Sometimes all things seem to happen at once. I have been working hard this week - creating a new Wordpress template for one of our clients and slowly I feel more like a WP developer.

I had a discussion on such matter before - some years ago. This was with a former collegue and we talked about skills, skill levels and just knowing a bit more than anyone else, and particularly clients, and that is how we make a living but in the back of our heads we are scared that one day it may all come out and we will be tagged as fakes. Don’t get me wrong - I know quite a bit of everything, but I do not feel a specialist in any particular field - I like almost all work I do (which is fortunate as there are many people that hate whatever they do for a living). I have done quite some coding over the years - in several programming languages, I have done database development, I do graphics design and if you have ever visited Very Simple Designs you know I write tutorials for graphic design too. I have built and maintained quite a few websites, and I can read and breathe HTML and CSS. I worked with several CMSs, but that was more a matter of technical implementation and tweaking of existing templates. So when I got hired as web developer for a company that uses WP - I knew I had to build more skills. My motto is “yes I can” but I had to work hard to extend my skill set. Both the WP Codex as well as Google were my friends - and as I said in the first sentence - I slowly feel more like a WP developer.

It is interesting tho - I used WP for years as blogging software. This site uses it. I did not have a lot of requirements at the time and figured I could get away with the standard configuration. And I did not even bother to create or install a fancy theme - it is a very simple one - one that had a colour scheme that I liked already and I just uploaded a new header. How lazy can one be? But the company I work for actually (tries) to use Wordpress as CMS. What can I say? It is NOT a CMS - it is blogging software - no matter what people claim. Its architecture is not suitable for complex site managment. For Very Simple Designs we used Joomla! which is a full fledged CMS with many more options - better configurable and certainly more suited for customizations, extensions and reusability than WP in its current state. But I am learning to overcome WP’s limitations and to cope with the restrictions that the business put upon development (as for an unsatisfactory explained reason the use of widgets is not allowed). So indeed - I am a WP developer now and there is a lot more to learn yet.

So what’s the big news?

This week both Inkscape (my all time favorite vector editing software) as well as Joomla! (a favorite CMS of mine) both released statements about upcoming releases.

Inkscape

The Inkscape team completed the goal for the bug hunt and is now making the final decision on items that will be included in the upcoming 0.48 release. They also announced the winning design for the new Inkscape 0.48 splash screen. The alpha release for Inkscape 0.48 will follow soon, in the mean time check out the Inkscape download page for nightly builds and feel free to experiment with the development releases and participate in the testing to make this a kick-ass release.

Joomla!

The Joomla team finally released Joomla! 1.6 Beta. I am very excited about this as it will bring plenty new features, amongst which a new access control system, unlimited depth organisation model (no more struggles to put subcategories under categories - the category tree can be fully user defined), a simplified process for updating extensions, and also better XHTML semantics in layouts. I will be using the beta release and migrate the VSD website to it on a virtual machine - just to see how much these new features will mess with the current content. But there is no doubt in my mind that we will migrate to Joomla 1.6 soon after production release is available.

Other things that keep me busy

• I am customizing some WP plugins to make them more flexible (re-usable) in our projects. Some of that work may be released here in near future.
• We managed to get tickets for the Metallica concert in November - long way ahead but we are looking forward to it.
• The kitties are growing fast - naughty as ever. We are still a bit worried as Moogie is very particular about her food and still very skinny tho the vet says she’s developing alright. Dax is wild and eats like a beast - food disappears in seconds and then she tries to steal Moogie’s food. Sometimes she eats too much too fast and that makes her sick. She meows and announces that she does not feel well but before I finish clean up she is running around like nothing happened. The worms are gone - and nothing serious to worry about now.

I need to find a proper balance between computer stuff for fun, computer stuff for work and other activities. My dude is a hardcore computer geek - and spends more hours on his PC than anyone else I know. He tells his friends that his geek girl spends even more hours behind the pc - they shake their heads in disbelieve (geek girls are a myth apparently) - but it is true. I don’t consider us sad cases - but the rest of the world seems to think we miss out on a lot of things - lol…

I really like the job I took up - the work mainly involves development of Wordpress templates and setting up wordpress for clients. After that SEO activities start and carefully selected / written content is uploaded. I learnt a lot about the processes involved - and as our main guru says .. there is no magic involved. It is a matter of a properly built website, proper navigation, useful content, relevant linking and time. Time because the website needs to build a reputation and further fine-tuning over a period of time. But without doubt the applied techniques work - and it is one of the main reasons why business is flourishing.

