The birth of nicolasdecorte.be V3

it's over...

2010-01-05T23:30:00.002+01:00

Hi,

I just wanted to say that I kind of screwed this blog up by not posting my progress anymore. But that's okay I guess, 'cause nobody was reading it anyway :-)

But here's the good news, the website did get finished, and it also has a blog. So if you're interested in what I'm up to now, or you're curious if I'm going to screw this new blog up too, have a look at http://www.nicolasdecorte.be

Errors that make you want to rip your head off

2009-09-24T20:26:00.001+02:00

When you’re a web designer, or any other kind of programmer you’ll probably be familiar with following problem. You’re thinking about your newest design, making sketches, writing down your thoughts perform some tests and there it is… The Light… You have a superb idea!
And there you go, you start implementing. You program the screens, the backbone and whatever other thing you need to program, and then it’s time for the big moment. You press the button (or enter or anything), you’re expecting the best, the really best, ‘because let’s face it… you are the best… But the system says: “Nope, ain’t gonna do it”.
Yes, it’s sad but true, you got an error.
So you curse a little, browse through the code to see if you can find anything that shouldn’t be there, you start downloading half the internet, you curse a little more, you smoke 10 cigarettes in one hour like that’s going to help, and at the end… hopefully… you find a solution. Now that ruined all the fun didn’t it? Isn’t that one of those situations where you want to rip your head off?

Now here’s a case study:

In Drupal, I wanted to implement a fancy image gallery. As I’m not the kind of guy who wants to invent the warm water all over again (you may call it lazy if you want), I started browsing the web for solutions. And there it was, the image gallery I’d been dreaming of. So I read the manual, implemented the module, everything was ready to upload the first image, and BAM! An error:

Unable to create scaled Thumbnail image.

No man lost, maybe this module isn’t exactly bug-free, so I downloaded another fancy image gallery module (although not as fancy as the first one), implemented it, but again the system said “Screw you, ain’t gonna happen”.
So I started browsing the internet, downloaded thousand and one different tools, patches, and all other crap, but still nothing.
But then I found a forum, which stated that this error actually didn’t have anything to do with Drupal, but with my PHP installation… When I thought I was a specialist who could install Apache with PHP with my eyes closed I may have done something wrong after all. Next thing I knew I was messing up my installation, editing my PHP.ini file, adding new lines, deleting them again, adding them again, starting the web server, stopping it, restarting it… You know the drill, don’t you?
So are you wondering what solved the problem? Well… I was editing the wrong php.ini file. Whenever I found out which file was actually used it was piece of cake, and the upload of images worked well.

Isn’t that always the case? It’s those small stupid things which keep you up all night searching for a solution. It happens very rarely that I spend my time searching for a problem that appears to be a bug in the software. 99 percent of the time it’s just one stupid mistake.
That really makes me wanting to screw my head loose and put it on a stick!

Where did I get my inspiration?

2009-09-11T13:00:00.000+02:00

I didn’t get any inspiration… I’m the inventor of travel blogs. In fact, I’m the inventor of blogging!

Now I have to tell you something that’ll blow your mind, so maybe you better sit down first.
Sitting down?
ready?
Okay, here we go: The first sentence of this post is a big lie, I didn’t really invent blogging…
You can’t believe it, do you? I KNOW! It sounds strange but it’s the truth…

I have been reading several blogs in the past, mostly because Google came up with them when I was searching for something. I wasn’t really following any, I just read the information I was looking for, and if it was very interesting, I also read some other articles on the blog.

At that time I thought blogging was something for people with too much time.
Why would anyone want to write technical articles? Most of the information can be found in books or on professional websites.
And why would someone want to write personal stuff? An online diary… wasn’t the purpose of a diary that it’s personal? Something you hide in a box with a lock under your bed?

Don’t worry, in the meantime I’ve changed my opinion! Bloggers are people who have something to say which might interest other people. And even if it helps only one person in the whole wide world, that’s one more than if he kept his idea for himself.

But back to the topic. You need to know that I really like travel stories. I regularly buy books from Peter Moore http://www.petermoore.net/ >, Michael Palin http://www.palinstravels.co.uk/ >, Brian Thacker http://www.brianthacker.tv/blog/home/> and many others, and it’s always been a dream of me to become a travel writer myself.
But next to the “real” travel writers, there are thousands of “amateur” writers who post their stories for free on the internet. Some of them do this on websites like BootsnAll http://www.bootsnall.com>, and others have their own website or blog.

That’s how one day I stumbled upon the websites of Marc Moxon http://www.moxon.net/> and Nomadic Matt .
The website of Marc consists of stories he has written about his travels, and Matt mostly writes blog posts about his is travels together with travel tips. But the thing they have in common is that they love travelling and they love writing. It’s not their purpose to earn big money with it (and honestly, I don’t think they are), but I’m quite sure they’ve been helpful to one or two persons.
Well this is where I got my mustard. This is what I wanted to do too!

So I started reading about blogging and bloggers. This is how I got to know the Art of Nonconformity http://chrisguillebeau.com/3x5/>. After I’d read the manifesto, I was sold. I’ve read the whole site…
Another inspiring blog is In the Hot Spot http://inthehotspot.wordpress.com/>. Anabel (the blogger) is someone who tries to live of blogging. She tells about her (very interesting) life, her travels, her migration from UK to New Zealand to Panama to Australia and so on.

The last blog I want to show you is Men with Pens http://menwithpens.ca/>. It’s a great blog about blogging, very interesting and the blogger is damn funny!

Now to finish, I’ll let you in to a little secret. I know I’ve let you down in the beginning of this post, but I’ll try to make it up to you.
I may not be the inventor of blogging, I even may not be the inventor of travel blogging, but the idea of writing a blog about the creation of a website is totally MINE! Maybe someone else has done it before me, I don’t know, but I promise that I came up with it all by myself!

