Bibliography
I recently posted that I “eventually” want to have a Bibliography of resources used for various aspects of The Wilder Place and Our Genealogy… no time like the present…
I’ve finally got The Wilder Place converted to WordPress… yeah… from Movable Type… boo.. and Our Genealogy on-line… thanks to TNG software…
Quite honestly, I’m very impressed with TNG software’s capabilities… As you may know, the entire genealogical area has exploded over the last 15 years, due to the internet… and my experience putting 6000+ names on-line without 6000+ pages of HTML… in a very short period of time (1 week) is nothing less than trilling… the various areas of the site are generally (very loosely spoken) looking the same, with basically the same color scheme, so you my lovely visitor, aren’t totally thrown off… lost in virtual space.
I did a lot of research prior to choosing TNG and WordPress… I wanted to use the same technologies for all of our modules, both now and into the foreseeable future, and I didn’t want it to cost my first-born nor any attached appendages… so I chose Apache, MySQL, and PHP… my ISP (www.ixWebHosting.com) has provided me with all three since 2005… but these technologies have a healthy learning curve for me… even though I’ve been in program and engineering management for over 20 years… I’ve been away from the fun hands-in-the-mud playing within my field of software engineering for at least half of that… fortunately its really only the specifics that have changed, the fundamentals are all still there…. and learning has always been more about my own initiative and love of reading than about technical complexity.
Without further ado (or rambling)…
The Wilder Place – Blog
- Powered by WordPress
- WordPress has wonderful documentation at codex.wordpress.org. I specifically started at Blog and Design Layout with an initial goal to tie everything (blog and genealogical records) together at the same time as adding various new features (i.e., chat, Surname forums, etc.)… I’m reading, following links and making copious notes
BOOKs
- WordPress Theme Design: A complete guide to creating professional WordPress themes - by Tessa Blakeley Silver, easy to read. It only has a little over 200 pages, but it’s packed with information and resources.
- Designing for the Social Web (Voices That Matter)
– by Joshua Porter. I should write the reviews as soon as I finish reading the book. But, I have lots marked in this little power house of a book to use as I continue to refine this site.
- Tagging: People-powered Metadata for the Social Web (Voices That Matter)
- by Gene Smith. This is a truly stellar book. I work for a large company and I plan to make some implementation recommendations at work. We all suffer from information overload; tagging is an extremely flexible mechanism for finding your things again, which surpasses the rigid folder/category approach.
- Building a WordPress Blog People Want to Read
This is a very helpful book. It really helped in areas that involved modification of the template and use of WordPress. I highly recommend it.
WEB SITES
- Position Is Everything with solutions to web browser bugs
- How to Size Text in CSS
- Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid
- Web Typography
TOOLs – the software I’m using to develop this site
- Mozilla’s Firefox – not just hype really helps with web development, there’s a lot to like with Firefox and while I like Firefox best (more and more as time goes on) I also check my pages in Internet Explorer (IE), Opera, and Safari for my PC
- Notepad++ – Stellar text editor for CSS, php, etc.
- Color Scheme Designer – very cool online tool which helped me to nail down my upcoming color schema
