Have you ever been totally immersed in a culture where the language is totally different than yours and you’ve had to learn it on the job?

My buddy Nik, from Russia, came to America and had to learn English as he was starting a job to be a kayak guide…a job that is 90% communication. I know some of my co-workers were getting frustrated with the communication gap, but this guy learned English, in my opinion, at an amazing rate & was able to communicate with co-workers and customers pretty darn well in the first 3 weeks.

So, here I am, 3 weeks into Zend Framework, a PHP Framework, and I feel like pulling my hair out. PHP is a language that helps computers talk to servers, and the best way to explain a Framework is to relate frameworks to dialects. In the south, we use y’all, ain’t & a’ight to package multi-word phrases into single words. Frameworks are the same way. Someone takes the original language and packages it to make it easier to use.

Here’s my real rub with creators of frameworks (and dialects for that matter): There’s rarely a Codex (or in depth guide on how to use them) and the ones that exist make a lot of assumptions, and don’t help users get to the core of working with them.

When I jumped into WordPress, which is a Framework of PHP, there was SO much to learn, but it’s documented so well, that you find yourself getting deeper and deeper into the framework because you want to.

I’ve found that the Zend Framework documentation leaves out variables that should be declared, leaves out some semi-colons (which as a programmer you should know to use) and doesn’t comment out the code it’s sharing.

It’s like my friend Nik coming to the US, me telling him to say, “Give water”, when he really wants to say, “Can you please give me some water?” and expecting him to be able to say it to a waitress at a restaurant without the waitress getting totally insulted.

Where’s the user-experience? The end user is who ANYTHING you produce a framework, product or website for, so why, as a developer, would you make it SO stinking hard for someone who understands the “native” language to use your framework?

So there it is. If you’re creating a framework, working on code that someone else is going to have to work with later, or expect to have to bring someone up to speed on a project you’re working on, make sure you comment out your code, create detailed documentation or give a Codex under the assumption that the people using it have never worked with a framework or at least, have never worked with your framework.

What do you think: Is it important to make sure documentation is accurate, detailed and robust?

Why Your Post Titles Can’t Suck

You know the saying: Don’t judge a book by it’s cover.

People don’t say it so we’ll focus on the content, but because we’re so easily drawn by first impressions (the cover). We constantly make assessments based on first encounters (what you see, hear or smell…that’s right, I said smell).

And it’s said so much for one simple reason: Because we do it…all the time.

It’s a part of our nature that we make long-term judgements about people, places and things based on our first encounter. Guess where else this holds true? Your post titles.

This is huge, because you can get a very elemental glimpse into what you’re dealing with as blogger who’s trying to optimize your blog for search engines and ultimately, people.

When someone finds you for a term on a search engine, your post’s title is your blog’s first impression on that searcher. It’s the difference between if they ramble past or decide they want to jump into a “dating period” with your blog.

So what makes an undeniable blog post title?

My Secret Weapon to Great Post Titles

Every time I write a post, I start by using a post brainstorming worksheet, where I write a brief description of what the post is about, what keywords seem relevant & what the important takeaways need to be. Only after I’ve finished my post do I decide on my title.

That may be a huge paradigm shift for a lot of people, but it’s worth it. Think about it, you can write whatever you’d like, without being confined to a title (which often leads to putting it off) and later come up with a golden title that wraps your killer content in a beautiful, appealing package that people can’t wait to open!

The Alchemy of Post Titles

Your titles need to be little, golden nuggets that searchers’ immediately look at and say, ‘Ah, I’d be stupid not to check this out!’

So let’s get started changing lead into gold.

The first step is to make sure your description still matches your post content. For this particular post, my brief description was this:

“Why you have to have good post titles & what they should look like.”

Next, you need to take your relevant keywords and figure out which ones are most relevant:

“blogging, post titles, google search results, human behavior optimization”

With this post, I’m most concerned with post titles and search results, but I want to make sure when an actual person encounters it, that they pick it. I could have written the most amazing blog post ever, but if my post title doesn’t help searchers (not to mention your readers from social media channels) latch on, your content is just white noise.

That’s it. I know you’re saying, ‘That’s it?!’ but it’s really that simple. You need to capture the search engine with relevant keywords and searchers with clean, easy to read titles.

I’d love to hear what post titles you’ve read lately that captured you the most. Did you find them on Google or a social platform? How’d it capture you?

If you’re trying to use Simply Typekit: A WordPress Plugin, you need to have your Typekit ID. Finding it is a simple 3 step process.

Step 1: Launch the Kit Editor

Once you’ve logged in to your Typekit account, in the top right corner you’ll see a green button that says Launch Kit Editor. Click this and it will take you to your kit editor.

Step 2: Open the Embed Code Pane

Now that you’re in your kit editor, in the top right corner of this page you’ll click the link that says Embed Code.

Step 3: Copy the Typekit ID

In the bottom right corner of the Embed Pane, you’ll see a 6 to 7 digit code that you want to copy, this is your Typekit ID.

So there you have it, simple as 1-2-3, typekit ID!

