Still, I have to admit Facebook was actually kind of awesome.

Facebook coaxed millions of users online and you can’t dismiss how important this has been for the growth of the web. Facebook convinced many people who would’ve otherwise be too scared or uninterested into joining an online network that seemed safe and private. Until Facebook came along the web was largely perceived as a place for kids, nerds, geeks, perverts and white supremacists. Now the web has a whole new group of users that, if not for Facebook, may well have never come online in any meaningful way.

Thank-you, Facebook.

But actually when you get down to it — Facebook totally sucks.

FB is not safe and these days it is certainly not private. The majority of it’s users are unaware of how their information is used and distributed by FB and are also unaware exactly what kind of information is being tracked in the first place. And it is this lie that will inevitably consume FB. They lured users online with the promise of privacy and now, because they can’t monetize the service without making it public, they are now slowly and covertly cracking it open. They can’t afford to lose any users but they lack the skill and patience to develop their model in a respectful, transparent way.

Recently there have been some predictions that FB represents the future — that for all of Google’s success they are doomed to the backwaters of search and text ads. That FB, due to the trust it’s users have, is the horse to bet on. I don’t believe that for a second. FB users do not trust the website, they trust each other. FB tries to position itself between users, in between intimate conversations and off-colour jokes. That is not where advertisers want to be — even if they think they do.

Imagine having an intimate conversation about a dying mother or father and mentioning, for a moment, that you’re worried your car is breaking down and you won’t be able to make it to the hospital. And at this mention a stranger walks up and says, “Hey do you like fast cars? You should by a car from me, we’ve got great deals!”. It just doesn’t work. On any level.

And that is why ads don’t work well on social networks — especially “private” ones. Social networks are more adept at providing customer support and creating a forum for fans to share their enthusiasm. They’re awesome at creating brand stewards.

Google still is still king. For now.

Search and advertising are a matched pair. The model is relatively easy to maintain and requires very little manipulation behind the scenes to be profitable. You’re already looking for something, they just want you to find it. Google has made their network better by investing in tools for it’s users on all sides — tools for marketers, tools for the general public and essentially fostering an ecosystem where it becomes profitable to share information. But Google has not mastered the next piece of that puzzle — the social layer.

However the social layer, in my opinion, is still essentially about search — or rather about finding things you just didn’t know you were looking for. That layer is still well within reach for many organizations who respect their users.

Facebook isn’t one of them.

Big Beach Lodge was just relaunched with a totally new look and feel. Updated photography made this retrofit much more exciting, along with the freedom to rebrand the property with a modern touch .

An iPhone version of the site created with jQTouch completes the experience.

Another collaboration with the good people of Butter Creative in Vancouver.

Very happy to work on the development of jimmysimpson.com with Butter Creative.

First off: my requirements. On a daily basis I’m editing/creating/writing graphics, php, css, html, working on multiple local machines as well as different servers running all kinds of web apps. I swore off windows years ago (although I do agree that windows 7 is looking more human-like) so my preferred platform is a mac running os x. I also edit a lot of text and images, use ftp, create pdf’s and other documents.

Dropbox [storage]

Dropbox syncing is just too good to be true. Flawless and effortless sharing and syncing between up between computers, 30 days of backup and restore.. blah, blah, blah it’s awesome. And the first 2gb are free. Get it.

Related: I also use dropbox to sync Things (task management), Snippet (snippet library), Sidenote (note taking app, free)

Photoshop/Illustrator [graphics]

I wish it weren’t so. It seems awful and wrong that it’s the beginning of a new decade and I’m still using a sledgehammer to pound in finishing nails… the metaphor won’t be lost on anyone that has to deal with the behemoth adobe suite for creating and editing graphics for the web. A few things are on the horizon though — Pixemator and Inkscape have been gaining ground. Here’s hoping the Adobe cartel won’t be with us when the next decade comes around.

Coda [text editor]

Coda is an integrated text editor, ftp, subversion, terminal app with extensions and even with all that it seemed a bit pricey for me at first. A year later all I have to say is that Coda is a hell of a bargain at $99.

Related: Coda is definitely a swiss army knife but even swiss army knives need help from time to time. I backup coda with Smultron (basic text editor, free), CSS Edit (CSS editor by MacRabbit) and Cyberduck

Firefox [browser/development]

Ask me in a few months when xmarks is compatible with Chrome and I might have changed my mind — but for development work I don’t see anyone bypassing firefox any time soon. The built-in inspector in Chrome and Safari is pretty slick, however at the end of the day firebug still has my vote. Syncing across multiple machines is a snap with xmarks, which also supports pretty much every browser these days.

Google Docs [word processing]

It’s simple, it’s fast and it’s everywhere that I need it. Google Docs could easily be overtaken if they don’t keep up with the feature sets of new and upcoming office apps, but as a hardcore gmail user I don’t know how much anything would affect my usage of Docs.

Related: Spreadsheets are still totally useless in Google Docs. And although it is shameful, I still have to use one Microsoft product — Excel. It’s functions are very useful for manipulating tabular data especially for those massive Drupal imports! I haven’t had the chance to try out Numbers but I’ve heard it’s mostly just good for the graphs.

Zero One Design was founded as a web design company in 1997, in Victoria, British Columbia. Right from the beginning, the partners envisioned creating a service that could present uniquely Canadian arts and culture: Zero One has been telling Canada’s stories ever since. I helped the partners find an updated look and feel for their organization using classic imagery with a modern slant.

“Madrona is an open source museum collections management system written for the community, by the community. Featuring an intuitive design and ground breaking media and internet integration, Madrona creates a whole new standard for collection management.”

