Today, while commenting on the blog Do It By Hand, I clicked on another commenter’s link. It was mainly out of curiosity, but what it brought me to, and I can only believe that it is the actual commenter’s upcoming business, made my jaw drop. What could be so damn surprising that you were actually stunned by seeing it, you ask? Take a look at this, and then think for a minute before reading on.

If you build it, they will come

Right now you are probably thinking something along the lines of what I was. That is incredibly stupid. Who would pay a company to have people go to your blog and comment on it? Think really hard about that, because I have experience in seeing people pay for some incredibly stupid stuff, like setting up social media accounts. Why would they pay for that? They don’t have time, they don’t understand how or what it really is but they know they want it, or maybe they are not internet savy enough. Who knows, but the point is people do.

Now think about this service that CommentFlock is offering. Say you are a new blogger, and you don’t have the patience it takes to build a readership following. You want people to come to your blog and think you are writing something terribly important. “This blog must be awesome, look at all the comments each post has!” That is what you would want anyone visiting your blog to think. How do you do this quickly? You pay these guys, who pays other people to go and comment on your blog. They say on that page that up to 20 different commenters will come to your blog and post something up, and interact with the conversation taking place with the ‘real’ visitors.

As much as I hate the idea of what this guy/company is going to be doing, I see the potential because I know people will pay for it. All they need to think is that it will drive people to their site, and they will fork over the cash. It’s brilliant. Of course this made me think of something else.

Could there be a Social Media crash?

All of the above was just to get you thinking about what I’m going to write about next. Could this kind of thing lead to a Social Media crash? Not as drastic as the .com, but still influential. Think of all the social media sites that keep popping up out of no where. I swear I read about a new one every day. Then think of all the other sites that might try to cash in on the success of them. Advertisers, CommentFlock type companies, whatever. Think of all the tweets you get that are just retweets of other tweets. Some new article comes out on one of the major design/developer blogs, I get about 5 tweets from different people about it, and I am not following more than like 20 people. Then you go to a blog that is crammed full of robot like comments sent from CommentFlock. More companies start doing the same thing, and soon you might have robot comments actually talking to other non-real comments. Soon, you can’t tell what comment is pure crap, and which is real.

I know you are thinking that is all far fectched, but all the automatic stuff being sent by twitter, be it advertising, retweets, or randomly generated stuff, then these fluff comments, and who the hell knows what else could be coming, will all start to add up to a TON of useless info. I am beginning to wonder if there is a threshold for the amount of crap data being sent by all of these different social media sites that people are willing to take.

Just asking you to think about it

My point isn’t really about the comment company. It’s about all the useless stuff being sent through it. I love twitter, but I wish I could filter out tweets that are duplicates. I love reading blog comments (I like getting them too!). What if though, companies start taking advantage of social media in a way that it becomes so annoying. Will people drop off those services because they are getting more crap than good out of it? What about the companies that rely on the actual social media services themselves to make money if people did say screw it? Obviously there is no danger right now of something like that happening, but what about 5 years down the road when social media isn’t so new?

Just something I pondered today. Thoughts?

Coupon Code: webmachine

Second, added the Blogroll. Why? Because I want to give shout outs to people that are not as well known in the web developer “community”. You know, doing my part to keep it alive! Can’t say I’m not trying. Of course though I had to add 2 that are my favorites, and they are of course very well known. The third one is by Joseph McCullough, a regular poster here, who has added some cool discussion. If anyone could please go there and help him out, he is having a bit of trouble at the moment with his category list.

Third, still tightening up some CSS as I go. Tomorrow, I would like to build the footer properly…or at least start it.

Fourth, added a bit of jQuery to add a target of blank to any external link:

$('a:not([href*=jc-designs.net]').attr('target', '_blank');

Now, I can stop doing that crap manually. Whew.

First, Smashing Mag, if you weren’t on there on Monday…I believe, you might not know. Apparently they are in some financial trouble and were asking their readership to help them out by purchasing an e-book. I’m guessing they took on more than they could chew, but who really knows. What I do know, is that the e-book contains like 10 articles…8 of which have already been published, and two new exclusive items. For $10. Not a lot really, but for content that most of us who go there have seen? Bah. Better if they asked to buy their print book for $30.

Second, NetBeans IDE 6.8. I know there are a ton of IDE’s out there, and most people I know use Aptana. I always thought it was too bloated. I don’t use half the crap it comes with, and just a little too confusing to get things going. If you think its easy and awesome, that is fine. It IS good. But a co-worker of mine downloaded NetBeans and showed it to me. And it is exactly what I want. Nice and simple, supports Zen Coding (though not as much as I would like), subversion, ftp, and a great little Navigator Panel. It also has some damn awesome javascript features. I only saw that what it does with the Ext library, but I am going to assume it does the same for jQuery.

Lastly, I just saw an amazing looking jQuery slider done by Gilbert Pellegrom of Scotland. Here is a link to the Nivo slider.

Oh, and I upgraded my graphics card last night to a GeForce 9800GT, and got 2 new monitors…Samsung 21.5″ jobs…..so work will be really damn fun tonight.

Aaaannnnd I’m working on a wordpress theme to attempt to sell on themeforest.net that I have to get back to.