Handling linked primary and secundary menus in Drupal

2009-09-04T13:00:00.001+02:00

Here it is…my first Drupal tutorial! The reason why I wrote this is because it took me about a day to figure out how I could link different secondary menus to certain primary menus. I couldn’t find much helpful information on the web, so here goes…

What I wanted to do is following:
On the top pane of the website I have the primary menu with several items. Then on the left pane, I wanted different secondary menus, displayed depending on the choice in the primary menu.
Are you still with me?
I’ll give an example: Let’s say that my primary menu consists of the options “Articles” and “Photography”. When someone presses the Photography button, a sub menu needs to appear in the left pane with the options “Travel photos”, “Portraits” and “Projects”. When someone presses the button “Articles”, I want a sub menu in the left pane with “Travel articles” and “Web design articles”. Do you see what I mean?

Basic knowledge
To be able to follow this tutorial, I expect that you had a first touch and feel of Drupal. It might also be useful if you already played a bit with menus and blocks.
Also note that this tutorial is for Drupal v6.*

Enabling the Path module
First of all you need to enable the “Path” module.
Go to: Administer > Site building > Modules
In the category “core-optional”, search for the Path module, check it and press Save.

The primary menu
First we want to create our primary menu which will appear on top of the screen. We will use the “primary links” menu which is installed by default.
Go to: Administer > Site building > Menus > Primary links
Go to the tab Add item
We don’t have a page or story yet, so in the path field, we’ll just fill out “node/add”, as proposed by Drupal. In the Menu link title field we fill out “Photography”, and we leave the other options as they are. To finish we press the save button.

Now we do the same for the Articles menu. We can set the path again to “node/add”.
Note that by changing the weight of your menu item, you select where it will appear in the menu. The lighter the item, the higher (or more to the left because we work with a horizontal menu) it will appear in the menu. For Photography we took weight “0”, so if we take e.g. “5” for Articles, the Photography item will appear first and the Articles item will appear last. Let’s say we take “-5” for Articles, the order will be the other way around.

* HINT: don’t let your weights follow directly on each other. Maybe later you’ll want to insert a new item between two existing items, and if you don’t have any “free” weights in between, you’ll need to change the weight of your other items too.

Now go to the tab List items, and you’ll see your newly created menu items.

The next step is to determine where your primary menu should be shown.
Go to: Administer > Site building > Blocks
Search for the Primary links block and change the region to “header”. You’ll notice that the block now appears in the header section.

Don’t forget to press the Save button.

The secondary menus
The next step is to create our secondary menus. The most logical solution seems to be the use of the predefined “Secondary links” menu, right? Wrong! Because we want to create several different secondary menus, we’ll need to create our own menus.
Let’s start with the submenu for Articles.
Go to: Administer > Site building > Menus
Go to the tab Add menus
We give our menu a name and a title, and we press Save.

Now a new empty menu has been created.
You might also want to do the same for every other submenu you want to create (e.g. Photography).
Note that we didn’t add any items to the menu (yet).

Next thing we need to do is define the location of this menu, which we do (similarly to the primary item) with blocks.
Go to: Administer > Site building > Blocks
You’ll notice that by creating the Articles menu, the system also created an articles block. You change the region of this block to “Left sidebar”.
Now press the configure operation of your Articles block (it’s next to region).
This is where we can set when a certain block is or isn’t shown. Let us have a look at the possibilities:

User specific visibility settings: Custom visibility settings
This is where you can define if a user can hide a block or not. We don’t want our users to hide our submenu, so we take the option “Users cannot control whether or not they see this block”.

Role specific visibility settings: Show block of specific roles
Who should be able to see our submenu? Everyone, I guess… So we just don’t check anything, because nothing seems to mean everything here.

Page specific visibility settings: Show block on specific pages
This is where it gets interesting. Here’s where we define on which pages the menu should be shown.
I can already think of a couple pages that’ll certainly need this menu: the default “Articles” page, the default “Travel articles” page and the default “Web design articles” page. But then what? For each article, we’ll probably create a new page, does this mean that after creating every new article, we’ll need to add it to this setting? That seems very time annoying and time consuming… Indeed, but there’s a trick!
Let’s just leave this setting as it is for now, press Save, and we’ll come back to this later.

Create content for the submenu
Now let us start creating the default pages for our articles.
First things first, the default “Articles” page, which appears when the Articles button in the primary menu is pressed.
Go to: Create content > Page
Give the page a title and enter some content in the body
All other settings can be left as they are, except for the URL path settings where you fill something like “articles/articles”.
What we’re doing here is a way of grouping our pages. The first part (before the slash) is the name of the group, the second part is the name of the page. I propose that you group your pages similar to your primary menu items, but you can go as far in this as you want, creating several subgroups. E.g. if you’re planning to write a lot of articles about different CMS, you might want to create “articles/webdev/CMS/Drupal” and “articles/webdev/CMS/Wordpress”. You can think this all over before you start, but if you feel like extending your groups later, it’s not a big deal.

You press the Save button, and your first page has been created.

Now we want to link this page to the “Articles” button in our primary menu.
Go to: Administer > Site building > Menus > Primary links
Press the edit operation for the Articles menu item, and change the path to “articles/articles”, or whatever url path you defined previously.
Press save, and your page is linked.

Now let us create a page for your first submenu item “Travel articles”.
Go to: Create content > Page
Similar to the Articles page, you enter a title and some content.
Remember that we didn’t create new items in our submenu? This is because we can do that directly here, which can save us quite some time.
You click on menu settings and fill out following settings:
- Menu link title: how you want to call your submenu item (here it’s “Travel Articles”)
- Parent item: Select the name of your self-created submenu (here it’s “Articles”)
- Weight: similar as in the primary menu, you should already know how this works, right?
Now the only thing that we still need to do is define the URL path. We put it in the same group as the Articles page, but we call the page “travel-articles”.
Press the Save button, and our second page has been created. Now you can do the same for all other pages, don’t forget to group them using URL path, and to enter Menu settings, if you want your page to appear as a menu item.

The secondary menus (part deux)
Let’s get back to where we left earlier.
Go to: Administer > Site building > Blocks
First of all make sure that the “Articles” block is put in the Left sidebar region. If this is not the case, change the region and press Save.
Choose the configure operation of the Articles block. Scroll down to “Page specific visibility settings: Show block on specific pages”, and choose the option “Show on only the listed pages”.
Then you have field where you need to enter all the pages where this submenu should be shown, but because we’ve grouped our pages using “URL path”, we can easily use a wildcard to define our pages. Here the wildcard will be “articles/*”
Now the submenu will be shown on every page where the URL path starts with “articles/”.