As I had to learn quite a few new things, I spent less time on the graphics design / tutorial writing as I like to do. I indeed prepared a new tutorial, made all screenshots and even uploaded the article to VSD - but the screenshots need to be cropped and included still before the article can be published. I know.. it is not a lot of work.. but I somehow just don’t feel like it. Perhaps this weekend?

Then it is Autumn in Oz. Temperatures are a lot lower and as I live in the Sydney area, people pretend that they won’t be exposed to winter. They simply deny it. Result: no central heating system and houses that are build to keep out the heat. I am quite fortunate as our house is fully insulated - but I really do miss the comfort of central heating. I wake up and it is about 15 degC in the house. It is not “that” cold - but too cool to be comfortable. And add to that the fact that my home is my office and you’ll get the idea. Shivering behind the PC until the sun hits the window and I finally start to warm up. Our gas heater broke down last year and as we are about to move to another house - not sure how to survive the next weeks - airconditioner on heating and a high electicity bill? Probably.

And a quick kitty update. Both our little brats are growing like crazy. They have been quite sick - first cat flu and after that Moogie started puking and had blood in her stool. We thought she might have something really bad - back to the RSPCA for check up - and as she still ate, put on some weight they suggested to bring a stool sample. Well.. stool sample from the right cat from the litterbox is not that easy, so when we finally caught her going to the box and prevented her from burying the sample in crystals - we didn’t need to bring the sample in.. they had worms. We called the RSPCA again - as we adopted them a month before and they were supposedly de-wormed. “It can happen that the treatment was not effective if the investation was too large”. Bleh… got meds from the local vet - made them poo a lot but they seem fine now.

Then we started with our tutorial site verysimpledesigns.com. Of course it is no fun to write tutorials if no one ever reads them. So I read up again, found some very useful pages explaining that SEO is no magic but mainly comes down to a good layout, good content and hard work. I just made sure that the template on VSD was as friendly for the human reader as for the search engine bot - I checked the generated XHTML with the text browser Lynx. As the site runs on Joomla! I enabled mod_rewrite on the server and installed the latest GPL version of sh404SEF to create search engine friendly - SEF - links to all pages.

I started to add page specific meta tags - apparently also less important these days - but I figured it takes minimum effort and won’t harm. I did *NOT* write keyword targeted articles. I absolutely see no use in luring people to a site finding a generic 250 word article that appears as a useful site in the search engine results but contains only superficial information. What I did was the otherway around - I wrote an article, a tutorial, and cherry picked a few keywords from that article and put those in the meta fields. I have not optimized my articles and keywords, which is an effort that I should start about now too.

Link building is another effort - and I can tell you that I suck at it. I am in general way to busy to go around and put my name and website in a zillion other blogs. But I do follow quite a few good blogs and where I thought comments were appropriate I added them using full details. I then also learnt about “do follow” and “no follow” links. VSD has “no follow” links by default in the comments section, so has this site. But I am contemplating in changing that. The comments on both sites are moderated and if someone with a website to cheap crap links with an unrelated comment or just “awesome” - I am free not to publish it - in the mean time it would allow me to link properly to sites that are useful and do contribute to a better web.

Anyways.. there is now a nice daily flow of visitors to verysimpledesigns.com. This is mainly because of the Spiro Swirls tutorial for Inkscape - which has been visited over 28000 times - the site got noticed and some awesome sites linked to either the homepage or directly to the tutorial page. The Alexa ranking is going up daily, and since this week we have a Google Page Rank of 4 on the Very Simple Designs home page and quite a few tutorial pages. The index page for tutorials and other resource pages such as Photoshop Brushes got a PR of 3. And the funny thing is that this blog receives more visitors too, altho the number is quite modest and it got a PR of 2. I am not a nobody anymore (at least not according to Google’s pagerank algorithm).

Our poor kitties have had serious down moments and one night Dax had serious respiration problems. My mate took her into the bathroom, opened the hot water tap to generate steam and ease her breathing. Next morning we both took them back to the RSPCA vet. They checked them out, yups it is the flu. We got some anti-biotics and some eye ointment that should help them a bit. That happened last Saturday.Today, Tuesday they are back to being VERY lively cats and it is clear that they missed the excercise as they are racing through the house and ran us over a couple times already.

