DustinsDesign.com

The 10 Types of Bloggers

Dustin — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 05:48:22 +0000

Having spent my fair share of time perusing the blogosphere I have come up with the following ‘types’ of bloggers. Every blog should be able to fit into one or more of these categories.

What kind of blogger do you want to be?

#1 The Guide - Not much original content but provides a resource by bringing info on a topic together in one place.

Upside: Can become a great resource by organizing information in new ways.
Downside: Runs the risk of becoming a repeater (below).

#2 The Expert - A guru in their topic of interest.

Upside: Readers flock to the expert in aspiration of greatness, answers to tough questions or to just stay informed.
Downside: Delusions of grandeur. Some ‘experts’ think a little more of themselves than others do.

#3 The Journalist - Provides topical news with insight where appropriate.

Upside: Just like the offline variety, blog journalists can become a reputable source of information.
Downside: Be careful of spin - unless its part of what makes your blog!

#4 The Muse - Gets readers to think about something in a new way.

Upside: Bloggers with true insight into a topic will find much success.
Downside: True insight is very rare. Unfortunately passionate rants are more common.

#5 The Reviewer - Writes reviews on the latest and greatest.

Upside: People are always curious about others opinions before they buy. Often they will read many reviews before making a decision.
Downside: A lot of competition; especially in popular items.

#6 The Narcissist - All about themselves, readers be damned!

Upside: This sort of self obsession can be entertaining.
Downside: The entertainment gets old very quickly due to lack of new material.

#7 The Rambler - Uses personality and wit rather than content to entertain readers.

Upside: There are some truly entertaining people out there. A rambler’s blog can be a fun pastime.
Downside: Getting long winded or going on a rant gets old.

#8 The Repeater - Is there an echo in here? Repeats content, often without permission, from elsewhere on the web without adding any value.

Upside: Bloggers do this in hopes of getting some traffic.
Downside: Without permission, this is copyright infringement. With permission you may have some hollow success. If you are going to write about someone else’s post or comment it’s best to add some value to the repeat.

#9 The Celebrity - Well known before starting their blog, celebrity’s blog popularity stems from past fame.

Upside: Allows fans to feel ‘closer’ to the stars.
Downside: Can have shallow content or celebrity may be unresponsive to fans comments.

#10 The Reporter - Reports on happenings in life or business. Reporters range from the practical company news reporters to the obsessive. An example obsessive reporter? A blogger who posts what they eat (complete with pictures) at every meal.

Upside: Great information for those interested.
Downside: Make sure someone is interested.

All in all, to have a successful blog always write for your readers and pay attention to your comments!

Have a blog that doesn’t fit? Let me know below!

6 Sources of Web Design Inspiration

Dustin — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 05:32:17 +0000

Looking for some design inspiration? Here are 6 websites that can get your creative juices flowing and help keep you up to par with latest web design trends.

In no particular order:

BestWebGallery (www.bestwebgallery.com)
An inspirational gallery site created and managed by Nick La (Ndesign Studio). I find myself coming back to this gallery regularly.
CSS Zen Garden (www.csszengarden.com)
A popular gallery often mentioned by designers.
Stylegala Gallery (www.stylegala.com/archive/)
Reviews and a rating system give this gallery’s visitors a clear picture of the community opinion.
CSS Vault (www.cssvault.com)
In addition to a great gallery this site yields useful resources and a blog.
CSS Beauty (www.cssbeauty.com)
Click on ‘gallery’ in the top menu to view. Not as large of a collection as the others but still a good resource.
Template Monster (www.templatemonster.com)
Many of the templates on this site do a poor job of placing proper emphasis on the content and require modification. However, it is still a good site to get ideas and has some awesome flash templates!

Wordpress Ping List

Dustin — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:01:33 +0000

PING - Announce new content on your blog to the world!

When you ‘ping’ you notify blog indexing services that you have made an update to your blog. Ping-o-matic is used automatically by Wordpress at install but there are others you should take advantage of. Use the following list to make sure your content is represented by these services.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://bblog.com/ping.php

Not sure where to put these? In the current version of Wordpress (2.5.x) click on ‘Settings’ in admin then ‘Writing’ and paste them into ‘Update Services’ at the bottom of the page. Click ‘Save Changes’ and you are in business. Now Wordpress will notify these services automatically.

If you are familiar with pinging services you already know that there are plenty more pinging services available than the ones listed above. This list is researched and optimized for efficiency. Credit for the research goes to Instant Info Online. You can check out the research here.