Testing
Of course we now want to see if it works. Let’s follow this test case:
1. In the top (primary) menu, press “Articles”. Now your default Articles page should appear, and on the left pane you should see the Articles submenu with the items you’ve created.
2. Press on an item in the Articles submenu (e.g. “Travel articles”). Your default page for that item should appear, and the Articles submenu is still available on the left pane.
3. Press in the top menu on “Photography”. Now you should see whatever page you’ve set as default for Photography (if you following this manual, it will probably be “node/add”), and the Articles submenu disappeared. Similar to Articles, you’ll need to create a submenu for Photography.

In case this test process failed: You might have done something wrong and you’ll need to start all over again.
In case this test process is successful but it doesn’t do what you expected: I’m sorry to tell you that you probably spent a lot of time reading the wrong tutorial.

In any case, you can certainly post a comment with your ideas and/or doubts.

nicolasdecorte.be V2 officially down

2009-09-01T11:17:00.003+02:00

Yes…it’s true… I finally decided to put the old website down.
While I was reviewing the progress of the new website, it came up to me that it became time to leave the past behind and start looking at the future. Sounds quite philosophic, doesn’t it?
According to my (current) planning, I should be able to put the new site online on the first of November, which is in about two months. As this blog is also progressing, I noticed an increased number of visitors to www.nicolasdecorte.be who ended up viewing the old site. This is why I thought it would be nicer to put an under construction message instead.
The thing with under construction messages is that they all look alike: a couple of roadwork signs and some text saying that the website can’t be entered. BORING! Everybody has seen this a thousand times and to be honest, how many times do you return to see if there’s already any progress? Probably not much huh…
Therefore I wanted something else, something that wouldn’t just scare the visitor away.
After renting the Hollywood movie the Bank Job last week, I noticed the cover of the DVD was in newspaper style. It consisted of small articles and pictures which attracted my attention and made me want to have a closer look.
Now I knew what I wanted: an under construction page in newspaper style. I didn’t want to put too much work in it, after all it’s just a temporary page, but still I wanted it to look professional, so I started searching the internet for some kind of template. Soon I found exactly what I wanted on the GTemplates website.

Please have a look at www.nicolasdecorte.be and let me know what you think about it. Do you think it’s better that a regular under construction page? Are you attracted to read at least one article?
The only fear I have is that when you see this first, it might look like this is the actual website and not like it’s under construction. You probably have to read a bit before you notice that this is only temporary…

For those who still want to enjoy the old version, it’s available at www.nicolasdecorte.be/V2

About me (the facts)

2009-08-28T13:00:00.001+02:00

After the technical posts of last weeks, I thought it was time for some content again.
In a previous post, I’ve showed you an example of my about page. It’s the summarized story of my life, how I grew up and why I do what I do.

Additionally, I would also like to provide an overview of some facts of my life. Small things that are typical to me, and where the visitor may recognize his/herself in. Some are funny, some are sad, but they’re all true.
Here’s a first draft of the list:

About Nicolas De Corte (the facts)

* I always feel more like partying on working days than on holidays
* I would like to be a moviestar, but the most I accomplished is being extra in a local theatre association.
* I would like to be able to live of photography or writing
* I would like to be able to play the guitar without having to learn it (same thing with skateboarding)
* I speak fluently Dutch and English, quite some French and I can explain myself in Spanish and German
* The first words I normally learn in a new language is “hi”, “bye” and how to order a beer
* I would like to go into space
* I can sometimes have an unexplainable urge for traveling
* I don’t eat pork, but did eat a grasshopper in Mexico
* I spend too much time on my portable computer
* I sometimes try to remember how life was without cell phones
* Which music I like totally depends on my mood
* I like too hot way more than too cold
* My favorite TV show all time is The Sopranos
* I can be found on following social networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Couchsurfing.
* Everywhere I go, I try the local beer.
* My favorite drinks are beer, red wine, all kinds of rum cocktails, Sprite and fresh fruit juice.
* Mosquitoes don’t bite me

It still looks a little short to me, and I’ll take the time to look deep into myself to find some more facts about me. Maybe I’ll need to ask some friends or relatives...

I have to admit that this is not my own idea (I wish it was). I found the inspiration for doing this on the website of Nomadic Matt. I found it a very original way of describing yourself, it looks like a lot of meaningless points, but when you put them together you get quite an idea of someone’s personality.

CMS Themes

2009-08-21T13:00:00.001+02:00

In my Joomla vs Drupal vs Wordpress post , I’ve already talked about “themes”. The purpose of this post is to tell you a bit more about what they are, where you find them, how you install them, and last but certainly not least how to personalize them.

What are themes?
Themes define the design of your website, how it looks to you and to your visitors.
We have to admit, You may have such interesting, funny or just great content, when the design of your website stinks, you’re very likely to lose visitors.
Each CMS comes with one or more themes in the default installation. Unfortunately this will most probably be the theme that’s used on the website of that CMS. When you know a bit about CMS, you’ll probably recognize the blue design of Drupal, or the grey and white design of Wordpress out of thousands. And let us be honest, we don’t want our website to look like the Drupal or Wordpress site. So we need another design, another theme.

Where do we find themes
The first resource of themes is the website of your CMS:
Drupal: http://drupal.org/project/Themes
Wordpress: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/
This should already get you started, I guess.

If you don’t find what you like on the CMS websites, don’t worry yet, there are lots of other websites which provide themes for free or for a small contribution. A few examples:
Free sites:
cmstheme.net: http://www.cmstheme.net
freecmstemplates.com: http://www.freecmstemplates.com/
…

Paysites:
themestock: http://www.themestock.com/
websitetemplates.bz: http://www.websitetemplates.bz/wordpress-themes.html
…

Still haven’t found what you’re looking for? It’s possible that you already had a certain design in mind, which is so unique that it doesn’t exist in a theme yet. There are several options left. If you want to pay for it, there are several companies and web designers who are specialized in the creation of themes. If you want to pay less, you can also purchase software that makes the creation of themes more easy (e.g. premiumwp). I must add here that I never tried such a software packet before, but that it seems to me like you have a lot of limitations (a certain amount of backgrounds, fonts,…). My personal opinion is not to use this kind of software. If you need to have your theme fast, buy it, if you have the time, create it yourself.

