The shift from film to digital happened quickly, as most things technology related tend to do. Years ago when I bought my first point and shoot digital camera, I was excited that during my procrastination, Olympus released  This .2 Megapixel enhancement meant that I could print a file over 10% larger than the 1.8 version and made printing an 8×10 a possibility for me.  Fast-forward to the present, my iPhone has a 2.0 Megapixel camera and a “professional quality” camera such as the Canon Powershot G6 (7.1 Megapixels) can now be had for around $200 (less than I paid for my original Olympus).

Digital photography allows us to point, shoot, then easily post photos on our blogs, email to friends and family, share on social networks, and create online photo albums, all without ever having to use annoying digital scanners.  But, you can take it further.  The pointing and shooting delivers the digital photographer the raw material ready to adjust, tint, dodge and burn into perfection.  Below are some of the tools of the trade.

Long considered the industry standard, Adobe Photoshop is a fantastic photo manipulation tool.  The limits of Photoshop lie only in the user’s ability or imagination.  The drawbacks are: a fairly high cost ($699 for a full license of Adobe Photoshop CS4) and a steep learning curve.  If you can get past these two barriers Photoshop is a fantastic tool.  Learn more at Jack Nack’s Blog and at Information Contraband.

For those of you lucky enough to be reading this on a Mac, you know that OSX comes bundled with iPhoto.  iPhoto allows a fair bit of adjustment to your digital photos, an extremely user-friendly method of publishing photos to the web or even creating reasonably priced photo albums (printed – old school).  If you are a Mobile Me member – your publishing with iPhoto is even easier.  While a wonderful application, iPhoto has its shortcomings.  It is perfect for mild retouching but for someone seeking a more professional tool, Aperture 2.0, Apple’s answer to Adobe Lightroom, may be worth a look.  Apple includes many Aperture tutorials on thier site – and with just a bit of pointing and clicking, you’ll be on your way to professional retouching.

So whether you’re new to digital photography, or you’ve been enjoying it for a while – check out how some of these tools might enhance your photos and the fun you have with them.

Cool Climate Jobs is an exciting new online job resource for the climate and renewable energy communities. Featuring jobs in the climate, renewable energy, and green collar research, policy, and practice fields from around the world, Cool Climate Jobs is free to browse as well as an affordable platform to promote your employment opportunities. It’s just $125 ($100 for non-profit organizations) for a 4 week posting – internship postings are always free. There are also sponsorship and advertizing opportunities to showcase your event or organization directly to thousands of skilled members of the climate and renewable energy industries.

For more information visit: www.coolclimatejobs.com (then check it out on your iPhone!).

Invisible Window’s Top 10 Mac Applications for building standards compliant web sites.

TextMate (macromates.com) The opening sentence on TextMate’s site puts it pretty perfectly “TextMate brings Apple’s approach to operating systems into the world of text editors.” One of the hardest things about Switching to a Mac was finding a good editor for writing (X)HTML and PHP code. TextMate has all of the features I was looking for, including custom color coding and a project viewer. At €39 (~$50) it’s not the cheapest editor out there, but In my opinion is one of the best.

Photoshop (adobe.com/products/photoshop/) From creating designs to cutting up design comps to optimizing and editing images – I am really un-aware of any application that competes with Photoshop. It is the industry standard, has been for years, and doesn’t have a real competitor. At $650 it is not cheap, but most developers will agree, bite the bullet – this is one application you’re going to use.

CSSEdit (macrabbit.com/cssedit/) This application inspired this post. Traditionally the job of editing CSS (or most any file type) fell to the text editor – developers have successfully edited CSS with text editors like TextMate for years. CSSEdit takes a different approach in that it was designed with one thing in mind – to edit CSS. CSSEdit does this perfectly and has many features that make building standards driven web sites much easier. One of the most helpful features is the ability to preview the page you are editing and see which declarations affect a highlighted area. Go buy CSSEdit, it will be one of the best $29.00 you’ve ever spent.

Transmit (panic.com/transmit/) The nature of building web sites is that eventually, you’ll have to move files to a server (otherwise it’s really hard for the world to view your work). In order to do that, you’ll have to have a FTP application. Transmit has a slick user interface and works flawlessly. You can buy Transmit for $29.95.

Firefox (mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/) Truth be told, in order to build a proper site, you’re going to have to look at your work in quite a few browsers (on at least 2 OSs). Through use and surfing, you’ll pick a favorite to use for your “normal” browsing, for me, that browser is Firefox, although I also have Camino, Flock, and Safari loaded on the Mac – and have a PC so that I can view sites in IE. One of the nicest things about browsers (other than bringing us the web) is that they can be downloaded for free!

Adium (adiumx.com/) Web developers tends to be a collaborative lot – email works – but IM works faster. The problem with IM is that every different service has a different application and everyone I need to stay in contact with tends to be on a different service from everyone else. In the past, this meant many different clients all open – all taking up valuable desktop space. By supporting all major IM services (aside from Skype) in one handy application, Adium simply rules. Oh yeah, and it’s free.

Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) I am old-school, I’ve been developing websites since Vi was standard. Sometimes it’s just quicker to do something on the server rather than mess with FTP, edit, re-FTP etc. Terminal is built right into the Mac framework (and rumor has it that Leopard’s terminal will feature tabbed sessions).

Flash (adobe.com/products/flash/flashpro/) Being a fan of standards compliant web development, full on flash sites are not my cup of tea, but often times using flash as a supplement really enhances a site. Originally developed by Macromedia, Adobe now distributes Flash. Adobe is synonymous with two things, excellent quality and big price tags – Flash will set you back nearly $700 – yikes!

HyperEdit (tumultco.com/HyperEdit/) HyperEdit is a great text editor and could easily satisfy all the needs of a savy web developer. I stumbled upon HyperEdit after using TextMate for quite a while and was un-willing to switch. So what puts this ap on the list? HyperEdit has a PHP compiler which allows testing and de-bugging of PHP code without the need to transfer a file to the server. HyperEdit is a great time saver. You’ll quickly recover the $19.95 it sets ya back.

iTunes (apple.com/itunes/) So strictly speaking iTunes won’t help you build a website. But who wants to develop in silence? iTunes is a great ap, and we all know that.

First, obviously, you will need to get WordPress and install it. If you’re new to WordPress, take a moment to play around with the interface. Familiarize yourself with the features, at this point in time you should be able to view your blog, login, make posts, and add pages. Now before yo get too far along…let’s start customizing.

The home page of your new site should now be your most recent blog postings – it’s pretty cool – lots of great information on that page. Generally speaking, a web site’s home page acts like an information kiosk – directing visitors to where they want to go within your site – a “recent blog posts” for your home page won’t really accomplish that goal. Home pages have very different jobs than the rest of the pages on a site and need a different look to do this job properly. So without further ado, let’s get a unique home page for our new site.

In WordPress version 2.1 which is current as of this writing, creating a unique index page is quite simple. How to do this is covered in detail here (on the WordPress Codex) and here (in the WordPress support forums) (if you visit this link – skip forward – the beginning of the thread is from over 2 years ago and reference WordPress 1.5). Here are the steps in case you don’t want to wade through all of that info.

1. In your WordPress admin, create a new page. Put some content on it (you can always go back and edit later) and save it – (Call it “Home”)
2. In your themes directory (WordPressRoot/wp-content/themes/YourSelectedTheme) copy your page.php page and name it home.php
3. Using your favorite text editor, Edit your new home.php page and right after the code for the header
   get_header();
?> insert this
   query_posts('pagename=Page Name');
?>

   Where “Page Name is the name of your page (ex. “Home”).

4. Save home.php and with your favorite FTP application, upload it to your web server.

That is it. You should have a unique home page now.

Now that you have a unique home page maybe you want the navigation to each of your pages to show up. Now explaining EXACTLY how to do this is tough because there are nearly a zillion WordPress themes out there and the code behind each of them is just a little bit different from the next. The following code is the key:

if (is_home()) {$pg_li .=”current_page_item”;}
?>

generally this code should go in your header file (WordPressRoot/wp-content/themes/YourSelectedTheme/header.php) but again – lots of themes – lots of different ways to do it (so we’re not spending too much time on it).

Now – you have a unique home page – you have your pages showing as nav, what if you want to call your blog something other than “BLOG” and what if you want it last in your navigation list (or as the Codex refers to it ” Making your blog appear in a non-root folder”)? Well it begins much like making a unique home page.

First, create a blog template. The easiest way to do this is to create a file named blog.php with the following contents in your theme directory:

/*
Template Name: Blog
*/
// Which page of the blog are we on?
$paged = get_query_var('paged');
query_posts('cat=-0&paged='.$paged);
load_template(TEMPLATEPATH . '/index.php'); //loads index
?>

Log into WordPress and create a page named “Your New Name For Your Blog” with template “blog”. You’re done. The one last thing you will want to do is to update your permalinks structure to begin with “/blog/”, ie, “/blog/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/”. How you ask? Easy! Log into your admin system – Click on the “Options” tab, now Click on “Permalinks” then select the “Custom” radio button and enter this in the text field “/%postname%”. Voilla, done! Now you have a WordPress-managed CMS with a unique front page and logically-structured blog content. Not only does this make your site appear better, this logical format of URL display should also help search engines catalog your site.

I think that’s going to do it for WordPress 101. Look for WordPress 102 to come in the following weeks. In that lesson we will address:
Unique pages (how to put WordPress administrated code into your side bar etc.)
Portfolio (how to put thumb nail images in your side bar and display full images in the content area)
Customizing the Templates (we’ll cover a bit of everything here).

See you soon, and don’t hesitate to leave comments, I will try to answer them all to the best of my ability.

This is not necessarily part of WordPress 101, but it is a great tutorial on how to install and configure WordPress.