Dynamic Logos

Dustin — Wed, 28 May 2008 18:15:52 +0000

I am days away from revealing the new iteration of the Dynamic Digital Media LLC website (For those new to this blog, Dynamic Digital Media LLC is the web development and online marketing company I started a few years back). With the new site is a new logo.

Our designers went through quite a few ideas before we settled on the above. I will post some of the other designs to this entry shortly.

[other logos]

Removing news feeds from Horde

Dustin — Thu, 08 May 2008 01:34:28 +0000

If you’ve used newer versions of Horde with Plesk, you have probably seen the news feed that runs down the left side of the screen. This newsbar is irritating at best. Here is how to get rid of it.

Open the following file in your text editor:

/usr/share/psa-horde/templates/portal/sidebar.inc

Around line 102 comment out the entire if() statement (lines 102-117).

If you upgrade Plesk, you will most likely have to repeat this process.

.htaccess redirect based on requested domain

Dustin — Wed, 07 May 2008 16:19:48 +0000

I often use the following .htaccess / mod_rewrite solution to redirect domain names based on the requested domain. The reasons for this are many. Most recent example for me is I had a single site with 5 alias domains but software licensed for only one. Even though I had the alias domains set up on the server it still did not satisfy the license. Add the line below to htaccess and now no matter which of the 5 domains are written in they are re-written to the one with the licence (need to duplicate for each domain). The license is valid since its all the same physical website and everyone is happy. Brilliant!

I am sure there is a more eloquent way of accomplishing this with mod_rewrite - but this gets the job done!

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?yourdomain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://otherdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Can also be used to redirect to a landing page based on the requested domain:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com
Rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.any-domain.com/landing-page.html [L]

Have a better solution? I’m no mod_rewrite guru so comments are always welcome!

Desktop Tower Defense

Dustin — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 03:18:48 +0000

This game is soo addicting. You have been warned - click on the following image at your own risk

Animator vs Animation

Dustin — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 15:36:27 +0000

For the Flash animators out there…

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Originally found here by Alan Becker.

Joomla 1.0.x Writeable Directories

Dustin — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 19:06:46 +0000

The following is a list of the directories that must be ‘writeable’ for Joomla 1.0.x to work properly. I’m including it here as a reference. In most cases individuals that install Joomla will simply chmod the permissions for these directories to 707 or 777. I have found through personal experience that this is not very secure (using 707 or 777 anywhere on your site allows a ‘hacker’ who may find a vulnerable script to upload anything they want to your server - aka ebay/paypal spoof sites, etc).

I have found a few solutions, but have not implemented any as of yet. The most promising looks like mod_suphp (aka PHPsuexec). I will post my solution to this issue once it is fully tested. In the mean time I am setting all directories to 755 and files to 644 and temporarily changing them when needed.

administrator/backups/
administrator/components/
administrator/modules/
administrator/templates/
cache/
components/
images/
images/banners/
images/stories/
language/
mambots/
mambots/content/
mambots/editors/
mambots/editors-xtd/
mambots/search/
mambots/system/
media/
modules/
templates/

Perfect Permissions for Joomla and Plesk

Dustin — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:43:02 +0000

This post is a continuation (actually a better solution) from my previous post on Joomla Session Save Path

The solution is a slightly modified version from the original post found at rackerhacker.com

Change the umask in ‘/etc/proftpd.conf’ from ‘022′ to ‘002′.

Then, update the directory permissions by running the following at the command line:

cd /var/www/vhosts/[domain.com]
chown -R [username]:psacln httpdocs
chmod -R g+w httpdocs
find httpdocs -type d -exec chmod g+s {} \;

Add the ‘apache’ user to the ‘psacln’ group by editing ‘/etc/group’.

Change

psacln:x:2524:

psacln:x:2524:apache

For my server I also had to add psaftp,psaadm:

psacln:x:2524:apache,psaftp,psaadm

Joomla also complains about some PHP settings, sometimes including not being able to write to ‘/var/lib/php/session’. To fix the issues, make some adjustments to the ‘/var/www/vhosts/[domain]/conf/vhost.conf’ for the domain (you may have to create this file):

var/www/vhosts/[domain]/httpdocs>
php_admin_flag magic_quotes_gpc on
php_admin_flag display_errors on
php_admin_value session.save_path /tmp

If the vhost.conf is brand new, then run:

/usr/local/psa/admin/bin/websrvmng -av

Make sure Apache runs with your new configuration:

# httpd -t (check your work)
# /etc/init.d/httpd reload (service httpd restart on my server)

Done! No more errors on the install screen and no more apache/ftpuser issues with uploading files.