How to install Drupal themes
In this part I’ll only handle the installation of themes in Drupal, but the procedure is more or less the same for every other CMS (just keep in mind that in Joomla themes are called “templates”).

First thing to do is download the theme you like. You will normally receive some kind of compact archive (zip, tar.gz,…), which you extract to the “themes” folder of your Drupal installation.

Afterwards go to Administer > Site building > Themes
Find the theme you’ve just installed and check the “enabled” box. If you also want to start using the theme immediately, check the “default” button. After pressing Save, you’ll see your layout change. Now that was easy, wasn’t it?

How to personalize Drupal themes
You’ve downloaded your theme, you’ve installed it successfully, but probably there are still some things that are not 100% like you want them. For example you want a different font, different colors, a different background image, and so on.
Well here’s some good news: themes are fully open source, which means you have access to all of the code, and you’re able and authorized to change it. Of course, depending on what you like to change, this requires some knowledge of CSS, HTML, PHP and/or Javascript.

But let’s not scare you away yet, first we’ll have a look at the file structure of themes, to see how things work.

page.tpl.php
This is the main template , together with style.css it forms the foundations of your theme.
The first thing you notice when you open this file is that it consists of PHP statements with embedded HTML. This is where the “what goes where” takes place.
When you go through this file, you’ll notice the use of a lot of variables ($site_name, $primary_links,…). These are values that come from the Drupal administration. An overview of these standard variables can be found on the Drupal website

style.css
In case you don’t know what a CSS is: it’s Cascaded Style Sheets. Which means that this is where your styling takes place. Here you define your fonts, colors, etc for each single part of your theme

the other .tpl.php files
These files contain the design of different parts of your theme, normally the name already tells you which part it’s about:
block.tpl.php : design of blocks
comment.tpl.php: design of comments
page.tpl.php: design of pages
and so on.
All of these files receive their styles from style.css

logo.png
The logo file. If you want a different logo, just replace this file

the .info file
As of Drupal 6, this file is obligatory. It contains some basic information of your theme.

With only those files, you should be able to create your own theme. Of course there’s more than that. When you browse through the file structure of more sophisticated themes, you’ll notice some more php of inc files (which are called from the tpl.php files), images (background, border,…), fonts, …

HINT: before you start messing up your theme (if you didn’t already), I propose that you first create your own theme as a copy.
This happens as follows:
You create a new subfolder in the sites/all/themes folder (note that this is different from the standard theme folder!) and you call it whatever you want to call your theme. E.g. mytheme.
You copy the content of the folder of the theme that you want to edit into your “mytheme” folder.
You rename the info file to mytheme.info (of course replace “mytheme” by your theme name).
You edit the info file, and wherever you find the name of the original theme, replace it by “mytheme” (normally this is only for “$id” and “name”).
And that’s that. When you go to Administer > Site building > Themes, you should now see your new theme.
It might also be handy to take a backup of your theme folder once and a while.

HINT: If you’re new to Drupal theme development, I propose that you start with the blue marine theme. This is quite a basic one, which only contains the basic files.

Have fun developing!

Drupal vs Wordpress

2009-08-14T13:00:00.001+02:00

As you may remember from a previous post Joomla vs Drupal vs Wordpress, I started with very little knowledge of CSM software, I picked the three famous ones, installed them on my web server and I started messing around. After a while I was quite convinced that I wanted to use either Drupal or Wordpress, so farewell Joomla!
It looks a bit like a reality show, doesn’t it?
Now let me welcome you ladies and gentlemen to our big finale, with only two candidates in the running…On my left hand: Drupal and on my right hand: Wordpress!

In the meanwhile, I have been using both CMS, and I tried to perform similar tests, but both succeeded more or less in all tests. One thing that did occur to me is that Wordpress seems to be a bit more user friendly than Drupal. It might be just me, but everything I tried went a little bit faster in Wordpress.
A second thing that I found quite annoying is that the text editor in Drupal stinks. It really does. It’s just a plain text editor which you can compare with MS Notepad. It’s not that I need something very fancy, but some basics are always welcome. When you look at the editor in Wordpress, you’ll find functionalities like lists, hyperlinks, spellchecker, etc.
Now it seems that I’m not the only one who’s annoyed by this, because there are already a lot of Rich Text Editor modules which you can implement in Drupal, for example FCKeditor and WYMeditor. Nick Lewis has written a nice comparison of a couple of these editors:

Basically, this means I’m still nowhere. Both CMS work fine for me, be it with some adjustments where necessary. So I’ll need to take things to a higher level: Have a look what the professionals think about this. Luckily the internet is full of comparisons between different CMS, and especially between Drupal and Wordpress.
The opinion of the professionals is more or less the same everywhere:

“If you want to create a website around a blog, use Wordpress. If you want a ‘real’ website, use Drupal”.

As I see things now, the blog will be the central point of my website, it’ll be updated regularly, and the articles and photo pages will be more static. So I should go for Wordpress. On the other hand, I don’t know what the future will bring, if I want more sophisticated photo galleries, I will get more possibilities in Drupal, same thing for video galleries, and maybe later I want even more stuff like a forum or a web shop. Therefore my final decision will go to Drupal. In the beginning I’ll need to do more than I should have to do with Wordpress, but in the end I hope it’ll be worth the choice.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls! Our winner is … (drum ruffle) … Drupal!

Also nice to know: In the Open Source CMS Awards, Drupal has been overall winner in 2007 and 2008 (the winners of 2009 are selected November 9th), and Wordpress has won the award for “Best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System” in 2007 (This category didn’t exist anymore in 2008).

Content structure: Technical

2009-08-07T13:00:00.002+02:00

In my Content structure: Philosophy post, we’ve talked about what content structure is, and why people make such a big deal of it. This week I’d like to tell you how we handle this with CMS.
I’ve already given you an introduction into Structured content and content types in my Joomla vs Drupal vs Wordpress post. These are the components that we’ll need to structure our data.

