On Monday I became the third employee of H1, a small, family owned web agency based in Helsinki, Finland. Aki and his wife Jaana are both very experienced web professionals, and I’m proud to be working with them. Looking forward to an interesting time!
Tag Archives: wordpress
The latest WordPress 3.3 includes a fix that removes the performance problems related to using just /%postname%/ as your permalink structure without any prefixing dates/numbers. According to Joost de Valk, using dates in URL’s can result in poor click-through-rate, so I thought I’d go ahead and make the switch.
Check out the instructions on Joost’s blog. He also has a nifty tool for generating the necessary .htaccess redirects.
Solid, semantic and accessible HTML markup matters. When most people look at a web page, it doesn’t make much difference to them whether headings are coded with proper <h1> and <h1> tags or <span style="font-size: 20px">. Still, for someone using a screen reader, not to mention search engines and feed readers, it can make all the difference in making sense of a document. Luckily this specific issue is now rare, but in a world of plugins and cool themes that generate semi-adequate markup, we’re often not using HTML and CSS to their full potential in building solid, accessible and search engine friendly sites.
By we I mean me of course. WordPress is awesome, and it’s one of the few CMS’s around that has committed to accessibility on the admin end (I’m not saying it couldn’t be improved). Unfortunately tight schedules and the very fact that its so easy to whip up a site using a few plugins and occasionally ready-made themes means its very tempting to be lazy.
So here goes: I hereby promise to continue to build usable sites, with a renewed commitment to good semantic and accessible markup. Because the web should be for everyone (and there’s nothing like some sweet, elegant HTML is there?).
I’ve switched over to using the WordPress Multi-lingual (WPML) plugin for translating my posts. Because of this change, the default front page of my site will now show only posts in English, with Finnish posts at http://danielkoskinen.com/fi/.
The reason I finally went the plugin route was to better allow for translating non-blog content such as my About page, Portfolio etc. The WPML plugin went commercial recently to allow for better customer support and development resources. They also split all the extra CMS features into separate, smaller plugins, which is smart for those only needing the basic blog features. Check it out at wpml.org (affiliate link).
Check your feeds
You might want to update your feeds, if you’re reading this via a feed reader. Occasionally I might write the same post in both languages, so to avoid duplicate content you can subscribe to the appropriate feed.
English only: http://feeds.feedburner.com/danielkoskinen_en
Finnish only: http://feeds.feedburner.com/danielkoskinen_fi
All posts: http://feeds.feedburner.com/danielkoskinen
I spent the last weekend in Manchester at WordCamp UK and had a wonderful time! I went with my colleague Markus from Ponsi Interactive, who has now been officially initiated to the wonderful world of WordPress. The sessions over the two-day “informal gathering” included general stuff about using WordPress in different contexts, but also really interesting ones discussing more advanced topics such as BuddyPress theme & plugin development and testing strategies for WordPress.
Meeting the stars
Summarising all the discussions I had during the weekend would be pretty hard, so I’m not going to try. Many non-profits in the UK are finding WordPress well-suited for their purposes, and I had lunch on Sunday with some of the many designers and developers working in that sector. It was interesting to hear their stories, having also done some sites for non-profits in Finland. Probably the biggest thing for me though was the chance to have a chat with some of the WordPress key figures, notably Nikolay Bachiysky (core committer involved in localization, and developer of GlotPress, the invaluable translation tool for non-english-natives) and WordPress UX and community person Jane Wells. There’s something really cool about meeting two people who on one hand, have made it easy to distribute the very laborious job of translating the WP interface, and on the other hand had a huge influence on transforming the admin interface into the sleek thing it is today.
WordCamp Finland?
Jane gave us some good tips on organising a WordCamp in Finland, which might still be some way off. The community in Finland is still making baby steps, but we’ll get there someday. A good point made was to start small with regular meetups, and then perhaps start to build up a group who might be interested in organising and, above all, attending a bigger event. I’m pretty sure though that there are plenty of interested parties, we just have to dig them out of their holes. To Finns reading this: do join the Finnish WordPress forums … (<em>In Finnish</em>: suomalaiset seuratkaa WordPress foorumeita)
Thank you Manchester!
Manchester was a great place for the event, and we got to see some night life too. Big thanks to the organisers and everyone else I had a chance to talk to, maybe will come back next year!