Check out the full set of FOWD NYC 2011 photos on Flickr.

Event Highlights

Host, Ryan Carson, addressing the audience

Aaron Gustafson on HTML5

Audience of Apple Users

Steve Fisher on the Future of Mobile UX. On the set of Avenue Q

The FOWD Lunch Rush

Voting in The Web Font Awards Ceremony

'Words Convey Knowkedge', Cameron Moll. (be they written, spoken, or signed)

Jason Pamental on what is certain and what is uncertain in our industry

Whitney Hess mentioning one of Apple's rare failure to embrace good Design Principles

Etsy's Randy J. Hunt on the Future of Branding

Aaron Weyenberg of TED on Responsive Design

Dave Shea working with an attendee during the 1-on-1 design clinics

Keynote speaker Joshua Davis refueling on Red Bull in the middle of his energetic presentation on not knowing things

Quick snap of working self portrait in the mirror, starring presenters Aaron, Cameron, and Jason

Other Web Industry Event Photos

If you’re in the New York City web design community keep an eye out for me at events — I’ve usually got a camera over my shoulder, in an official capacity or otherwise. Here’s a few sets from other events:

• Creative Mornings — Jessi Arrington’s Rainbow Parade. Nov. 11, 2011, DUMBO, Brooklyn, NY
• Brooklyn Beta 2011. Oct. 12-14, 2011, Brooklyn, NY
• Past Future of Web Design events: FOWD NYC 2010, FOWD NYC 2009, FOWD NYC 2008, FOWD NYC 2007

The above photos were taken yesterday in South Mountain Reservation & made 80% more autumnal with Instagram filters.

You wouldn’t know it from this blog, but I’ve been busy

I hadn’t realized it’s been more than a month since I’ve posted anything here, but there’s a few good reasonsgood reason for that. Besides some interesting work projects, and not having reliable internet connectivity for a bit, I’ve also been embracing “conference season” and been out and about whether at conferences or just one off events or meet ups, possibly meeting you! In no particular order there was Brooklyn Beta, an evening at Etsy, Creative Mornings, a few others I didn’t take photos of, and then just soaking up NYC via NY Comic Con or its Parks & Rec.

The good news (for me, and for any blog readers I might have left) is that the stretch is almost over & hearing about such great ideas from a wide variety of people has put some ideas in my head, many of which will be appearing here in some form or another in the not too distant future.

I’ve been commuting to NYC on and off for quite a few years now. Which has put me in the position to see a lot of things, the most memorable of those trips was taken on the morning of September 11, 2001. I had been riding the train to Hoboken, NJ where I would normally then transfer to the PATH train and travel to the 9th street station, near my office. Instead, that morning as we approached Hoboken Terminal, we saw the plume of smoke already haunting the skyline. By the time we were stopped and off the train all public transportation had been shut down and I was left stranded with a ring side seat for what was to unfold that day.

Across The River

Across The River is my attempt to give a proper, modern, facelift to the gallery of photographs that I took that day which I first published a few days after the attacks, 10 years ago. I’ve not altered the photographs, but have reprocessed them at a more larger resolution, and with the addition of photographs of the NYC skyline before the attacks as well as images of memorials in the days and years since I hope to have been able to add just a little context to the collection.

Visit Across The River

The previous 9/11 Gallery, as published in September 2001

FDNY 2001-2011: Published with a President

With many groups and individuals using this 10th anniversary of the attacks to pay special tribute it isn’t a surprise that there are others putting together similar collections of images that tell the story of the World Trade Center. I’m honored to have been asked to contribute a photograph to the newly published “FDNY 2001-2011: A Decade of Remembrance and Resilience”. The book is an amazing collection of images of the events and heros of the days following the attacks, put together by the FDNY Foundation, and has a forward written by President George W. Bush. You can purchase the book here.

Web Standards Sherpa’s experts provide helpful, pragmatic and up-to-date advice on best practices for web professionals everywhere.

Back in March, Web Standards Sherpa, the brainchild of some of the crew at the Web Standards Project and support from Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, the W3C, and others, was born. The new site aims to provide guidance on the real world usage of web standards and surrounding best practices through reviews and feedback on existing web sites. Now, with the 10th article published yesterday, I think we’re well on our way down this path of building a great, relevant, and current resource to help web professionals on their journey. Already I am finding that I’m referencing many of the pieces in conversations with clients or colleagues.

The Path We’ve Started On

Current Sherpa Issue: Overlays and Lightboxes: Keys to Success by Derek Featherstone

Here’s an introduction to the current staff of Sherpas guiding you and the types of wisdom they’ve been dropping along the way.

• Improving the Tweet Box – developer Aaron Gustafson critiques the code choices behind the tweet box on twitter.com
• Stop Hiding Behind Products – usability expert Jared Spool looks the impact of language on site organization and navigation
• Curing the jetBlues – where Derek Featherstone looks at the keyboard accessibility of jetBlue’s site in light of the pending lawsuit against them
• Dissecting a Chattarati Sidebar – content strategist Erin Kissane discusses the value of sidebar modules on a local news site
• Designing Scannable Headlines – designer Dan Rubin looks at content density, headline legibility, and typography at the NY Times

Join The Trek

Check out the great team behind Web Standards Sherpa and learn a bit more about the project by watching Aaron Gustafson’s talk from MIX11. And if you have a project that you’ve recently launched or that you’re looking to redesign soon and you’re wrestling with a topic such as accessibility, performance, semantics or content strategy drop the Sherpas a line via the submit a site form. Or just come by the site and join the discussion.