As an example, I will use the structure of my own website.
First of all, I have the blog, which will be the central component of the website. There will be regular posts and also announcements of what changed on the rest of the website. Next to the blog, there will be a part with articles and a part with photo galleries.

We need to separate the blog from the other parts of the website, as the way of structuring the data will be different. This is something we will do with content types.
For the blog we will use the content type Story in Drupal or Post in Wordpress. For every other part we will use the content type Page (this is the same in Wordpress and Drupal).
The pages will be structured using menus and submenus, the stories/posts will be structured using categories in Wordpress or taxonomy in Drupal

The Pages
Structuring data using menus is not really what CMS is all about. But if they contain data that’s not frequently updated, it’s often the best choice. There will be two main categories: “Articles” and “Photography”. These will be accessed by pressing a button in the main menu (I will chose for a top menu here). For both categories, there will be following subcategories:
Articles
      Travel
      Web Design
      The written word
Photography
      Travel
      People
      Projects
Like I said in the Content structure: Philosophy post, it’s necessary to do some thinking about this. Is this the level on which I want to keep working? Creating new subcategories on an existing level is easy, dividing a subcategory into new subcategories on a deeper level is a lot harder.
As these pages won’t be updated that much, the chance that new subcategories are needed is a lot lower, so I think it’ll be sufficient to stick with this structure. For the blog we will need to be more careful though.

The Blog
As said before, we will use the Story/Page content type for the blog, which is the central component of the website. We will structure the stories/posts using the CMS standards: Categories in Wordpress and Taxonomy in Drupal.
The reason why is because the blog can be seen as one component with lots of new information being published on a regular base. Suppose you have written this great photography post about landscape compositions a couple of months ago, but your readers need to scroll through every post about cameras and aperture settings, chances are that they’ll leave your website before they found your article.
Another thing that needs to be reconsidered is that posts/stories can be linked to different categories. This is a good and a bad thing. The good thing is when writing a post, you don’t have to be thinking all the time about sticking to your subject. The bad thing is that people are likely to link their posts to as much categories as possible.
Let me give you some examples:
1. You’re writing a post about a nice landscape you’ve seen, and you describe why the composition was that perfect and what settings you’ve used on your camera to make that superb picture.
This story can be categorized in photography/technical and photography/composition.

2. You’re writing a travel story about your last trip, and at a certain moment you describe a landscape that seemed to have a perfect composition for a picture and why it seemed like that.
You classify this story under travel/story but not under photography/composition.

In the second example, why don’t we classify the story under photography/composition?
When a visitor requests an overview of all photography posts about composition, your travel story will appear in that list. This is not the information he/she is looking for. The visitor wants tips or information on composition, and is not interested to read how you’ve spent your time in Oegadoega. If you really think that the info about composition that you’re giving in your travel story is that important for photographers, you need to consider to write a separate post for it.

Now let us get back to the techniques. My blog will have four main categories: Travel, Writing, Web development and Photography. These will be the top nodes of the tree structure.
In Drupal:
Go to Administer > Content management > Taxonomy and press the tab Add vocabulary.
We add four new vocabularies for each of our main categories. Check the content type story and check the setting multiple select .
In Wordpress:
Go to Posts > categories and create four new categories.

The next step is to define the different levels in which you will divide your main categories (or vocabularies if you like).
Here’s how I’ll structure my content:

Travel
Stories

Photography
      Technical
      Cameras & accessories
      Composition
      Pictures
            Travel
            People
            Projects

Writing
Blogging
Articles

Web design
Code
CMS

Now I know what you’re thinking… first I’m telling you that you need to think this over and over and that you need to have several subcategories of subcategories, but my structure only has three levels, most of the time only two.
And you’re right! This is only a first draft of my structure. At this stage I’ve spent most of my time learning the different CMS that I didn’t really think about the final structure yet. But I promise, when I’ve figured things out, I’ll certainly post them!

Before I show you how to create this structure in Drupal and Wordpress, you need to know that there’s a huge difference between the two. In my humble opinion, I think this is a huge shortcoming of Drupal but I guess the designers had their reasons (probably because taxonomy can be used for every content type in Drupal).
Suppose, you’ve created the category “Writing” in Wordpress with the subcategories “Blogging” and “Articles”. And now you want to write a post about the writing style of a book you’ve read. This doesn’t belong to Blogging or Articles, and as you’re probably not going to write fifty posts about this subject, you can just categorize it under the main category “Writing”.
This is something that’s not possible in Drupal. You can’t categorize a post under a vocabulary, only under a certain term in a vocabulary.
There are two possibilities to solve this issue:
1. For each (sub)category where you expect that there might be post which don’t fit in any subcategory, you can create a new subcategory called “other” or “random” or something like that.
e.g.
Writing
      Blogging
      Articles
      Other
2. You start your vocabulary at a higher level.
e.g.
Blog
      Writing
            Blogging
            Articles
      Photography
      …
Both solutions have their pros and cons. The first solution looks very amateurish to me, it looks like you don’t really know what you’re doing (which might be the case, just don’t tell anyone).
The second solution may resolve in the fact that visitors won’t find your articles as they tend to look on the lowest level possible (so only in Blogging and Articles, but not in Writing).
It’s up to you!

Now how do we create these subcategories?
In Drupal:
Go to Administer > Content management > Taxonomy and press the add terms function next to your vocabulary. Enter the name of the term. For the first level this is sufficient, for any other levels, go to Advanced options and select the parent (higher level) category.
In Wordpress:
Go to Posts > categories, enter the name of the category and select the parent (higher level) category.

And there you go. Your content is now structured.

I’ve mentioned this a lot before (I know), but again, think before you start structuring your content. Otherwise you may find yourself one day in a huge mess, needing a lot of time restructuring it all.
Last days I’ve quite heavily investigated in this issue, and I still haven’t figured out some kind of ideal strategy.
If you have one, please share it with us!

My office

2009-07-31T13:00:00.000+02:00

A couple of posts ago, I told you my story
Now I would like to show you a bit more of my environment, and I would also like to take the time to discuss the existence of an ideal environment for blogging.

