This site’s current design sucks when it comes to showcasing new comments, so in the meanwhile here’s Matt clarifying on a old post about whether Gravatar slows down page load speed and hurt search engine rankings:

…Gravatars (or any images) aren’t going to hurt you in the Google rankings or we would have seen a massive drop-off in traffic on WP.com.

True, because as far as I know page load speed isn’t taken into account yet. And when it is, Gravatars will be just one of the many other factors that influence load speed anyway.

Nowadays pretty much everybody is using pretty permalinks while also using the much shorter url.com?p=page_id format for the short URL of the same post, usually on Twitter. You can also use the various URL shortening services, of course, but Zeldman’s article explains why it’s good to roll your own short URL:

Rolling your own mini-URLs lessens the chance that your carefully cultivated links will rot if the third-party URL shortening site goes down or goes out of business

This post will show you a few more unique keywords (not just “p”) that you can use to shorten your URL with WordPress. You don’t need to do anything to get these keywords to work; they’re available to any WordPress install and will still work regardless of your Permalinks setting.

p

Links to a certain Post / Page.

Usage: url.com/?p=(Post or Page’s ID)
Example: wplover.com?p=1426

m

Either links to Posts from an entire year or an entire month.

Usage:

• To link to a certain month’s Posts: url.com/?p=(YYYYMM)
• To link to a certain year’s Posts: url.com/?p=(YYYY)

Example:

cat

Links to Posts from a certain category.

Usage: url.com/?cat=(Category ID)
Example: wplover.com?cat=3

tag

Links to Posts tagged with a certain tag. Note that you use slug instead of ID here.

Usage: url.com/?tag=(Tag slug)
Example: wplover.com?tag=awesome

s

Links to search results for your supplied keyword.

Usage: url.com/?s=(Keyword)
Example: wplover.com?s=design

Any other short URL keyword I missed?

Sounds silly, I know, but here’s a nice quote on “Great products are triumphs of taste” by 37signals:

Want to build a great iPhone app? Go listen to Billie Holliday. Trying to design a piece of hardware? Visit a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Aiming to write great marketing copy? Read Aldous Huxley. Need a color scheme? Go to the museum and check out some Mark Rothko paintings.

So. Super Mario Bros.

Read more →

I’ve talked about this on WPTavern before, but Leland’s tweet made me feel that we should talk about this more.

Remember when LogoMaid ripped of Dan Cederholm’s logo? Everybody pretty much agreed that that was illegal. And so imagine my surprise knowing that there are WordPress themes that are direct copies of Twitter, of Facebook, of Basecamp, and what have you. Heck, we even have a theme describing itself as “The exact Facebook clone theme for Wordpress” in the official Theme Directory. This I believe is a case worse than the LogoMaid issue.

Please stop this. The freedom in GPL does not mean the freedom to steal copyrighted design. Stop making clones of popular websites and turning them into WordPress themes. It doesn’t matter if you release it only for personal use, or under GPL, if you code the CSS yourself, if you painstakingly recreate the graphic elements in Photoshop. It’s still, as Ryan Hellyer puts it, “illegal, immoral, and unethical.”

Instead of doing that, go and read this article by Cameron Moll, “Good Designers Copy, Great Designers Steal“, and learn how to “steal” a design in a much better (and ethical) way. Learn what makes them work, and improve it:

This article wouldn’t be complete without a warning to be careful when copying well-known sources. If I were to summarize this warning in one sentence, this would be my golden verbiage: copy the inspiration, not the outcome.

Or teach us. Write an article on how you do that AJAX load more posts wizardry. Or how to make that rounded corner work on every browser. Show us how to recreate your favorite website’s cool feature in WordPress.

Now that will be awesome.

Update: Another discussion is up at Theme Lab, WordPress Clone Themes – Your Take?

A question: how do you guys keep track of sites that use your theme?

I find that Google’s Webmaster Tools show links to my site, including those from the link on the footer area of my themes, but its update can be quite slow and incomplete.

What about you guys?

It all began with Darren Hoyt’s tweet:

interesting new question over at WPQ courtesy of @jophillips, any ideas? – http://bit.ly/7NOEl3

The particular question was about adding an “old” or “new” class for a listed Links based on whether the Link is inserted less/more than 31 days from now.

Curious, I dug around the Codex and into the core files. I began to think about filtering wp_list_bookmarks. Tabs upon tabs were opened, lines of code tested. Finished, I logged in into my WPQuestions account and opened the page again.

Amazingly, the question was already solved (this is only a couple hours after Darren linked to it), and there I saw two different solutions, both solved the problem with a short and easy to understand piece of code. One of it involved editing core file, which generally is undesirable, but both codes were undeniably elegant and to-the-point.

Continue reading this entry →

The way I see it, designing and developing a theme is part of web design in general, and it’s only going to make our themes much, much better in quality if we keep on sharpening our design skill. Sure, it’s important to learn how to code and hack a feature into our theme, but having a good understanding of design is an equally necessary part.

I’m sure we don’t have to worry about the quantity of currently available WordPress themes; but the quality? That’s the kind of improvement I’d like to see in our community, so let’s do this, guys.

Style versus Design. Here, Jeffrey Zeldman explains the importance of looking beyond just focusing on eye candy:

Design communicates on every level. It tells you where you are, cues you to what you can do, and facilitates the doing. Style is tautological; it communicates stylishness. In visual terms, style is an aspect of design; in commercial terms, style can communicate brand attributes.

Learn About Design, Not Making Things Pretty. A short article that will teach us to always question “why” we put a particular element in our design, why we do things this way and not that way, and so on.

You Are Not A Designer And I Am Not A Musician. This is an eye-opening article about the state of web design. The original article was written two years ago and see how little have changed since that time.

4 Principles of Good Design for Websites. The four principles are Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity, explained clearly with examples.

How to Make Your Web Design Stand out from the Crowd. 3 ways to make your site stand out from the crowd. 3 Powerful Ways To Make Typography Talk On Your Website. These three articles are part inspirational, part practical guides on web design.

Those are some articles that I believed all worth reading and learning. Do you have any recommended articles to share?