王朋 - Filed under 'WordPress'

hello, i’m 王朋. ⁵
i use design, art, and code ⁷
to make small wonders. ⁵

During the day, I am focused on web design and development. During the night, I am interested in exploring the intersection of visual art and software processes.

I have lived in Beijing, Miami, and San Diego. I am currently in Los Angeles.

Views and content expressed are my own. More content at pengxwang.com

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January 30, 2010

Coding Update #1: Git, MVC, & .NET

I've finally started using my GitHub account. I've had it since almost a year ago, but only recently decided to dive into the Git commands in bash. The learning curve is definitely manageable, if you're not afraid to google. This sudden shift from SVN is mostly invoked by jQuery's move. A good amount of the source code I 'clone' for my own use (I'm not a fan of browsing for download links) is on GitHub, too. As awesome as TortoiseSVN is, GitHub just seems to have so much potential, at least over Google Code.

I've also started venturing into MVC web frameworks again, mostly in PHP, since it's mostly what I know server-side. I'm going to redo the back-end for my site, so I can extend it with more flexibility and creativity. This will definitely be a long-term project, with a lot of long pauses and short spurts of activity. But it just plain sucks that I can't easily build new portions of my site without affecting or changing the old, because Indexhibit or WordPress are simply not designed to be highly extensible, from a development standpoint. They're also not really getting improved upon very quickly, at least in the rate their language platform (PHP) is -- which actually isn't that quickly. And as a side note, looking at the BuddyPress source--which sits on top of WordPressMU, induces powerful headaches. So I've just abandoned what most of the internet runs on; what do I want?

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November 15, 2009

Essay: Navigating The New Housing Boom

blogpost header: a city of markup, a house in focus with #fff hex on its roof

Websites are like houses. The creator of Django confirms this idea I've had in my head for a while. While I lack his experience working with the internet, and I have not worked in construction or studied architecture, I see the similarities in the processes. I also believe these similarities will can help us correctly defined the future of websites.

Definitions

Most websites are, or should be, functional, so they're rarely foremost works of visual spectacle. I am excluding the genre of the Flash-based brochure sites, as they are closer to commercialized movies. I am referring to sites that foremost deal with data: its storage, distribution, presentation, aggregation, and management. Since the internet is about interacting with information, it doesn't do much good if the information is static, like in a brochure site. Therefore I'm referring to sites where the data is very dynamic. Of course, it doesn't matter what the site does; sites do a lot of things, from tracking your life to being a game.

If making websites was about visual spectacle, it would be more like making a painting or a movie, all about the visual feel with little concern about supporting functional, non-linear interactivity. Rather, making websites is different and harder in two ways. First, websites, like other software that support user-interaction are non-linear. This changes a lot of the underlying creative thought process. Instead of just imagining the natural, cumulative, visual progression of strokes on the canvas or frames in the clip, you have to think of use cases, the variety of paths that branch and fork depending on what the user is looking for. The user is given too much interactive power for linearity to work.

And that's how, for a while now, I've realized like many, many others, the website of our time is actually software.

Analogies

And making software is like making houses. Both tasks take a very long time. There are numerous stages, and I'm sure, variations of processes for projects of various scale. There are many components and with them, are constraints. And these standards must be met, or the result is unusable. Just like poisonous Chinese drywall doesn't meet standards, make people sick, and devalue the houses they're in; a website where there are ads anchored to malware or flash banners that interfere with the layout and content upon mouse-over will drive away readers and actually lower revenue, thanks to ad-block features on browsers and userscripts. Or something as careless as forgetting user-friendly color contrast.

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September 24, 2009

Visual refinements

This Posterous thing is pretty neat. Although the interface is a bit clunky, with the new theme feature, I'm really sold on this as a decent, low-overhead blogging platform. I'll admit the default html/css doesn't exactly follow best practices at parts, but it sure beats what I've seen in some themes in other blog platforms; ahem WP.

September 9, 2009

A real post on design

Though I subscribe to them, I've had it with the so-called 'design' blogs and their unending streams of linked lists. Let's forget for now how much of a hassle it is to be able to keep references to all of these individual posts, since designers who blog probably can't be bothered with using a wiki, since they're so gawd-awfully hideous. No, let's just talk about quality of content. It bothers me that gradients and starbursts are presented as exemplary design. From the content on these blogs, you'd think to design a better frontend web interface, all it takes are some grunge textures, drop shadows, and large social networking and syndication icons. Though I'd have to conclude from the standpoint of sensible, human-friendly design, that concoction just makes it a gawdy, user experience nightmare. There's a reason the websites of most agencies and professionals stay clean of such fads. WordPress theme designers take heed.

Bottom line. The web designer in me is more interested in real innovations in user-friendly interface design. And the print designer in me is more interested ways for layout to highlight and enhance content. Neither side really cares about textures and gradients. Under most circumstances they're benefits are not worth their weight. Expect a link to a list of resources and articles, on a wiki page.

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