Don’t forget to check out the Simply Typekit: A WordPress Plugin, the easiest way to integrate Typekit into your WordPress blog or site!

SEO.

It’s one of those terms that “experts” and news anchors have perverted so badly that a lot of really smart people list it with Astrophysics and Quantum Mechanics. It’s gotten so bad that most bloggers don’t want to do it, think it’s so unattainable it’s not worth it or even worse, buy into the “GET SEO’ed fast!” schemes.

Well, I’ve got a news flash for you, Walter Cronkite, SEO is really simple.

If you have a website now, odds are you’ve got a lot of simple, quick tweaks that can be made to help you get bumped up in search rankings but more importantly, that can make your site’s result the one searchers choose when Googling for widgets, decoder rings or whatever it is that you want to get found for.

What SEO IS: Start With A Blank Slate

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is essentially a tool belt of techniques, practices and structure that make your site get picked up by search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Dogpile. (That’s right, I said Dogpile. If you google “search engine” guess who comes up first?)

There’s a secret twist to SEO, however.

An Experiment in Human Behavior

Take off your “Learning SEO hat” and try Googling something you are interested in, right now. Try to behave as if you were just googling something and not as if you were trying to be an SEO expert.

What results did you want to go to? Was it the very top result? If not, why? What drove you to decide, “I want to go to this page” from the list you had?

You’ll probably find that you didn’t go to the first result, but to the result that looked most appealing to you. It’s a lot like going to the grocery store to buy fruit. You don’t normally just grab the first apple you see, you go through the “results” and pick what looks tastiest, right?

THAT is Search Engine Optimization, getting found by search engines and getting picked by humans.

Stepping into the jungle of SEO

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to systematically guide you into making your website or blog an elite, unstoppable choice for search engines and searchers.

To get started, there are a few objectives I want you to “complete”. They’re not going to make your website get found, but they will give you a window into what kind of progress your making, as well as show you anything you might need to check on as we go along.

This Week’s SEO Assignment

• Setup a Google Analytics account for your blog or website and make sure your Google Analytics are actively collecting data.
• Setup a Google Webmasters account and make sure it’s catching your website.

Be sure to share your website’s url and name in the comments so other readers can follow your progress!

In the next article we’re going to cover what makes great page titles, the kind searchers pick everytime.

Web Safe Fonts are exactly what they sound like: Fonts that are safe to use on the web.

But what does that mean, exactly? It means that if you don’t use one of the following fonts (or a Web Font Replacement Kit), it’s likely that most people won’t be able to see your site or blog in the font you intended for them to see.

Here’s a list of web-safe fonts and what they look like:

Serif

• Serif
• Georgia
• Palatino Linotype
• Book Antiqua
• Palatino
• Times New Roman
• Times

Sans-Serif

• Sans-serif
• Arial
• Arial Black
• Helvetica
• Tahoma
• Trebuchet MS
• Verdana
• Geneva
• MS Sans Serif
• Gadget
• Impact
• Lucida Grande

Monospace

• Lucida Console
• Courier New
• Monaco
• Monospace

Advances in Web Typography

There are some really great products out there that make it so you can have the freedom to use any font you’d like and have most people (anyone with a current browser) see it. Companies like Google, Font-Squirrel, Cufon and my favorite, Typekit, are helping to get the web font out of the 1.0 dark ages.

I always suggest that even if you’re utilizing font-replacement, that in your stylesheets you create a fall back font that is web-safe. This way you can be sure that even if your Replacement Kit fails, YOU know what your viewer will see.

What fonts would you like to see come to the visual web?

I’m going to make my first WordPress video to:

• Give you guys an idea of what my teaching style is like.
• See if I can even do videos.
• Give you a little something to enjoy and learn from.

A few examples I was thinking of:

• How to activate a new theme in WordPress
• An overview of using and implementing widgets in WordPress
• An overview of what a variable is and how they work

With that, what one topic/idea/lesson on web development, WordPress or web technologies would you like to learn?

As many of you have probably heard, I am now officially a part of the team at Rock, Paper, Scissors, a Creative Communications Firm in Downtown Lawrenceville, GA!

I started Monday and just in the past two days I’ve learned so much that, as Tom Moradpour would say, my brain’s at 11.

I wanted to take a few minutes to answer some questions that I’ve gotten from various people here, just to make sure that I get it all covered and to keep from answering the same question multiple times.

What’s happening with your current clients?
If you’re a client that I was working with as RCA Labs, no worries, everything stays the same and I’m going to continue working with you as RCA Labs. The folks over at Rock, Paper, Scissors (RPS) have been gracious enough to let me keep my current client base and pick up new clients.

What are your hours like?
I’m planning on being at RPS from 8:30 to 4:30 Monday through Friday. That’s 5 days a week. I think I miscommunicated to some people that I was working 3 days a week, and even though I’d love to only work 3 days a week, it’s not the case…yet.

What are you doing over there?
I’m pretty much doing all sorts of stuff. For right now my biggest responsibility is website maintenance, development, SEO and a little on the Social Media side of things…definitely hoping to push on the edges of the internet and see if we can break it.

