The first ever Build conference was held at the Waterfront Studio in Belfast this week, Thursday 5th November. Featuring a truly stellar line up of Tim Van Damme, Andy Budd, Mark Boulton, Ryan Sims, Wilson Miner and the legendary Eric Meyer, Belfast had never seen anything like this.

Much credit has to go to Andy McMillan for pulling this off, with some 300 odd attendees, it put the FOWD tour which recently came to Belfast, firmly in the shadows.

Having attended @media 2009 this year, my 3rd time of going, I can confidently say that Build was better by a mile.  Whether it was fluke or intentional, there was a natural progression through the day as one presentation seemed to follow into the other. From the opening appearance of Tim Van Damme chanting “designers, designers, designers” to the closing call of Eric Meyer announcing “the web has won”, Build brought some really inspirational stuff and will no doubt have a huge impact on every delegate who was fortunate enough to have had a ticket.

The highlight of the day for me was Andy Budd who has got to be the slickest presenter I’ve ever seen. Excellently prepared, informative and entertaining Andy’s talk about seduction techniques on the web was genius. I hope Build release video clips in the not too distant future as this is one that will get plenty of play on my iPod.

With Build 2010 already in the pipeline it’s hard to see how it will top this year. I for one would appreciate a presentation from the very personable standardistas, I’m just sorry I couldn’t attend their workshop. Judging by the amazing buzz at Tweets from Build I have a sneaky feeling Andy McMillan will have less asking to do next year when it comes to speakers and rather will be handling numerous requests to appear!

My main reason for moving to wmpu was because I discovered the buddypress plugin which turns your wmpu site into a social network similiar to Facebook. Installation however turned out to be a real challenge and I was surprised at the complete lack of advice on my issue on the web. My current host is a Windows server. Technically speaking wpmu should install on a Windows server but despite following every piece thrown at me from Twitter to the support forums nothing worked. My host did their best and even though isapi_rewrite was installed I was stuck in an endless loop installing, getting stuck  at an IISPassword error, back to installation again…

So I finally gave in and opened an account with HostGator and sure enough my problems were solved. Next nightmare was figuring out themes and wpmu. Again the documentation was either poor or I was being completely thick, the latter is often unheard of

In Wordpress a theme is simple, install it and your site skin changes. In wpmu/buddypress themes are very different and I will blog this as I’m sure I won’t be the first or last to be baffled. Buddypress basically needs 3 themes. One theme for your home page and any new pages you create, one theme for your member/group pages and another theme for any new users who wish to create their own blog.

So when you install a buddypress theme this should come in two parts, home and members. They’re installed in two separate folders which is a problem for maintenance as you have two sets of images, php and css files to work with. But of course these themes are not much use to a new member who wants to create a blog on your wpmu domain. They aren’t running a buddypress site so they need your standard Wordpress themes installed, enabled and available for selection.

In any case I eventually got there and have enjoyed playing with new widgets and getting to grips with this exciting multi user platform. I’ve now ventured into installing bbpress which is a message board with its own set of themes and plugins! Again this has been fraught with problems. It seems the latest stable install doesn’t play ball with some of the basic plugins/features you’d expect with any decent forum. I’ve uninstalled it and rolled back to version 0.9 but still these plugins aren’t work. Most bizarrely icons aren’t being displayed despite the absolute paths being correct.

It remains to be seen if the site will be a success as most users prefer to hang out at the Matt Goss Forum but while they post reviews and photos I wish they’d make the jump to using gossy.us to setup their own blogs and have their efforts perpetually available to view and be commented on.

Gossy is fan site for my favourite artist Matt Goss. There are a couple of really informative fan sites out there and loads of social networking links but nothing pulls them together. So I created a new Wordpress blog and got working on bringing feeds together to develop a dynamic and easy to manage site.

There were a number of things I learned over the last couple of days that have been invaluable for future projects, whether personal or work related.

As we all know Wordpress has some really great plugins and one which came into play today was HITS – IE6 PNGFix. I’d spent some time trying to fix the transparency issue with pngs in IE6 going the hardcoded route but something wasn’t right. Eventually I thought there must be a plugin for this and hey presto – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/hits-ie6-pngfix/

Another superb plugin is Tubepress. Tubepress lets you integrate videos from YouTube, either using featured, favourites etc or as I did, from a specific user. It comes with a whole host of customisation options called “Tubepress Shortcodes” which basically let you add things from video runtime to opening videos in a jquery style modal window. Fantastic!

