Miralize v9 : Merry Christmas

Hey folks, hope you’re all having great holidays. I definitely am, especially now that Miralize version 9 is released. Yes, the same “Miralize v9″ that I’ve been tweeting about since late September. And the same one I have posted images about. The reason for the extremely long delay was because of college, and the business with others.

Ugly Blog Design

Not so much a factor now, but dozens of blogs that have great content dont deserve the awful aesthetics that they are encased in. I read dozens of blogs a day and when I visit some of it makes me want to click right back out again. Its a pity because with the amount of skilled designers out there creating amazing pieces of XHTML art, it doesn’t have to be like this. There are free themes to cater for anyone, for any platform, and to fit any type of content.

Too often do I look at a blog and after a glance say to myself that I wont return primarily due to the horrid design before me. Some may call it shallow, others may feel the same. And I’m not saying mine is better than anyone else’s or saying mine is good. But there is a limit to how much crap I can take.

Create a Tweet This Button with Shortened URLs

Because micro-blogging services like Twitter have a character limit of 140 characters, it is paramount that you shorten your links as much as possible. WordPress does not do this natively but that does not mean that it is difficult. We can include our code in the functions page for an easy,  repetivitve action. You can see an example of how it looks below this post. Is.gd probably outputs the shortest links, but you can use most other url shortners for this tutorial. Open your templates functions.php and include the following code.

function getTinyUrl($url) {
  $tinyurl = file_get_contents("http://is.gd/api.php?longurl=".$url);
  return $tinyurl;
}

What this code means is that we create new function called “createTinyLink” and allow a parameter of “$url” to be grabbed so it can be convereted into a tinyURL. Then we create a new variable called “$tinylink” and let that equal to the contents of the function on the is.gd website. I got that link from here. But you could also use Bit.ly or Tinyurl just as simply. The code then returns the contents into where we want it displayed.

After this we go into the single.php (or any page) and enter in:

Tweet this

This creates a link that says Tweet this and the url will be a link to Twitter.com that can update your status with Currently Reading : [The title of the post] and the shortened link to the article.

There you have it extremely easy and very cool addition to your blog, without slowing it down with a million plugins.

Best Designs Of The Week 1

Every week I’m gonna post 10 or so amazing design finds. Contrary to what you may think, this is for both you and me. This way I can archive the sites I like and look back on them when I have a creative block. But mostly it’s to show some really cool designs to the people who read this blog. So enjoy!

Made By On

Edenbee

R U 4 Children

Base 6 Design

Insic Designs

Havoc Inspired

Echo Brand Design

Jan Pivonka

Atebits

JukeBook

If you want to be included in next weeks collection, please leave a comment or use the contact form.

And remember, please subscribe to my RSS feed

100 Amazing Design Blogs To Subscribe To

It is important as a designer, to build a good collection of resources for constant inspiration. That’s why I subscribe to over 100 feeds all in different areas of design, to gain see a wide spectrum of knowledge. My RSS reader of choice used to be Google Reader, but more recently I’ve been using the Firefox addon Feedly , which extends Google Reader’s capabilities and adds Twitter and FriendFeed integration.

Here I will list over a 100 blogs for you to subscribe to, but also I will give a link to download all the URLs so they can be easily imported into Google Reader.