LOLspeak is infiltrating the universe. Imagine my surprise when my Flickr page greeted me this morning with this:

It is a language now.

This isn’t what you think. Tabbing between form fields is a built in behavior in modern web browsers that admittedly saves a load of time and is extremely convenient. This article is not about tabbing between form fields. It’s about tabbing IN form fields.

As someone who spends a lot of time in a web browser, and a lot of time again coding in a web browser, this has been one of my biggest pet peeves. One of the principles of clear code is lots of whitespace. Tabs help set hierarchy and make code much more readable. In your web browser, if you press the “Tab” key in a form field, you just jump to the next input. This is inconvenient! I want to make my code readable! And I don’t want to press the spacebar a thousand times to make it so!

Fortunately, there’s a great Firefox extension that fixes this! It’s called “Tabinta”, which stands for Tab in Textarea. Simply install the extension and you’ll be able to make tabs in multi-line text inputs! It’s simple to turn off as well (just right click!) and offers a wealth of configuration options through Firefox’s about:config. I’m seriously so happy I found this.

Right-oh, nose back to the grindstone!

I’m really excited for the upcoming Wordpress 2.7 update. I know that as soon as it gets here, it will be underrated, but I’m excited now regardless.

The new admin interface is my main reason for excitement. I never really knew what problems people had with the older admin interfaces, but after test-driving 2.7, I see a lot of room for improvement in 2.6.x.

Regardless of the changes, I’m just thankful that Wordpress is Wordpress. I maintain a website for one of my clients that uses Joomla, which I personally think is just a mess.

Clients: Please don’t do this. And yes, it has happened like this.

In order to make it as easy as possible for a potential client to engage my services, I decided to switch from a PDF based client questionnaire to a web form. While this would be an easy enough task with HTML, I decided to use the excellent cformsII Wordpress plugin. This plugin can create elaborate custom contact forms, with many swanky features such as regular expression validation, email confirmations, CAPTCHAs, and a database store.

CformsII is extremely easy to setup. Just download the plugin from the Wordpress plugins site, extract it with your favorite zip program, and upload the entire folder to your wp-content/plugins/ directory. Login and activate the plugin. You’ll notice a new “cformsII” entry on the tab bar. Click on it to start creating your forms.

The cforms screen should make sense to you pretty quickly. Simply add form fields to the list, select the type, and choose any additional options, like required fields and regular expression validation. When you’ve created the form, the options below will set up the delivery of your data.

Now that you know how it works, why not hire me to do it for you?

Ok, so I had enough of a break this week from doing everyone else’s projects to get into the nitty-gritty of updating my own site. I’ll be cracking on here as I’m at leisure. So far I’ve updated the color scheme (I love brown!), the header graphics, favicon, and categories. I’ll still be working on the sidebar and navigation, as well as the little details. I’m very happy with how this is coming together!

Much to my surprise, some of my work was recently featured on a great church marketing blog I read. Check out the post here, and keep track of what I’m working on at my flickr page. Also be sure to check out the Church Marketing Lab for some great peer review!

Well, I’m back.

After a brief hiatus, I’m back in front of my computer, only now the computer is in Bonita Springs, Florida. We had a hectic couple of weeks through the end of July. My wife is now getting settled in to her internship, and I’m ready to start kicking out projects. My first official Erik Teichmann Design project is done now. Messiah Lutheran Church of Amherst, New Hampshire has a fully updated website running on Wordpress. Check it out at www.messiahnh.org. I’ve spent yesterday updating a personal site I run for my wife and I. Even though it isn’t a commercial project, I still think it turned out nice. Visit www.eriknsarah.com to see it. This one is running on Textpattern. Anyway, now that I’m settled in, please feel free to contact me for jobs. At the moment I’ll be doing this work full time, so expect quick turnaround.

Traditionally, organizing an email inbox has been a chore. If all emails from clients come to your address, then it’s a sorting game into folders. Simple email filters can make this a lot easier, but there’s always the question of your filter criteria. Usually, filtering by source address or domain can help, but this can lead to problems with clients with multiple points of contact or multiple email addresses.

I’ve found a simple solution to this using Gmail. I use Gmail for Domains for my email system, and this includes a nice feature. When giving contact information to clients, I append an identifier onto the end of the email address, like this: erik+client-name@eriktdesign.com.  This way, I can set up one filter for each client to sort by “To:” address into a single label for each client. Aside from saving hassle, this has several other benefits. First, you can see where referrals come from. Assuming your client gives someone else your contact information, you can clearly see that this new prospect has come in through a particular client. Also, you can tell if your email address has been sold down the river, and easily filter out the ensuing spam.

Jen at Pop Stalin also gave some good advice on organizing projects.

Good morning, friends.

I’ve taken the plunge and signed up with Dreamhost for my website hosting. I did a fair amount of research, but by no means exhaustive. I had decided to use Wordpress as a CMS for the site/blog after successfully using it for a church website backend, so the first place I started to look for hosting was at Wordpress.org. Dreamhost tops the list there, presumably because of the special pricing they have for Wordpress users (seriously, if I ever use a terabyte of disk storage… [well, never say never]).

Another host I considered was HostICan. The plan they offer is similar enough for me, and came recommended by Pop Stalin Design. However, after some looking around, I found some negative feedback with regards to their CPU limits.

So anyway, Dreamhost it is. The one-click installs they offer are pretty nice, though it isn’t that hard to set up Wordpress on your own (did that on my local machine first for a test-drive). Also, it was simple enough to set up Project Pier for my project management needs. More on that later.

So setup was a breeze. DNS seems to have propagated, so we’re live from nine to five (figuratively speaking). Stay tuned for more nerdy bits, as well as an actual design (by me!) for this site.

Cheers!