AdvisorBits

Astute readers and some Movable Type users will notice that AdvisorBits is now published using version 3.1. They have added some spiffy new blogging features at the same time that I had been thinking about making some changes around here. (There has been at least one post in each of the last 21 months, AdvisorBits is almost 2 years old!)

Over the years I have helped a lot of web designers get their start, and one piece of advice I have consistently given is that a site should never be published "Under Construction..." The reason for this advice is simple: Today's information scavenging users never come back to a site that doesn't have anything to offer them.

I am about to break my own rule. This blog is under radical reconstruction.

Starting with a redefinition of "What it is." Most definitions note that it comes from a conjunction of the words Web and Log. Any basic and generic description would include verbiage about posts, or nodes. A post or a node of information. Like little bits of advice.

Before you is the basic unit of a blog. Stripped naked of its style, with only the information remaining.

In the days to come, for the second anniversary of AdvisorBits, I will rebuild this blog from the ground up with explanations of the process at each step along the way. Readers, clients, and friends are invited to join the process through posting comments, which in turn will become a part of the information node.

I plan to discuss the following:

Information Architecture

This is a buzz word phrase at the time of this writing. I went to architecture school, and I didn't learn a thing about building. (I later worked for an architect in order to learn this... a little.)

These days a lot of web designers, and a few people legitimately dedicated to the study and exploration of this discipline, organize data into some kind of structure which they then refer to as Information Architecture.

How do we organize data into information on a web site? AdvisorBits will serve as an guinea pig.

Content and (separately) Presentation

And what about document structure?

In order to effectively design and deploy web sites, there are a number of reasons to separate style from substance. I will examine these reasons, and provide information on standards. We'll also look lightly at the absurdity of our purist tendancies to conform rigidly to the standards.

I hope the new improved Advisorbits will be interesting and helpful to my readers and clients; one way you can point me in the right direction is to comment on this post. Let me know what your biggest questions are about the whole process of web design for small businesses.

Over the past few days if you glanced at AdvisorBits and refreshed your broswers, you might have seen me working on the layout. I still want to do somethings with the type and there are a lot of other pages to repair. To say nothing of the pages I have to create because of the new navitgation system.

I've included a selection of recent images from my PhotoBlog courtesy of the MultiBlog plugin for MT, by David Raynes.

Listamatic was super helpful in supplying ideas and code for the main navigation list at the top of the page. I'm sure I'll use it as I fix up the links on the right side of the page.

If you like the new colors you can thank {style:phreak;}, I used his fancy color picker. If you don't like them I guess you can blame me, I stopped spinning the dials on the color picker when I saw some combinations that I liked. I think I will be using Eric Meyers' color blender for some button colors soon. You might want to bookmark those two for your own use if you design web pages in color.

You won't read this until a few days after I post it, but after a slight hiatus AdvisorBits is back. The databases that drive AdvisorBits were temporarily lost, and so the site has been in a state of stagnation for over a month. The databases were restored due mostly to the efforts of my sister, I was too mortified by their loss to speak of the matter for a few days, much less to fix things. (She just got a contract with WebMD, but if anyone needs an experienced professional technical editor I think she may be available again in about 6 months.) The last touches are being put on the new templates and we will rebuild the site in public within a few days.

Thanks for your patience.

The server where Advisorbits is hosted was recently rebuilt, which is to say, it got a new operating system and hard drives. It has served me well for years. But like everything else, time changes the network environment. When I first deployed the server, there was little SPAM. And in my niavete' I was hoping not to have to deal with mail services... which any hosting provider can tell you is part of the package. I barely knew what a blog was (though not by that name) and certainly had never dreamed of comment SPAM.

Those days are gone.

You may have noticed a little new life has been put into the Advisor Bits Regional Web Directory, and I just used the new Feeds.lite widget to put the last five listings on the front page. (At the top of the right column on the front page.)

Carol Hargis who also works with JSW4.NET has recently been adding new links to businesses and organizations in Chatham NY.

I'm making some design changes at AdvisorBits. And the first step is to get naked. I love to have a reason to say GET NAKED, naked is a great word. By GET NAKED I mean that I am going to shed the CSS for a while.

But you needn't fear, my good friend Jesse is going to help me get things decent again.

Trackbacks are gone. Too much surface area for attack. The ratio of value to abuse was almost none, on this blog. (YMMV)

Comments are less hidden. Previous indexes did not indicate comments if there were none, which may have lead people to believe this I didn't encourage comments. I do.

Subscription will be via FeedBurner, and I'll be sharing my Del.ico.us bookmarks with you. (Oooo how Web 2.0 am I?)

I have not had many posts in AdvisorBits recently, and its not because I've been slacking off either. This time of year always has me busy in the yard preparing for my annual Garden Party. And this year, I'm working on a web project with my old friends Guy R Leo and Jesse Gardner that could turn out quite nicely.

I'm also preparing for something a little different this year.

A few months ago, I had a blogroll on this blog. A blogroll is the list of the blogs I read every day. I had some sample code (that turns out to have been broken), and when I updated the blog the last time, that stuff disappeared somehow anyway. (Ooops.)

June being what it is for me this year, I was on my way out the door this afternoon, to make it to an appointment that I inexplicably (and inexcusably) missed yesterday when my friend Eric called to task for a couple minutes of help implementing my instructions. (Did I mention they were broken?)

Well, the list of blogs I read everyday, is at Bloglines. (Which I use to keep up to date with my feeds.) So wouldn't you know they got a little snip of JavaScript you can put into your Index Template, and it will magically render your Bloglines folder hierarchy in the side bar.

If you have a Bloglines account, you can do this too. Go to Home page and click on Share. This will take you to a wizard that generates the HTML you can paste into your MT Index Template.

And now you know what I read every day.