After a working day at my desk, the first thing I like to do when I get home is throw myself at the couch. This couch throwing also includes watching some TV, read a book, read some blogs and check my e-mail. When I started blogging, this seemed to be the ideal environment for me: in the couch, laptop on my tummy and blog blog blog.
Now that I’m already doing this for some time, I noticed that this “ideal environment” might need some reconsidering, as I get very easily distracted and after a certain period of time my back starts to hurt. So there were some questions raised: “Do I need a new, ‘real’ office?”, “Won’t such a real office make blogging look too much like real work?”, “where should it be located?”, “what accessories do I need?”. Lots of stuff to think about, and lots of decisions to be made.

While reading some blogs, I found the article “10 Unconscious cues to create a work/life balance” at Jonathan Fields, which already gave me an idea of how the professionals handle this.
Shortly summarized, what they’re saying is that it your work environment at home needs to look like you’re at the office of a/your company. This means that you need to have a separate room, you need to shower and get dressed before you start, you need to agree with your family that they don’t disturb you during working hours, you need to take breaks and you need to stop working at a predefined hour.
Now I have to say that these are tips for people who work at home for a living, so I don’t think it works the same for me, but I could find some improvements for myself too.

After googling the terms “home office”, “blogging desk” and “blogging office”, it was time to try to give myself a first answer on the questions I had.

Do I need a new, ‘real’ office?
At the moment, I think I don’t. I can just write my weekly post from my couch and also the creation of the website doesn’t take such an amount of time that I need the feeling of being in an office.
But hey, I do have the ambition to start writing more and more in the future, so it might be a good idea to already start thinking about some kind of work space that keeps me focused.

Won’t such a real office make blogging look too much like real work?
Honestly? I think it does.
But then I ask myself the question “what’s wrong with something looking like a job when you like doing it?”. When you like doing something, doesn’t matter if it’s writing or sporting or playing tic tac toe, you could do it all day and all night, right? So if you create your own tic tac toe room, it might feel that you’re a professional, but will that keep you from doing it? I guess not.

Where should it be located?
When you’re really considering going into the blogging business, and you already made your business case, then maybe you could rent an office somewhere, because who knows that after some time you’ll need to hire 4 other bloggers, a secretary and an accountant.
Well, I told you that I’m ambitious, but maybe not that much. So the location will need to be somewhere inside the house. Lucky as I am, I have a spare room, of which I don’t have an idea yet what to do with it. It’s unfinished, it doesn’t have any power sockets yet, the light doesn’t work and it certainly needs some new painting or I will become depressed, but I have the space, so there’s a start.

Which accessories do I need?
Maybe it’s a female side of me (sorry ladies) but I like desk accessories. When I start thinking about decorating my desk, I think of pencil cups, letter trays, business card holders, memo cubes, a fax machine, a paper shredder, that kind of stuff. But do I really need that? Probably not eh…
So let’s start with the basic accessories: desk (check) , laptop (check), printer (check), big leather chair that says “Chief Executive” (not check, but probably my regular chair will work just fine too). What else? Maybe some pictures for on the wall? A radio? Most likely I have the basics, and when I’m actually sitting in my home office -sounds already quite professional – I’ll find out soon enough what else I’m missing.

You may have noticed that I haven’t sort it all out, yet. So any help is welcome. Do you have a home office? Do you feel the need to have one? Do you have a great idea on how to decorate mine? Let me know!

My current "office"

My new office

Content structure: Philosophy

2009-07-24T13:00:00.008+02:00

What’s the best way to structure your content?
When developing a website, at some point you will need to find an answer to this question. You probably already have some content in mind, written in a notebook or in files on your PC. If it’s on your PC, you might already be one step ahead because there will be already some kind of structure in the form of folders and files. But yet that’s not exactly what we are looking for.

Let us start at the beginning, what is structured content?
When you do a search on Google, the first thing it comes up with is a Wiki. Quite ironical is the fact that this Wiki page seems to be an orphan, which means that no other documents are linked to it. In other words, it’s not structured. But still it has something to say:

Structured content refers to information or content that has been broken down and classified using metadata.

Now we have a new question: What is metadata?
Of course there’s also a Wiki page for metadata which tells us that metadata is "data about other data". Now we’re getting somewhere.
If you’re not familiar with metadata, here’s a Bert and Ernie movie that explains it all:

What we have to do now is have a look at our content and define keywords for it. Unlike Ernie (the smooth bastard), we’ll need to define keywords that point to several of our content items. More important, we also have to think about future content. It’s not unlikely that you don’t yet have an idea of what the future will bring, so instead of defining your future content, you might want to create the possibility to easily add new items to the structure.
As an example, let’s say you are a veterinary medicine, and your specialties are cats and pidgins. So you want to create a website about this, and you create following specifications:
animals
mammals
birds

This will work just fine! Everything you write about cats will be classified under mammals, and everything you write about pidgins will be classified under birds. But then one day you start thinking about extending your business, and you start specializing yourself in dogs. Of course you want to write about this on your website. But where do we classify dogs? Also under mammals I guess. It does look strange to put cats and dogs together, doesn’t it?
What you’ll need to do now is split up mammals into cats and dogs, and you’ll have to add the new metadata to everything you’ve already written about cats.
What you should have done from the beginning is structure your data to a further level:
animals
      mammals
            cats
      birds
            pidgins

This way you could easily add an item dogs under mammals, next to cats.
Maybe you should have even gone further and divide cats into Siamese cats, Persian cats and so on. I have no idea which different types of pidgins exist, maybe I should have done some more research before writing this post, but I guess you get my point. It’s worth thinking about possible future content before you start creating your structure.

In a next post, I’ll get more down to earth and describe how we handle this technically, using CMS software.

Joomla vs Drupal vs Wordpress

2009-07-17T13:00:00.003+02:00

It’s been already four years ago, I guess, when I created nicolasdecorte.be v1. Based on school knowledge, the web pages were totally created in HTML written in Notepad, only using Macromedia Dreamweaver when I really couldn’t figure out how to design a certain item. I was a hardcore programmer, and I was proud of it!

