I think it comes down to how designers and developers sell themselves, and the expectations put on them. Where a developer can talk about their skills, their contributions to a project, designers are expected to walk in with a portfolio of projects that they’ve designed from start to finish, on their own or as part of a team.

I think it’s also important that while software is great at iterating and evolving, design projects are delivered as a fixed quantity, and expected to work perfectly from day 1. I think there’s room for an open source design paradigm, but I think that much of the artwork for OS projects is delivered using a closed process.

To some extent, delivering it that way seems to work better for developers. They have one absolute standard to code against and solve, rather than having each revision in the design process necessitate many more code revisions.

I suppose since the company I work for is listed on the page she's wanking about, it's reasonable that I would be considered untrustworthy.  I think it says more about that status of the wankery, though.

Go Forth and Follow.

flShow WordPress Plugin

Today, my Chicago-based WordPress-powered design firm released their first plugin: WordPress Flash Photo Carousel Plugin.  It allows you to easily manage photo galleries from your media library, and creates a template tag to easily insert the Carousel Galleries into your theme.

I love working with WordPress 9-5.  It's different than building and supporting general use templates, though.  Most of our projects have little application outside of the very specific niche that our clients serve.  Occassionally, though, we need something broad enough that it's worth making widely available.  It's great to be able to give back to the community.

UDPATE: the plugin is now available on WordPress.org.

The guys at Six Apart have released Sandbox for Movable Type.  They've included the winning themes from the Sandbox Designs Competition.  The first step is to install Sandbox as a plugin.  After that, you'll be able to install Promised Land as a one click install¹ .  You can also manually install any Sandbox Child Theme, which means that the Bus Full of Hippies design should work on Movable Type as well.  Hopefully, this will make designing for Movable Type easier for people used to WordPress.  My previous attempts at using their templates failed, since there were no examples of using Pages as a navigation menu.  I'm having a little trouble with my own test blog, and I'm completely new to movable type. At this time, I won't be able to provide support for the Movable Type version of the theme, but Movable Type does provide their own support, which is undoubtedly strong.

1. My own attempt failed to copy down the background images, YMMV. (back ↩)

The issue that most of these services seems to be trying to mediate is "truthiness" or "authority".  Assigning some sort of integer to the value that a commenter typically brings to a discussion.  The first such plugin that I tried was Buddycards, which were relatively non-invasive as far as layouts go.  The problem being that not enough people use the 30boxes service, or were willing to create another profile just to have an identity to map to their truthiness.

The next one I tried (that I remember) was SezWho.  All of my comments were imported there, so that users can claim their comments here, to obtain better karma elsewhere.  Disqus followed later this year, you can claim your comments at archgfx.disqus.com.   The problem with both of these is that the company's entire business revolves around comment authority, which is inherently tarnished by a profit motive.  If we can't trust the company, how can we map real trustworthiness to their scale of authority?

Centralized anti-spam services play largely the same game, and indeed disqus appropriately cuts out Akismet, Defensio, or any local spam prevention measures.  Ultimately, anti-spam services don't try (yet) try to merge disparate communities.  That's the biggest problem I see with comment authority - The authority I would have on a music blog is different from the authority I might have on a tech blog.  The comments I might leave on a feminist blog would be little more than conjecture or anecdote.

Ultimately, the reason that I, and most people choose to run our own blogging app, instead of using a hosted service like wordpress.com or blogspot, is that we don't want to be dependant on the standards and defaults of a larger, authoritarian group.  By removing the ability to customize, and normalizing the authority of commenters, commenting services like disqus take away the things I like about having my own blog, even while they attempt to mitigate the unpleasant elements of spam and trolls.  Anonymity and decentralization are linchpins in the present nature of the internet.

I haven't bothered installing Intense Debate or JS-Kit yet, because each new plugin from a non-reputable source is another security risk, as I allow it to rummage through my database for comment information, and email addresses of people who wordpress assured wouldn't be shared.