Big list of to do’s. I also want to post a really quick and dirty Wordpress theme building tutorial. Ugh…too much.

.entry ul li:before, #sidebar ul ul li:before {
      content: "0BB 020";
}

You know what that does in the default theme in Wordpress? It adss >> in front of all the sidebar list items. REALLY damn annoying. I searched the code for about 20 minutes and googled my rear off. Finally got the right search terms to bring up a forum post of someone trying to do the same thing.

Apparently you can use the content property to add things to the html…such as this example:

a:after {
     content: " (" attr(href) ")";
}

That adds the URL in parenthesis after each link. Interesting bit of css right there. Can’t think of a reason why I would use it off the top of my head, but still cool.

It was some tutorial on how to use this web application called Wufoo, which from the sounds of it, does all the hard work for you. Creates the css, xhtml, and parses the data from the form created. Sounds great, right? That was my first thought, but five seconds later, I changed my mind.

Why Jeremy? Why is this bad for heaven’s sake? It does all the work for you! My answer…because it does the work for you. I’m not saying short cuts and what not are bad, I’m saying there is too much of this sort of thing. I really dislike the idea of web designers being a jack of all trades. No one becomes good at any one thing. They just sort of start packing all this nonsense into there sites, but they don’t know how to do it themselves. To me, that is dangerous.

What if you designed a site for a client using…saaaaay…a jQuery slider. You don’t know jquery, but you DO know how to paste in a simple javascript tag linking to the library, and paste in the code for the slider in the html. Now say, the client says “Jeez Mr/Mrs. Designer, that is awesome…now make it do this!”

Only, you have NO idea how to make it do that. Now what? I’m sure you have an answer for me, pointing out that you can find a plugin to make it do whatever you need it to do. That is great, but there will come a day where you can’t. And you my friend, will be screwed.

This Wufoo thingy helps support just that. You have people that are great at nothing, but ok in a lot of stuff. I’d like to know too, what that type of designer puts on his/her resume for skill sets and such. In my example, you certainly cannot put jQuery down.

My point is, I think designers should try to be really good in at least one thing, be it Actionscript, Javascript, PHP…whatever, just something. Because anyone can be ok at the rest.

Oh and just for reference, I used the jQuery example because I have been guilty of that. I am trying to correct that now by learning javascript. I suggest getting good at something too! Fell free to criticize.

What won’t you see here? Damn, you guys are doing awesome with these questions. You won’t see a freakin’ 50 AMAZING ICON SETS lists, or why beer sites suck even though they are selling cool products. There are enough of those kinds of web mags. I’m not that. Of course if I’m offered the money, I’m sorry, but I will be selling out in a second. You would too, so shut up.

What you will see though are posts that tell you how to use a png in IE6 without any scripts, cool links to sites for tutorials or freeware that has helped me…like evernote. That damn thing has saved me so much time and headaches. Thank you to the guys that came up with that bit of kick ass.

I plan on writing a tutorial on how to do a Wordpress theme. Lame you say? Cause its been done? Ya, but they all suck. Mine will tell you what lines to copy and paste where, and that is it. Soooo much easier than half the crap I’ve read. I can’t claim the credit though. My supervisor at work was the one that told me how to do it. I’ve told him to write it up, but he never seems to find the time. Here is a link to his site to give him a little props: chriselias.com. I think if this tutorial were up somewhere, there would be a lot more happy developers in the world.

Anyway, I’m starting to like this blog, and I thought I would take some time to give it a design of itself. Not only that, but I gave it a title. Web Machine. I have a fascination with machines….anything mechanical with lots of parts. I designed a german style board game called The Machine some years ago (which sold about 15 copies, thank you very much!), and the idea has always stuck in my head. Some of you maybe chuckling to yourself saying, “Wow, that is lame.” Guess what…I don’t care. Go write your own damn blog, this one’s mine.

Why not a full blown redesign of my entire site, you ask? Well…my wife talked me out of it. She said the new look is too, hmmm, professional….corporate? I don’t know, but anyway, she convinced me to keep my old one. She likes it. I do too, but I’m really starting to like this new one as I work on it. But for now, I will let her win. She is usually right anyway. This new one has a lot in common with some popular web magazines. You might see my influences, you might not. But all-in-all, it will be my own creation.

I like this piece of writing. I think he has a bit of a chip on his shoulder, or at least it comes off that way to me, but his points are valid. It mainly deals with how one site, smashingmagazine.com has spawned a ton of copycat sites, to the point where you stop caring about any of them.

One of his “things” is the list type articles that they do. There is no real discussion on design as a whole. The community has pretty much become “Where are the 50 images of sites? You must suck if your article doesn’t show at least 30 things”. I would agree. In fact if you look at smash’s site now, you can find tons of list articles like 50 free buttons or 50 wordpress themes. Those would be fine, if like this author says, the people writing those articles wrote why each of those 30 things are there…why they are great, or why they suck.

Personally I like articles that show a problem in web design, and then tell you how to fix the damn thing. Which is what I try to do here even though all I seem to get is a lot of freakin’ spam. Its also hard to find the time to write something that you hope people will find some use of. I try though.

Anyway, if you are reading this, check out the article….its a good read.