It didn’t take very long before I found out that this wasn’t something to be very proud of. All I did was spending loads and loads of time on reinventing the hot water. Even worse, I reinvented the cold water when the hot water already existed. So that meant it was time for v2. The same website, the same content, but written in PHP 5. Using professional tools as Dreamweaver and Zend Studio, and implementing scripts I found on the internet, the website became more professional and more dynamic.

Some time ago, I figured that it was time for v3. I had some ideas of changes in mind, but instead of starting to program immediately, I planned some hours of research before the first code would be written. And this is how I found out about CMS software.
After some reading about this subject, I found out that there are lots of software suppliers who each have their own CMS masterpiece, but there are three that seem to be used very often: Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress.

If you’re reading this post because you finally want to figure out which one is the ultimate CMS software package that you must use, I’ll have to disappoint you. Maybe you know more about this stuff than I do. I only had a first experience with both Joomla and Drupal yet, but I read a lot about this item, and what I will bring you here are my personal ideas.

If you haven’t stopped reading now… great!

So what I did next was also install Wordpress, and then try to create a basic website in all three CMS.
The test phase could be divided in following categories:

Installation
All three CMS are kind of similar in installation. You download a zip file from the website and extract it to the source directory of your website. Then you need to create a database (If you don’t already have one), and you have to tell your CMS which database it needs to use. Joomla has a user interface where you can set your database settings, this interface starts automatically when first starting Joomla. For both Drupal and Wordpress you need to adjust a config file where you put your database settings. When this is configured, all three CMS have an installation script which does the database setup.
Guides:
Joomla: http://help.joomla.org/ghop/feb2008/task048/joomla_15_quickstart.pdf
Drupal: http://drupal.org/getting-started/install
Wordpress: http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress

First time use
Now wasn’t that easy? But beware…It might get a bit confusing now.
The first thing you need to do is to log on to the administrator page, and have a look at the possibilities. This can be done by using following urls:
Joomla: http:///administrator/index.php
Drupal: http:///?q=admin
Wordpress: http:///wp-admin/
(replace “” by the server/location where you installed your CMS)

There you are, this is where your website will be born. Quite overwhelming, isn’t it?
What’s important to know is that the purpose of every CMS is the same: to let you create a website. They give you the possibility to create structured content, create a specific design and use several add-ons (e.g. calendars, RSS,…).
But still there’s a big difference between them. First of all in the way of working, and secondly in what they can or can’t handle.

Structured content
That the content of your website is the most important part is something I probably don’t have to tell you. But how do we structure this content? Let’s take my website as an example, I will have four main topics: photography, writing, travelling and web development. So I need a way to categorize everything I publish under one of these topics. But after I’ll be posting for some time, maybe I have too much content for one specific category, so I’ll need to create subcategories. E.g. Color photography and black & white photography. Each CMS has its own way of structuring content:

Joomla:
Joomla works with sections and categories. Each section can contain several categories, and the content can be linked to a certain category.

Drupal:
Drupal uses something they call “taxonomy”. The point is that you make a tree structures (called “vocabularies”), in which you categorize your content.
So, I’ll create four vocabularies: Writing, photography, travelling and web development, and then I divide these vocabularies into terms, which can also be divided in other terms, and so on.
Here’s an example of a “Photography” vocabulary:

Photography
      Portraits
            Color
            Black and White
      Landscapes

This can go on and on as far as you want to categorize.
A good tutorial on taxonomy can be found here

Wordpress:
In Wordpress, you have categories. The usage is quite similar to Drupal, you create a main category (e.g. photography), and then you create sub categories with that main category as parent.

As you can see, there are different ways of categorizing your content, so it’s very important to take some time to think this over before you start creating content. In the beginning, this might sound boring and useless, but when you become a Problogger, managing thousands of articles, blog posts, stories, pictures, videos and so on, you’ll thank me for this.

Content types
When you reread my previous sentence, you already see that there are different types of content that can be on your website: blog posts, stories, articles,… You have already categorized them under your different categories or sections or whatever you prefer to call it, but that’s not enough. You want them to look differently from each other and you want each content type to have other functionalities. E.g. my “about me” page should be static, my blog posts should be able to receive comments, …

Again, the different CMS have different ways to handle this. They all have certain content types installed by default and the option to add new “non-standard” content types. A short overview:

Joomla:
By default, Joomla works with “articles”, and that seems to be the only content type you can use. However, there seem to be lots of modules and plug-ins which you can use within your article to create an image gallery, make it look like a blog post, and so on.

Drupal:
Drupal has Pages and Stories by default. They both look similar, but pages should be used for static content (e.g. the “about me” section) and Stories should be used for sections that are updated regularly (e.g. a blog). Furthermore, you can install several modules like blog (so each user can have his own blog), image gallery, and so on.

Wordpress:
In Wordpress, several content types are ready to use be default: Posts, Pages, Media, Links and Comments. Pages can be compared with the pages in Drupal, and Posts are similar to Drupal’s Stories. Media is used for images, videos,… Comments manages the comments that are given to a certain post, and Links speaks for itself, I guess, it’s for managing links (duh!)

Themes
Now that you’ve created some content (with the right content type of course), and you categorized it, it’s time for some designing (woohoo!)
If you’re not used to web development (html, php,…) that’s not a big problem, because thousands of others have done the designing for you. It’s called “Themes”.
Each CMS comes with its standard theme, which is normally the same theme as they use on the CMS website. But you probably want things to be more personal, right? That’s why there are lots of free themes available. They can be found on the website of your CMS, but also on specialized websites like proWebCreative , osskins and many others.

Still not personal enough? No problem! You can also build a theme yourself. Or start from a certain theme and make adjustments to it. But this requires at least some basic skills in html, css, php and javascript.

This topic will certainly be discussed in future posts.

Modules/plug-ins/add-ons/extensions
Each CMS has a standard installation package which includes the basic components to get you started. But there’s more…much more! There are lots of pieces of software available that add certain functionalities to your CMS, these are called: extensions (Joomla), modules (Joomla, Drupal), plug-ins (Joomla, Wordpress) or add-ons (Drupal).
A good example is a forum module. It’s not available by default, but you can easily download and implement it. Another example is an image gallery.

