The Jake Neumann

Put simply, you shouldn’t pay for a website. There are plenty of free options out there. Go ahead, do a google search, you’ll find a lot of options. Some of theme are going to be through reputable online dealers looking to upgrade you at a later date and there are others that operate a little more shady. Either way, the free option isn’t always the best one.

The problem with these options is the fact they look like all of the other free sites on that service. While a website that looks similar to another website has nothing inherently wrong in and of itself, if it is related to the websites that it is modeled after. Let’s say that there is a shoe store, Joe’s Shoe Store, and Joe gets himself a website from some free website service. Then let’s say that Sally opens up Sally’s Beauty Salon, and she gets a website from the same free service. If these websites look similar enough, people that have visited both sites are going to make a connection between the two, whether Sally and Joe want a connection or not.

In order to get a quality website, you are going to need to pay some money to somebody. You’re probably wondering, how much money is the right amount. I’m sorry, but that is a discussion that you need to have between yourself and whoever you are getting to help with your website. Something only has a dollar value if somebody is else is willing to pay it. If it comes down to price, I know this great guy that does websites for a great price. Here’s his link, he works for a great price.

You do have the option to do it yourself. If you are using wordpress, you will need to understand how theme files work. If you follow this link, you will find everything that you need to know to start making your own WordPress themes. If you’re still reading you either didn’t care enough to follow the link or you followed the link and you are interested in what I have to say. Either way, I’m still talking.

You know the old adage ”You get what you pay for?” That is true with everything, especially visual medium. Contrary to popular belief, websites are more than just brochures that can be easily updated. They are a way to communicate with a much wider audience than you would otherwise be able to communicate with. Something that a lot of people forget is that communication is a two way street. Communication requires both parties to put forth effort. If you are talking, but nobody is listening, you are not communicating.

When you want a nice website done, just remember that you if you don’t want to pay for it, you don’t have to. But also remember that when you get a free website, you are going to be judged be each of your visitors either consciously or subconsciously. I can’t tell you which is the better option, only you can make the decision

About six months ago, I released a plugin for NaNoWriMo. I haven’t done much with it since it was released, but I need to update it. I’m wanting to add a report card, like the spreadsheet that is floating around. What other options would you want to see in the NaNo Word Count plugin?

I’ve been thinking about myself a lot lately. And I realized that I should lose some weight. As the audience, you are probably guessing what the magic number is that I’m trying to reach, but that doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I’m trying to lose weight and I need a person or group of people to keep me accountable. This is where you come in.

I need the Internet in all of it’s infinite eyes to watch me for everything that I do. I have a few goals that need to be met. The first is that I need to release at least one plugin or theme for WordPress a month. The second is that I need to lose the weight that I mentioned. I’m not going to release any number right now, but I might in the future.

For my first goal, I am going to release a plugin that will allow me to track my second goal. I’m thinking something of a thermometer that you see when schools try to raise money, but instead of going up, it goes down as you lose weight. There will also be other options in there for graphs and stats to see the average weight you lose in a week. If there are any other things that you would like to see, I’m open to suggestions, as usual.

Before I start this, here’s a little disclaimer. I love wordpress and all of the options that it has, but I don’t think that it is a one size fits all solution. When an Internet ignorant person comes to me for a suggestion on how to set up their website, they expect to get some knowledge and wisdom out of me, not the same stuff I give to everybody else. I feel like people are often given wordpress, because that’s what everybody else uses, not because that is what they need. WordPress is great, it has a lot of plugins available, and it is customizable to no end. It also has a lot of things that a small website might not need, such as the ability to blog.

I recently found a CMS called Concrete5 it is a free open source CMS. While templating isn’t as intuitive as wordpress, what the end user sees is simply stunning. It has a feature that I have wanted to see in WordPress for a while now, inline editing. This alone wouldn’t make me change my mind, but everything  on the concrete5 dashboard seems much more intuitive to me.

I know that lot of people have invested a lot of time and money into developing for wordpress, and there is a lot of money available in supporting wordpress. But I also know that designers should be more worried about the end user, than making a quick buck. If you could make your customer happier without using wordpress, why wouldn’t you?