What about Cofer/Adams Building Center?
They’ve been gracious enough to also keep me on call for any technology questions, certain web project and of course, I’m hoping to take my old boss to lunch and go on some adventures with him and his wife.

Twitter?
I’m not leaving, but I’m probably going to be reducing the nuclear-ity of my tweeting. I’ll also probably be tweeting as RPS now and again, and you can bet there’s going to be some real nuggets there.

What about RCA Labs? What are you going to do with it?
I’m hoping to blog more, have a lot more goodies for folks and of course, the web courses are slated for the next few months. Be on the look out for some free technology learning courses and in the future some paid courses with office hours!

I think that about covers the transition, if you have any questions, give me a call or e-mail me at chase@rcalabs.com.

Cheers,
Chase

The ghost margin. That’s what I’ve dubbed it.

You may notice, if you are a web developer, that your themes have a 28 pixel margin on top sometimes and other times it’s gone. What the heck, right? Isn’t that the most inconsistent thing you’ve ever heard of?

Here’s the real rub: It’s not because of anything you did.

The WordPress 3.1 release came with a new update, the wpadminbar a useful tool for managing your WordPress administration panel without having to go to your WordPress Dashboard to add new posts, approve comments or manage your Widgets.

The problem is that, for local developers, the bar doesn’t show up, but that pesky margin is still there, and can leave you scratching your head and working hours into the night trying to figure it out.

So what are you Options?

• Knowledge is half the battle. Knowing it’s there is enough to keep you from pulling your hair out trying to figure out how to fix the rogue margin.
• Disable that sucker. When you’re logged into your WordPress backend, click Users, select your username and in your Profile options you’ll see a section like this:
  
• Disable the Admin Bar for everyone. Yoast wrote a post on how to disable the Admin Bar for everyone, which is great for WordPress sites with more than one user.

Hope this was a helpful tip & let you take a breath of relief.

As a photographer, you’re going to find yourself in situations where you want to share your photos, but don’t want people to be able to just print them or claim them as their own. Even though there are a lot of ways to watermark images, this is the one that I’ve found to work the best for me.

Finished Result:

Creating Your [Water]Mark

Step 1: Add Your Logo

Open an image you want to work with and grab a single toned, white vector of your logo. If you don’t have a logo, or don’t have it as a vector, it’s okay, just type your name in white and place it over the top of your image.

Quick Tip: Don’t use a copyright symbol or a generic word, use your name, better yet, your logo. That’ll make it undeniably yours and look good at the same time.

Step 2: See It Through

With the Logo layer selected, find the drop menu in your layer palette that says, Normal. Click on the drop menu and select Overlay to give the logo a “see through” feel, and allowing the viewer to see the entire image more clearly.

Now change the Logo Layer‘s opacity to 70% & the fill to 35%. If you’re wondering why we didn’t just change the opacity to a lower number and leave the fill, opacity changes the opacity of the layer as a whole (effects and layer) whereas fill only changes the opacity of the layer image, not the effect. It’ll make more sense in step 4. If you can scarcely see the logo, you’re doing great.

Step 4: Give It Some Shadow

The last little tweak we’re going to add is an inner shadow. Right click (ctrl + click on Mac) the Logo layer and select Blending Options. Inside of Blending Options, select Inner Shadow, change Distance to 1 & Size to 1.

When you look at your image now, your watermark should be very faint, with a noticeable, yet not overwhelming shadow. The shadow would have been very hard to see if we’d have reduced the opacity to 35%, however, since we reduced the opacity to 70%, the shadow is only slightly hidden, and the logo itself is very faint, achieving a really nice water mark.

Finished Product Again:

Have an image that you watermarked and want to showcase it? Share a link in the comments section!

This is my very first video roundup and depending on if a lot of people enjoy it, I’ll figure out whether it’ll be a weekly or biweekly thing. Enjoy!

Canon Pixma Sound Sculptures

My brother-in-law, Jonny Rickwald, stumbled onto this video. It’s an amazing project collaboration between Dentsu London, a creative communication agency, and Linden Gledhill, a biochemist/photographer, for Canon’s Pixma Color printer line.

This video is a collection of ‘sound sculptures’. They laid paint over a balloon membrane stretched over a speaker, and the paint jumps in reaction to the sound waves.

If you’re interested in a “The Making of” of the Sound Sculpture video, check this out:

The Cyclotrope

Created by Tim Wheatley, a British animator, this stunning video is a bicycle wheel, fitted with 18 images that is spun at a rate that the camera filming actually convinces the viewer that they’re watching an animation.

A Brief Introduction to Genetics

Having taken Genetics, I can attest to the fact that for the most part it’s hard to visualize or remember most of the information that I was learning. David Murawsky did a beautiful job of taking the 101 part of Genetics and wrapping it into a well-packaged infographic styled video.

Cadbury Eyebrows

And last but not least, a little something from the archives…I’m not even going to try to explain it.

What videos did you watch this week that you think should be featured in next week’s roundup?