Hey Folks,

Thanks to all who showed up for the Holiday Meetup on Dec. 15. I had a great time and hope you did too. :)

In fact, I'd like to thank all of you who participated in the Meetup over the course of 2009, our most successful year yet. :)

I hope you all have safe, fun, and Happy Holidays and a Wonderful New Year!

Look forward to seeing you next year at the January Meetup, where we'll have a CPA come and discuss the financial and accounting aspects of setting up and running a small biz!

Here are some notes and my top ten lists from the Meetup. I've also posted these in the Message Board's Meetup Notes thread.

Moving WordPress
First, we'd talked a bit about moving WordPress from a sub-folder to appear as if it were served up from the root of your site. For example, if you installed WordPress in a sub-folder like 'wordpress' while you're developing the WordPress site, but you don't want users to have to visit mydomain.com/wordpress to see your site, you can easily move a few files, change a few settings and have your new WordPress site available when visiting mydomain.com.

There's an article on the WordPress Codex that covers this issue from a slightly different perspective:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory

The above article assumes you've installed WordPress into the root of your hosting account and want to move the WordPress files to a subfolder. In our case, the files are already there, but we want to make it look as though there's no subfolder.

In case the above article's confusing, I've excerpted and edited the instructions below:

• We're assuming that your wordpress files are located in your /wordpress directory. Your 'root' web directory is one level up. Login to WordPress.
  
• Go to the General panel.
  
• Leave the box for WordPress address (URL) as it is.
  
• In the box for Blog address (URL): change the address to the root directory's URL: http://www.mydomain.com
  
• Click Update Options. (Do not worry about the error message and do not try to see your blog at this point! You will probably get a message about file not found.)
  
• Copy the index.php and .htaccess files from the WordPress directory into the root directory of your site (Blog address). The .htaccess file is invisible, so you may have to set your FTP client to show hidden files. If you are not using pretty permalinks, then you may not have a .htaccess file.
  
• Open your root directory's index.php file in a text editor.
  
• Change the following and save the file. Change the line that says: require('./wp-blog-header.php'); to the following, using your directory name for the WordPress core files: require('./wordpress/wp-blog-header.php');
  
• Login to the new location: www.mydomain.com/wordpress/wp-admin/
  
• If you have set up Permalinks , go to the Permalinks panel and update your Permalink structure. WordPress will automatically update your .htaccess file if it has the appropriate file permissions. If WordPress can't write to your .htaccess file, it will display the new rewrite rules to you, which you should manually copy into your .htaccess file (in the same directory as the main index.php file.)
  

Let me know if you have any questions.

Definition Lists

I mentioned how much I love Definition Lists in html and illustrated a few possible uses for them. My love of definition lists can largely be blamed on Dan Cederholm, author of BulletProof Web Design, Web Standards Solutions, and Handcrafted CSS. I can't recommend his stuff highly enough. You can visit his site directly at: http://simplebits.com

General format looks like this:

<dl>
<dt>Defined Term</dt>
<dd>Definition</dd>
</dl>

More info on the W3C site: http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html3/deflists.html (note that they're using uppercase for their tags, which you'd not do in xhtml - keep them lowercase.

My Top Ten Lists

My Top 10 Web Dev Sites & Services of 2009

• Google.com – not only am I a google search junkie, but I also use tons of their other tools including: Chrome, gmail, calendar, contacts, docs, webmaster tools, analytics, reader, Earth, YouTube . . . .
  
• Highrisehq.com – a 37signals product. Web-based contact manager that focuses on simplicity and usability. Keep track of contacts, companies, deals, cases, and more.
  
• Basecamphq.com – a 37signals product. Web-based project management.
  
• Dropbox.com – dropbox is cloud-based file syncing and backup software. Wonderful if you use multiple PCs.
  
• SitePoint.com – they've got forums, books, a podcast, articles and much more.
  
• cnet.com – good product reviews, articles, and great podcasts including Buzz Out Loud, Gadgettes, CNET Conversations.99designs.com – post design projects online and get lots of designers competing to win your job.
  
• Delicious.com – social web-based bookmarking.
  
• WordPress.org – between the forums, the Codex (documentation), and the theme and plugin. directories, there's months worth of reading here.
  
• MailChimp.com – kick ass email list management tailored for designers.
  
• AListApart.com – great articles from some of the web's visionaries.
  

My Top 10 Web Designer Pet Peeves

• Tables for layout. Hate them. Nested tables are even worse.
  
• Navigation that depends on Images and/or JavaScript.
  
• FrontPage-based designs. Not acceptable. Death to the <font> tag!
  
• Centered body text.
  
• Non-semantic naming (.style1, .style1, .blue).
  
• Underlined text (non-links).
  
• Freaking Flash! Don't get me wrong, Flash is awesome, but often overused and rarely made accessible. Don't use it for navigation.
  
• Disable right-click for image protection.
  
• Autoplay videos and music. NSFW!
  
• Click here links.
  

My Top 10 Free Software Tools (as in 'Beer' and 'Speech')

• Linux (Ubuntu)
  
• Firefox
  
• Thunderbird 3
  
• Web Developer Toolbar (Firefox add-on)
  
• Firebug (Firefox add-on)
  
• FileZilla
  
• Bazaar - Version Control System
  
• LAMP (I know, it's cheating – Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python)
  
• OpenSSH
  
• WordPress