Cat vs Man

Moogie had to figure out what we do with the toilet. My mate experienced how she dived into the bowl between the morning visit and the flush. Cat and Bathroom got a wash. It was disgusting but funny nonetheless

Dax does not care how she reaches her favorite sitting spot. She uses our bodies as climbing tree without regards of being fully clothed. My mate got quite some scratches from her climbing along his bare legs. She attacks and jumps from the floor to about thigh level. No fun when you just wear shorts

Job update

The job is fun - currently I just perform small tasks but there are quite a lot of things ongoing. I have to be careful in my planning as time flies. Currently reviewing website designs and making small modifications to wordpress plugins. I have not coded that much in PHP so I need to look up quite a lot, but I am getting there

Very Simple Designs

With Easter, sick kitties and a new job I have not had too much time to work on new tutorials for the site. I poked Dakka a bit and he told me he would chip in a bit - so hopefully we see some new additions by him soon.

Cheers,

Syllie

Cat Flu

Then last week Dax started to sneeze. And as my mate says - she sneezes like me: a few careful whisps and sneezes and then HATSJOE! HATSJOE! HATSJOE! HATSJOE! HATSJOE! 5 or 6 times sneezes that turn you inside out. Afterwards she looks likes she just survived a hurricane and shakes her head to try and put everything back in place. When we were at the RSPCA they informed us that they had cats with cat-flu, and those with symptoms were treated and recovering in an isolated cat house. But they also told us that whilst the kittens we selected were vaccinated, they may have picked up something that is in incubation time.

Well.. the poor kitties have cat-flu. Clogged eyes, sniffing, sneezing, diarhea and low energy. I called the RSPCA-vet early this week, and they told me that as long as they eat and drink and not go in total lethargy that we should let it its run. So it is with ups and downs. Some days they feel not so good, others they seem back to full rascal mode (altho it is only till their energy runs out). We give them their kibbles and they eat wel, and entice them with some tuna as that is very smelly and reaches them even with their blocked noses. Poor sweeties.

Cat versus Man

• missed the litterbox 5 times
• destroyed a headset by chewing the cables

My New Job

My new job is seriously cool. This week was a short one, as it is just before the long easter weekend. The first day was quite uneventful as I got some time to set up my new development environment and everyone else was too busy with whatever they were doing. In the following days I had training sessions in the morning and some small development tasks in the afternoon. An easy week - probably the easiest work week I have experienced in the last uhm.. 18 years or so. But a good start. I like the people that work in this place. We only have a virtual office - so I only know them from online interaction - but sofar they all seem to be great and I feel very welcome.

Downside is that I did not do much work on my tutorials site for this week. I am a bit too busy taking in new information and adjusting to a full workday again to sit relaxed at night and write out some tutorial. It was a short week however and now I enjoy already a long weekend - so that will give me some opportunity to work on new things to publish.

I really enjoy my life in Oz and I have enjoyed extreme freedom in doing freelance work and creating our resources site verysimpledesigns.com. And whilst my partner encouraged me to continu my solo ventures, I thought it would be good to look around for a cool job that at least brings in some steady money too. I am a bit too picky to relay on others for that - tho my partner keeps telling me that is the sole reason why some girls marry. Well.. I am a kinda independent girl I guess. Anyways, we talked it over and he told me please don’t go for a high profile job again, you will be all stressed and forget to enjoy life and sure will have no more time for all the cool creative things you do now. So I started looking around for a job that would teach me new things, allow me to develop some skills further and would consider me even tho I might be unqualified for some things (skills that are not much developed yet) but overqualified for others (work that I have done for many years and can do during sleep).

Web Designer/Developer

After a few days I came across an advertisement for a junior web developer/designer for a very company that is known for its search engine optimization work. I have done quite some website design and development, but on a different platform and mainly to provide access portals to adminstrative information systems. So this would be a new area, developing for Wordpress and most exciting - learning more about SEO optimization. I wrote a lengthy application letter, included my CV and said there might be a win-win situation - and yes I know it is an entry level job - money isn’t everything (not in my book anyways). We talked about it, I got a technical interview and I ended up with a new job. The very cool thing about this job is that there is no office, except for a virtual one. That cuts 10+ hours travel time out of the working week and should leave me enough time to continu creative work. The contract says that I am bound to work for them exclusively and not to undertake any work in a competitive field - so the freelancing webdesign is put on hold.

Cute Kittens

Also as you may remember our cute cat passed away last month. There was a litter of kittens at a neighbour’s house and my mate came home a few weeks ago and asked carefully if I would be interested in one of those little critters. I thought it would be a bit too soon, but I had to confess I miss a cat around the house. I grew up with cats and have held cats almost all my life. Last Saturday it became clear that all the cats from this litter had found a home already. Sunday we went to the RSPCA - we just went for a look at the kitten home and were sold immediately. There was this cute gray little lady screaming her lungs out to please take her home with us and a few cages down was a cute playful lady that might make a good playmate.  We  talked to the caretakers and the cats were put together to see if they could make good mates. We went home with both of them. The gray tabby has cute little spots on her belly, we named her Dax. The dark tortoise is 3 weeks older, a bit more dominant but surely the wisest of the two, we named her Moogie. You got to be a Trekkie to see the resemblance.