Took off for a walk before a late lunch today and snapped these industrial landscapes with Instagram where you can find me as user placenamehere.

Read my earlier blog post on The CSS Pocket Guide for more info about the book at how to buy it! And if you already have, please let me know what you think in the comments here or via reviews on your favorite book retailer’s web site.

A quick cellphone snap for this Halloween, via the Instagram iPhone app.

Why Change?

I had been contemplating the change for some time now. I’ve used both systems, as well as others like Movable Type, for personal and client projects and have a good feel for each system’s strengths. I was seeing that where WP was headed is more aligned with where I think I want to take this site. It isn’t that there was anything wrong with Textpattern—in fact in many ways I still prefer it’s simplicity, template system and other core features. But that project seemed to have plateaud and contributions, updates and roadmaps are sometimes unclear. WordPress has continued to move forward and make easier some of the features I’ve been wanting to add (pingbacks, gravatars, other blogging and infrastructure fluff). But since these weren’t pressing needs, I just kept bumping the move until recently when I had the time to look at it again.

Data Importer Hiccups & Changes

Having a relatively simple markup structure to begin with for the old site’s templates made the theme transition relatively easy. By creating a child theme of Twenty Ten and editing just 9 of the files (along with a bit of experience) got me to what you see now. Given this is only a migration of a 2+ year old markup and CSS that’s been tweaked a few times too many there is certainly cleanup that needs to be done when I get a chance, but a redesign is another challenge for another day.

What I did have to wrestle with was the data migration. The current Textpattern importer plugin seemed a bit out of date and for my needs it needed a bit of customization. The requirements I laid out for a successful migration from Textpattern 4.2.0 to WordPress 3.0.1:

1. Post author needed to remain my user account in both systems.
2. Old permalinks needed to work, so /article/[ID]/[textstub] needed to be configured and IDs in the old system needed to be preserved.
3. Tags needed to be migrated from the old system to the new.
4. Post Body and Excerpt HTML fields needed to be imported so I didn’t have to configure Textile parsing for all old articles.

Items 1 and 2 required a little massaging before import.

1. Create the WordPress admin user with the same username as the author in Textpattern.
2. Delete all test posts, comments and pages from the MySQL database to free up any IDs.

Customization of the textpattern-importer plugin was required to make the rest happen. It wasn’t really a heavy job, but three changes needed to be made.

Swap the use of the Body and Excerpt containing Textile code with the “compiled” Body_html and Excerpt_html fields.

// Get Posts
return $txpdb->get_results('SELECT
	ID,
	Posted,
	AuthorID,
	LastMod,
	Title,
	Body_html,
	Excerpt_html,
	Category1,
	Category2,
	Status,
	Keywords,
	url_title,
	comments_count
	FROM '.$prefix.'textpattern
	', ARRAY_A);

Include the Keywords field (was this just overlooked? I don’t understand why it wasn’t there already). Also, insert the existing ID for each inserted post (as import_id).

$ret_id = wp_insert_post(array(
	'import_id'			=> $OldID,
	'post_date'			=> $Posted,
	'post_date_gmt'		=> $post_date_gmt,
	'post_author'		=> $authorid,
	'post_modified'		=> $LastMod,
	'post_modified_gmt' => $post_modified_gmt,
	'post_title'		=> $Title,
	'post_content'		=> $Body,
	'post_excerpt'		=> $Excerpt,
	'post_status'		=> $post_status,
	'post_name'			=> $url_title,
	'tags_input'		=> $Keywords,
	'comment_count'		=> $comments_count)
	);

What To Do With The Code Now?

I feel the need to share, but is it worth submitting back to the project?

I’ve uploaded both my customized importer plugin and a diff incase anyone else should want to attempt to use it. Please read my requirements above before you do, but it will probably be a smoother transition than the current plugin. I’d love to discuss contributing the changes back into the project with someone, but wouldn’t lobby for it without some discussion of which of my requirements are universal enough to make it (keywords, yes, HTML posts, dunno). Please use the comments section to let me know your thoughts on contributing this code back to WordPress—or report back if you’ve used the code.

Download pnh-textpattern-importer.zip which contains:

• textpattern-importer.php: (replace contents of /wp-content/plugins/textpattern-importer/textpattern-importer.php with this file after installing existing plugin)
• textpattern-importer.php.diff

Last Saturday I had the opportunity to attend “WordCamp NYC 2010”: on the Baruch College campus. The day started with a morning full of 5 minute lightning talks to help attendees choose which session to attend in the afternoon. I was up front taking photos of the speakers, photos are now up on flickr, and in this slideshow:

Session Roundups

In the afternoon, longer form presentations were given on a number of topics, from blogging, to academic use, and more technical topics. Here are some slide decks from some of the more interesting sessions—some I made it to and others I wish I did:

• Building a High Performance WordPress Environment by Matt Martz
• John Ford presented on Hardening Your WordPress Installation
• Sara Cannon introduced @font-face and other font embedding with Type in your WordPress Themes
• I don’t see slides up online, but check out the work at Universal Subtitles which Dean Jansen spoke about.

I think some of the sessions should be up on wordpress.tv at some point so keep an eye out for them.

See previous post for more info