Since the blog page was only going to show a specific category of posts, I thought that I could “confuse” WordPress. I made the category slug and the page slug exactly the same. Important to note, the slug is not the title. The slug is usually lowercase, no spaces, and WordPress usually generates it based off of the title, which you can obviously modify.

So I created a News page, and then a News category. Then I created a news template within the theme as well. I applied the news template to the News page under the Page Attributes section on the Edit screen. The News page previewed just like any other page. Then after some thought and scripting, I came up with the code below which allowed me to pull in the posts based on the slug.

Place the above code into the theme’s template file where you would like the list of posts to appear. The part of this code that does the heavy lifting is that it reads the slug of the page and then builds the query to pull the posts of that category. Obviously, that can spark some creative ideas with the page and post relationship. I’d love to hear what other people have done for this type of situation and I hope that this helps others.

I’m all for change, and although I’m getting used to it, there are many times when I find myself going back to old habits. I’ll start off with why I’m sticking hard to this setting (which I can easily be turned off). It’s an advancement in UX and sooner or later, we will do away with the mouse altogether. I mean take a look at Star Trek, or any sci-fi movie, there isn’t a mouse to be found. But seriously, it’s just my point of view, it’s not because I’m an Apple fan or anything, it’s just how I see things.

With that being said, after about a week, I am now scrolling web pages, documents and alike without scrolling in the wrong direction first. But there are places where I find myself still doing it “backwards.” The drop-downs on forms, Tweetdeck columns, even this text area I’m writing this post in. I do find it extremely annoying and wanted to turn this setting off more than a few times now, but I don’t. I thought, “there’s got to be a reason why my brain isn’t adjusting to these UI elements but changed to others.” I think I’ve come up with it.

With explosion of the iPhone, iPad, Android and other various devices in the past few years, my brain has become accustomed to me looking at websites and writing documents on these devices. So the transition from just using my finger to scroll on the screen to scrolling on the mouse took some time, but came around fairly quickly. But Tweetdeck and code completion my brain has never seen in the reverse scroll world. It’s time to re-train the brain to perform tasks that it had been doing for the past 15-20 years. No easy feat that’s for sure, but I’m determined.

It’s funny that scrolling has become so second nature, that now I have to think about performing that task again. Brings me back to when I introduced the mouse and PC to various family members who would pick up the mouse and use it like a tv remote. It’s what our brains are accustom to. It will always default to that pathway that you formed the first time you did something. Breaking that pathway is hard, but can be done for sure. Let’s see how long it will take me before I stop scrolling up when I mean down on the DOB fields on a form.

I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this new take on scrolling, or even in general on trying to change your thinking on doing the simplest tasks. Feel free to comment below.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell

Posted via email from Jason Resnick’s posterous

I guess there always comes a time when good things come to an end. Yahoo announced that Geocities will be turning the switch off permanently on October 26th. It’s been a long ride for the free web host. Starting back in the mid-90s, pretty much at the advent of the internet as we know it. My first site we a Geocities site, and from reading the article, it makes me wonder why I haven’t kept that first site. Oh yeah, I remember now, because it was horrible – animated Simpsons characters, horizontal rules that were yellow and black construction type signs, an “LED” Welcome sign, all center aligned. At the time I loved it and spent a lot of time on it when I should’ve been in economics class, and was proud to have my little place on the web.

Anyway, thank you to Yahoo for keeping the “first apartment” alive and well these past several years. But we all need to move out and move on with our lives as you do as well. Goodbye and Farewell Geocities, it was great while it lasted.

Posted via email from Jason Resnick’s posterous

Everest Broadband Interlink

I was hired by them to design and develop their website.  They needed their clients to be able to log in and view their accounts.  Everest also wanted to have a CMS implemented so they can managed the website.  This was all done in ASP with a SQL Server backend.