I designed the User Interface for Madrona along with their WordPress blog and the Madrona logo.

Madrona is of course latin for Arbutus, so the Arbutus tree was a logical choice for the logo.

I’ve seen a few people on drupal.org how to implement Facebook Share and asking for modules, etc. However with the share widget provided by Facebook it’s really very easy to implement FB Share at the template level. To make it really easy, use CCK.

Step One: Get the Widget

To start off, FB provides you with this code in their widgets section

<a name="fb_share"></a><script src="http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect.php/js/FB.Share" type="text/javascript"><!--mce:0--></script>

Which gives you a little widget on your webpage that looks like this,

That’s pretty quick and easy. Using that bit of javascript you’ll get a little FB button that you can stick basically anywhere on a page (or, more precisely in your node.tpl.php file) and when the user clicks it, they’ll be prompted to login to facebook (if they’re not already) and then they can share your link on their wall. FB is pretty good at scraping pages but if you want fine tune control over what image and what text is displayed with your link you need to go a step further.

Step Two: Take Control!

As an example, this is the code I added to my page.tpl.php template right underneath my <title> tag:

 
//

I’ve made references to three variables here; $title is just the title of my page, $node->field_fblink_teaser[0]['safe'] is a CCK field that I’ve created which allows users to specify a meta description of their page and lastly $node->field_fblink_image[0]['filepath'] is an image that user uploads that is used to create a thumbnail for the FB Share wall post. I’ve defaulted this image to 100x100px since that is what FB seems to like. For more info on linking different kinds of media including audio and video, check out this page. Although there are no guidelines given anywhere else, FB does actually have minimum/maximum sizes for images, so if you’re image isn’t showing up try changing the dimensions.

In the end you should end up with a wall post that looks like this,

Disclaimer: I don’t advocate using Facebook. For anything. It’s a popular platform and website, yes. But you should be aware that Facebook likes to change their rules, often without warning. It can be a bit of a nightmare for developers. That said, Facebook Share is relatively low-impact though (all authentication takes place via facebook) and that makes it quick to implement.

Updated on April 4, 2010, plugin update killed my example code.

Recently I was asked to summarize the parts of a drupal theme. I came up with the following semi-literate guide to my own theme framework, sp0xx6 for Drupal 6. This is not a very technical guide but I think it’s none the less important to document my perspective, especially for newcomers to drupal who are having a hard time with the way information is presented on drupal.org.

Please note: The text below makes reference to a set of theme files for Drupal themes. That theme is sp0xx6. You can download sp0xx6 from google code. For free. To keep. Forever. Drupal rocks! Thanks to everyone on drupal.org that makes my life easier and more interesting.

.info

The .info file registers your theme with drupal along with your theme’s regions (area’s content appears in) your CSS and javascript.

template.php

Your template file allows you to customize practically everything in your theme. You can rewrite the appearance of forms, lists, links, taxonomies and add all sorts of functionality.

node.tpl.php

Unless you have a separate node template defined (as with node-gallery.tpl.php), every content type will use the default node.tpl.php file to render the contentof each page.
The node template is made up of two sections, the teaser and the main template the teaser is usually used in lists and the main template is used when you are displaying the actual page your node is located on.
The teaser section is optional, it simply provides another way to render the shortened layout of your template.

Main $components of node.tpl.php

$teaser — the teaser format of the node, can be customized and manipulated
$title — title of your node
$submitted — user that submitted the node followed by published date
$content — the content of the node body
$terms — taxonomy terms assigned to the node

page.tpl.php

This is a crucial part of the theme, but most of the components of this template are actually quite arbitrary. This is one of the reasons I really like Drupal — you can use plain html/css to do just about anything to a page before you get drupal to load some content in it. To function properly the page template requires the following pieces,

$head — prints meta tags and other important stuff
$styles — prints all styles from your .info file and Drupal modules
$scripts — prints all javascript, including your script.js (see below) and Drupal module scripts
$content — prints node content
$closure — prints everything in the footer of your page (it’s easy to miss so check twice!)

Other notable pieces,

A few custom regions (defined in .info and can be placed into content-type templates),

$left, $right, (left & right are defined by default in drupal) $content, $header, $footer, $precontent, $content, $subcontent, $mainnav, $subnav, $searchbox

page-front.tpl.php (not included in sp0xx6)

Page-front is the default frontpage template for Drupal. This page will automatically override your homepage unless you have specified a different page in your theme settings. sp0xx6 does not include this file, but you can simply duplicate page.tpl.php and rename that file to create your own front page for drupal. After you rename the file you can customize it with whatever markup you like and it will only change your homepage.

script.js

Contains all of the javascript stuff you need for your regular templates. Other js elements can be added on a case by case basis using drupal_add_js (http://api.drupal.org/api/function/drupal_add_js)

search-block-form.tpl.php

An optional template that allows you to modify your search form.

style.css

This is the main stylesheet of your theme and will be included with every template. You can add additional styles to specific templates with drupal_add_css (http://api.drupal.org/api/function/drupal_add_css/6) You can also add other css styles in .info

Custom node template example –

node-gallery.tpl.php

node-gallery.tpl.php is an example of a content type called “gallery” that has an image gallery built into it using CCK image fields and the imagecache module that is presented in lightbox form.

In the template you can see that the field_imagefile cck field is rendered as thumbnails using the gallerythumb imagecache preset.

I am extremely happy to announce the launch of Arthur Vickers new website that coincides with Arthurs gift of The Leadership Desk to the Premiers Office of the Province of British Columbia.