During the development I learned of the Facebook fan box facility. As someone who is still relatively new to Facebook it was something I’d never come across before. I never really like using widgets out of the box, preferring to customise so this is something I’d like to revisit and perhaps later blog on, how to write your own css for Fan box.

Gossy is still very much under development. I like to think I have a good eye for design, especially detail but what I realise time and time again is I can’t do both at the same time. So I imagine I’ll eventually sit down and rethink the site layout but in the meantime I’m reasonably pleased with the simple grunge style I employed.

Any Matt Goss fans out there, let me know what you think either here or at gossy.us. Thanks!

1. Firefox scroll jump – there are a number of techniques for enforcing the scroll bar space to appear in Firefox so users don’t see a jump as they navigate from content light to content heavy pages. My preferred option is to set the document height to 101% so Firefox always thinks there’s more, therefore shows an empty scroll bar:

html { height: 101% }

2. Equal table column widths - this is particularly useful on a content managed site where you have many users adding various data tables but you want a one style fits all. To ensure colum widths are always equal just set the following declaration:

table { table-layout: fixed }

3. Style selected text – if a user selects text on your webpage to copy and paste elsewhere, do you know you can style it so it’s not the default navy background, white text?


::selection { background: red; color: white /* Safari and Opera */ }
::-moz-selection { background: red; color: white; /* Firefox */ }

Before I begin let me make a few disclaimers. Firstly I have the utmost respect for Andy Clarke and have had the pleasure of hearing him speak on two occasions. He’s a very articulate, intelligent, funny and lateral thinking kinda guy and a world class speaker. So any opinion I give comes with the addendum, no offence Andy! Secondly I reserve the right to change my mind after this post. I’m not a pig-headed person and if I can be convinced I’m taking nonsense I’ll hold my hands up. Lastly, I don’t pretend to be an authority on any topic but I do have over 8 years experience working in Northern Ireland Government, with a vast range of customers, so I do have many war wounds and t-shirts as evidence.

Ok a healthy discussion has broken out over on Andy’s blog (I prefer to call him Malarkey having known him from accessifyforum.com for some time) with many people supporting the notion of a stylesheet for IE6 users.

If you haven’t read the article I suggest you do so but in a nutshell my taking on it is that Malarkey is encouraging developers to stop supporting IE6, where possible, by spending large amounts of time on bug fixes, css hacks, javascript/jquery patches etc. I think he’s largely getting at sites which are content driven, which lets face it most are. So to clarify I would suggest the notion is sites which aren’t big on design but big on focused content.

I feel this article could prove very damaging and needs to spell out more clearly what needs to be considered before implementing any kinda of ready made css framework for IE6.

I’ve harped on in the comments about browser stats as this is the first thing you need to consider. For example, if you have a personal blog which is mainly read by developers, it’s likely the vast majority of us nerds will be using Firefox 3 or Safari 4 for Windows. We like to show off with our nice new n shiny browser. Therefore if you serve up a dumbed down version of the blog for the odd IE6 user, does it really matter? No.

However, if you are building a site for a national company, have looked at their browser stats which tell you that 6% of their visitors use IE6, then should you continue to treat those users in the same manner? Absolutely not. To do so could prove very damaging for the company. Why? Because in these instances image is everything. Usually these type of sites are content heavy, navigation is important therefore CSS is important in order to style the site, improving usability, readability and comprehension.

There seems to be a real hate campaign at the moment against IE6 which may have some valid points but doesn’t address what is often reality. That is that users either LIKE IE6 or that they are unable to upgrade. So with that in mind go easy on the IE6 user, sure encourage them to upgrade but don’t treat them as second class citizens.

Due consideration needs to be given to your potential audience before considering adoption of universal ie6 css. I recently developed www.nidirect.gov.uk and as a baseline tested it in Firefox 3, IE6 and IE7 before going any further with it. Over the last day browser stats tell me that 80% of visitors to the site have been using IE, 31% of which are using IE6. That’s a sizeable chunk and not one I’m going to ignore. Have a look at NIDirect, just how usable would it be with little styling?

Perhaps I’m slightly blindsided working in Government. We have developed our own set of strict standards and still develop for IE6, working on the premise that the market share is still sufficient, not to mention most civl servants have IE6 on their desktop. Time taken to develop for IE6 is just part of my job and an ethos I carry through to any personal work I do because I believe in working to the highest standards possible. Perhaps if I ran a private business where my developers where developing IE6 was costing me money I might have a different viewpoint.

The point still remains though, this should not be looked upon as a universal solution, its an on-the-odd-occasion solution. Please approach with caution.