I finally finished my NaNoWriMo word count plugin, you can find it here. I for one think it’s does a pretty good job at what it does. I wrote this plugin, because I noticed that there was a lack of plugins in the word count department that fit my needs. I am planning on doing NaNoWriMo this year, but I wanted to use wordpress as my editor. I found that there was nothing to track my word count on my way to 50,000 words. So, I unveil to you the NANOWRIMO WORD COUNT PLUGIN!!! With this plugin, you can view the titles of all of the posts in a category, see their individual word counts and the total word counts of all of the posts.

You can see this plugin in action on my Table of Contents page.

I’ve been learning a lot about programming, specifically with WordPress in mind. I know the basics of wordpress plugins, but I don’t know where to go from here. I’m currently working on a plugin to use WordPress for NaNoWriMo. I’m looking for other ideas for plugins, though. Is there any functionality that you would like to see that you haven’t been able to get yet? Or is there something that you found that almost does what you want, but not quite?

I’m just learning, but I’m open to new ideas.

SASS is the second greatest thing since sliced bread. With the first being Twitter. It is a beautiful framework for CSS that makes styling faster and easier. Apple users can use it right out of the box, because it is written in Ruby; Windows users will have to do a little bit of work to get it up and running. There is a great tutorial here on getting Sass up and running on your windows computer. Sass follows all of the same rules as CSS, adding nesting and variables (which we all know, and will come to love), but it also adds two killer features called mixins and selector inheritance.

For examples, you can go to the Sass website. I was going to include my own examples, but I got to wrapped up in making sure that everything looked just right. If you want to see an example, i can upload a couple of flies to show you, or I could walk you through what i’m working on at the moment. Right now, I’m just going to highlight why I find Sass to be the second best thing since sliced bread. The things that I am writing about are only the things that I have noticed about Sass, if you find something else of interest, feel free to drop a line in the comments.

It makes styling easier -  If you have ever had to format a menu or a list, you know how annoying it can be to type the class name, the the class name ul, then the class name ul li, then the class name ul li a. With Sass’ implementation of nesting, you have a couple of options for formatting sub elements. If you only need to do it once, you just have indent for your sub elements. But, if you are going to have the same formatting on different subelements throughout your page, you can include those elements in a mixin and call them when you need them.

The one concern that I will express about  nesting is that Sass is white space dependent. One space in the wrong location can bollocks up the whole thing. Something that changes the way you think about CSS is the lack of brackets before/after the styles and the lack of semicolons at the end of a line.

It makes styling faster - With variables and mixins, sass makes styling websites easier, because you don’t have to type the same thing repeatedly. You can assign a variable to a width, color, or you can even use mathematical functions for your variables. This is very useful for those of us that have a tendency to change things quite frequently. With a variable, you can set it once and then call it as many times as you want throughout the document. If you want to change that width, height, or whatever you set the variable to, you just have to change it in one spot instead of hunting through your document for the one line of formatting that you missed.

Mixins are similar to variables, but you can expand on them more. If you wanted a few elements to have the same font, but didn’t want to have the font applied globally, you could create a mixin with the font name, size, line spacing, color and anything else that you wanted to include. Again, if you ever want to change anything that you included in the mixin, you just have to edit it in one spot instead of hunting through the document.

If there is something, such as a global reset or basic styling, that you use in most of your projects, you can write that mixin in a seperate stylesheet, then just call it in all of your new projects so that everything that you do is uniform. You can also find style sheets online of new functions such as CSS3 functions that are prewrittin for you, so you don’t need to remember all of browsers different idiosyncrasies. One example of this is a gradient fill. As far as I know, there are five different ways to use a gradient fill for different browsers. I could remember or look up all of them that I need to use or I could just use a mixin that somebody has already written and tested so that I don’t forget any of them.

It make syling fun again - Do you remember when you first started making web pages and how much fun you had trying out new things? With Sass, you allowed to play again. For the longest time, I found it such a chore to format my web pages, because I was just typing the same thing repeatedly. With Sass, I am allowed to try new thing and find new ways to make my web pages better over all.

Just like any tool, I think that you should know the basics before you start using Sass. If you don’t know the basics of CSS before you start using Sass, you could get into the habit of thinking of Sass as the only way to CSS. But CSS is a language just like any other. If you start off with the shortcuts and you don’t give time to learning CSS, you may never fully understand the language.