpress or Joomla are directly better or worse than each other – they are all good at some things, and bad at others.

I think I’m finally beginning to get my head around Tumblr. Where Wordpress is designed for wordsmiths – people with a story to tell – Tumblr is designed for people (like me) who find lots of interesting stuff, and wish they had an easy way of storing and sharing it.

I think perhaps the secret behind Tumblr is it’s simplicity. Take the “dashboard” for example;

Notice you are not just writing “a post” in your Tumblr scrapbook – you are throwing a conversation, a link, a photo, a video, or whatever – and it will be represented appropriately. To make life even easier, there are Javascript bookmarklets for your browser, and an iPhone application.

The iPhone application suddenly makes the idea of “Life Blogging” far more realistic for the rest of us – being able to note photos, observations, and thoughts while on the move.

If you join Tumblr, feel free to start “following” me – jonbeckett.tumblr.com.

cross posted from my technical blog – Bag of Spanners

This morning I have been looking at WeFollow – a directory of Twitter users, and a much needed tool for those of us looking to expand our circle within specific subject areas.

WeFollow requires that you add yourself to the directory – which it makes relatively painless by integrating with Twitter. If you are already logged in at Twitter, it’s a simple, single authorisation step. When registering yourself for the directory, you can choose three tags under which you would like to be found. This is a masterstroke, and prevents WeFollow from being manipulated by those who might try to register themselves in a thousand different areas.

Much has been writte, theorised and cogitated on the success of Twitter in recent months – I think WeFollow is a great illustration of why. Twitter doesn’t do too much, and it has open APIs. An ecosystem of supporting services is growing around the core firehose of consciousness passing through the system – TweetDeck, Twhirl, FollowMe and Twellow all co-exist in a new communication medium that is still finding it’s true purpose – and nobody is trying to dictate what that purpose might be.

We live in exciting times. Head on over to wefollow.com and dip your toe in the Twitter firehose…

Using a modified version of the bespoke wordpress theme developed for my personal blog over at Cheese and Beans, Bag of Spanners is intended as a repository for technical notes, reminders, and items of interest to the general community. It is born of the idea that I spend a great many more hours than most devising solutions to all manner of computer related issues – and sharing the knowledge I pick up along the way is a good thing to do.

Of course the blog will also carry my various idiotic and ill founded views and opinions on technology related subjects such as social networking, webdesign, productivity tools, and new websites too. Just thought I should warn you about that in advance. As somebody once remarked having encountered my personal blog – “Wow – doesn’t he have a lot to say!” …

Head on over to www.bagofspanners.com and have a read!

The client was looking for a portal style solution through which they could feed information, news, blogs, and gather registrations for events. It’s been a wonderful project to work on so far because it involves so many elements of the web designer skillset – from server configuration, to database administration, graphic design talent, ergonomics, usability, and of course basic XHTML and CSS authoring skill.

If you are a business owner reviewing your online presence, and like what you are seeing take shape at Axispoint, get in touch!