With the house empty and a empty DSL line I sat down tonight to get to work on the design for Revision Magazine. Although Brian Gardner's theme is nice and WordPress is powerful; to really get this going Stuart and I decided that we'd need a custom Zine Management System. While he dove into the intricacies of the CodeIgniter framework I decided to tackle the design; aiming for a highly usable design that would put a ton of content right at the reader's fingertips. With this goal in the spot light I'm aiming for a gridded design with the most important items focusing in the top left with everything else spreading away from it in circular patterns. For those of you anxious to see some stuff, screenshots will hopefully come soon.

Are they really that great?

My first impression on the native tagging in WordPress 2.3 was more of an "Oh." than a "Coolio!". Although I do recognize that Matt and all the other guys over at WordPress and Automattic did put some effort into incorporating the tags into the system, and that there was a lot of code rewriting involved. I personally feel that for such a monumental addition they could have implemented it a bit better.

I Have a Dream

I thought of and still see WordPress tagging in the same domain as WordPress's categories, and I believe they should be implemented similarly. I feel that a better implementation of tagging is really not that difficult. I see a window similar to the already existing "Categories" window in WordPress, except it would display the already existing tag cloud. Clicking on a tag would highlight it, showing it as selected; clicking it again would un-highlight it to show that it is no longer selected. It would be easy to add tags by using a form similar to the one already used in the "Categories".

Shout Out

This is my shout out to all those WordPress developers; if you were good enough programmers to make WordPress in the first place, then I'm asking you to make a better tagging interface, because I know it can be done.

Firebug recently gave me this wonderful error, I found it quite...flattering. After about a half-hour screaming at the screen I figured out that I was trying to make a call to a JavaScript function included in the Prototype library, the problem was that the library hadn't been loaded yet, so my function call was looking for a function that did not exist. Or so I think. Anyway, the problem was solved by sacrificing a small animal to the JavaScript gods and putting the code in a function that was only executed once the entire document was loaded. I'm not sure if this workaround fully fixed it or I just got lucky with something, but I'm definitely going to look for some better ways to solve it in the near future.

Huh?

Misnamed errors can be quite frustrating, even more so when there obviously isn't an error. This is often the result of negligence, bad design, or the lack of the proper tools for feedback. In the image to the left, it is obvious that an error message isn't necessary, but there wasn't any other good way of giving feedback that the operation did run successfully than to display an error.

Combating This Problem

Until the proper tools come out, it seems kind of like we're stuck with misleading error messages.