Dax

Moogie

I simply opened up Inkscape and started to dabble a bit, with the idea to make a concept for a character creation tutorial. But I ended up making an easter bunny - and as that holiday is upcoming - I decided to share it. The vector is cleaned up and can pass any microstock scrutiny check - all paths are closed, no embedded text, no transparancies and no patterns.

I have published the vector as Inkscape SVG and eps format but also exported it to png in 300dpi and as web-friendly size with all bunnies scaled to 256 px height. The work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License. Check it out: Freebie Easter Bunny Vectors.

Freebie Easter Bunnies

Through verysimpledesigns.com I received a request for a tutorial on seamless pattern creation, and I figured I might as well finish and publish the tutorial I started earlier. Total composing time for this tutorial is over 20 hours and I still am not totally happy with it. My Inkscape “guinea pig” still needs to test it - and I hope he’s gentle in his verdict. It is available on the Inkscape tutorials page and I will announce it on the front page as soon as the final tweaking is done.

Create seamless textures in Inkscape

Thing is that we design stuff from logos to stationery and fabrics, but also create illustrations and digital art and as we are both techies, we do website design (front-end and back-end) as well.

I am quite familiar with CMS systems, but when we decided to use Joomla for verysimpledesigns.com, I had to learn a lot of new things. And as we just wanted to get the site going, we decided to use a freeware template, install some plugins and that was that. No big publishing campaign, so not a lot of visitors, which gave us a lot of time to sort things out and add some content to the site. We had some plans for reworking the design, but sofar it has just been plans. Today we started to talk about actually changing things.

We like the current layout. It is distiguishly different than most other websites - that conveniently use 2.0 to indicate their style, but we all know that again is just a buzz word. I like many of those layouts, but somehow one looks like the next and the next again. We do however need to redesign the website, to allow for more modules, get the breadcrumbs working properly, depend less on plugins, and optimize the site further for SEO. The site is quite easily found by most search engines, especially now all our image are slowly being indexed, but we sure could use a few more proper links. We are considering a link exchange page too (realizing that we are not that interesting yet, but at least we can support the sites that we consider to be cool).

So template design for Joomla, we keep the purple but I do not know where it will take us next. We also will finally implement forums so we can create better interaction with our users.

Lots of plans that will keep us busy for a while again.

Most weeks life goes by in a nice reasonably predictable way and the days sorta smoothly roll over from one into another. Other weeks things happen like wild water rafting. This was such a week. Worst thing that happened was that our cute cat got hit by a car and passed away. Some people might say a cat is a cat, others say it was just a pet, and others may cry for him. Truth is that this little cutie was very important to me. When I moved continents I had to leave my cats behind with new friendly owners. And when I arrived in Oz, this cat was waiting for me, rescued by someone that cared about the cat but had no idea how to take care of him. He was about 8 months then, kept indoors and as a young male in puberty very wild. So I was greeted by a strong cat piss odour and a cat that attacked upon each opportunity given. Oh, and they fed him dog food (as the cat ignored cat food). It took me a few weeks to straighten the cat out, train him to use the cat door and be happy with proper cat bits for food and little snacks of tuna or chicken whenever he was behaving particularly well. The cat turned out to be very socialized and a real cutie and he made it a lot easier to get used to my new home. This week I had to say goodbye as someone took him away from us. I feel very very sad.

New Inkscape tutorials

This event also slowed down some designs I was working on. I made a cute paisley motif a while ago for some custom stationery. I figured it would make a good Inkscape tutorial. When I started to write however, the tutorial became unbelievable long. This is mostly due to the fact that I try to write them for beginner Inkscape artists. So lots of hints and tips, while I describe each step. I am still very fortunate that my mate is not good in vectoring, and that he is still trying to learn Inkscape. That makes him the ideal guinea pig. I only mention new tutorials on the homepage of verysimpledesigns.com when they passed his test.

In the end the simple paisley motif appeared to be useful for 3 new tutorials, where each one focusses on a different aspect of pattern creation. The tutorials are published and we are awaiting feedback.

Inkscape Tutorial: Fancy Borders

Inkscape Tutorial: Floral Motif

Inkscape Tutorial: Paisley Motif