Just like themes, these modules are available on the website of the CMS, and on a lot of specialized websites (just google it). And like themes you can also program them yourself, if you have the knowledge.

Conclusion
So far my first comparison of the three major CMS. This is only the top of the iceberg, but I guess it gives a wide overview of what CMS are and what’s the main difference.
So now the big question: Which one will I use?
Based on my experience up to now, I think that I won’t use Joomla. It looks a bit like a mess to me.
So there are two left: Drupal and Wordpress.
Word’s on the street that you need to use Wordpress if you want to create a blog. If you want to create a “real” website, you need to go for Drupal. This means that I should go for Drupal... But I’m not going to decide yet. I’ll test Drupal and Wordpress further, and then I’ll see which one will fit best to me.

Another conclusion that could be made is that there is no such thing as the “best” CMS. If you read about this on forums, you’ll find Joomla-people, Drupal-people and Wordpress-people. I guess I’m just not a Joomla-person myself.

First content: About me (the story)

2009-07-10T13:00:00.002+02:00

As I see things now, there will be two main categories under which my future blog posts can be divided: content and design.
Probably they more or less speak for themselves. In the content section I’ll post ideas about the content of the website, with articles and photos. In the design section I’ll post everything about the design of the website. Can it be any easier?

So here’s my first content post.
All websites seem to have an “about the author” section, here’s mine:

About Nicolas De Corte (the story)

Hi, my name is Nicolas and I'm addicted to blogging.

But in my defense I would like to explain to you how things got that far:
It all started the 18th of April 1982, when I saw light for the first time in some hospital in the city of Ghent (Belgium). After peeing on doctors and nurses for about a day or five, they finally decided to send me home, together with my parents of course. Those days "home" was an apartment in a small town called Laarne. I was a peaceful child, only waking up a couple of times each night, mostly because of a shortage on love and food.

Time went by, I grew older and I developed some kind of natural laziness. As school was equal to hard work, it's no wonder that until I was seven, I cried every morning when my mother tried to bring me to school. Somewhere around the age of seven or eight I accepted the fact that I had to go to school anyway, and I became more or less a good student. Friendly as I was, I also tried to explain my opinions to fellow students, which produced me a lot of punishments. In the title song of the Simpsons, there's a part where Bart is writing on the board in detention... Story of my life.

And then there was high school. I'm still wondering why people expect so much from you during your puberty. Can't they just leave you alone for a couple of years? Anyway, what I remember of those days is that I spent all my time experimenting, getting drunk and trying to get laid. So school went kind of downhill, especially because I found that it needed some experimentation too. Instead of sticking to the same classes, I tried it all. From economy to electricity to mechanics to gardening to biomechanics, until (eventually) I tried IT, and finally I found something I really liked doing. Was it the fact that I was doing something I was interested in, or that my puberty years were over? I still don't know. But things started to go up hill again.

After high school, I went to college to try to get my bachelor degree in IT, and guess what? I got it.
So there I was, ready to jump in the working world... Luck was on my side, and the first job I applied for was mine.
Hi, my name is Nicolas, and I'm an SAP Netweaver consultant. If you're thinking about hiring me, please find my CV here

It was also around that time that I started some serious thinking about travelling. In previous years I hadn’t traveled more than a couple of city trips and a week or so in Spain, and now I wanted something serious, I wanted to cross at least one ocean. My girlfriend, those days, wasn't very fond of low budget traveling, so we booked a round trip to Cuba. This way we would see the whole country, and we wouldn't have to arrange anything, and we were sure about air conditioned transportation and hotel rooms.
That trip was really great, I liked the country and the culture shock, but I really missed some kind of adventure. We only saw the tourist spots and “picture points”, the rooms were too clean, we didn’t get sick of the food once,… It felt kind of boring. For me, the best days were two extra days we’d booked in Havana . Then we were out there on our own, discovering it all by ourselves. For my girlfriend those were the worst days.

When we were back home, I knew what I wanted: I wanted to travel, I wanted it to be adventurous, and I wanted to do it all alone.
So one year later I found myself closing my eyes, pointing my finger on the map, and after a couple of retries (I didn’t feel much like traveling to the South Atlantic or the North Pacific ocean) I booked a return ticket to Guatemala. That was my best holiday ever, en since then any kind of group travels or pre booked hotels are totally out of the question.
Hi, my name is Nicolas, and I’m a backpacker.

Now let us fast forward to the beginning of the year 2009. One day I was looking at some of my pictures and I thought by myself: “Wouldn’t it be great if I could make those really nice pictures?” Next thing I knew I drove to Rotterdam to buy myself a SLR photo camera, and I subscribed for a 3 years photography course.
Hi, my name is Nicolas, and I’m a wannabe photographer.

While traveling, next to photos I also like to take notes of what I see, do, experience, mostly because it’s great to read it after a while back at home. It’s like a diary.
Some time ago, when I got back from travels in Iceland, I wanted to share my experiences so much that I took my notes and started to create a real story: Iceland for beginners
Hi, my name is Nicolas, and I’m a wannabe writer.

Writing that one story got me so much going that I started to read a lot of other travel stories and blogs, until I finally decided that I wanted to create a whole website about the things I like. And what’s a real website without a blog?
Hi, my name is Nicolas, and I’m addicted to blogging.

Any comments are more than welcome!

So what about this blog?

2009-07-03T13:00:00.005+02:00

Many of you might be wondering why I started this blog, and didn’t directly start with the blog on my website.
Let me give you a couple of reasons:

1. The development of a website takes a lot of time. Now I have these ideas, I want to start NOW!

2. Starting it all on my own will certainly not give the same result as doing this with help and advice of others.

3. With this blog I’m able to start already a community, even before my website is online.

You might see this blog as my pre-website. It will be about building a website and starting a community from scratch. Now you might think that this is all very nice, but at the end I will have developed the website, and that will be that. End of story.
Let me explain why that isn’t exactly true. I expect that the audience of the eventual website might be slightly different from the audience of this blog. The main topic of this blog is the creation of a website and everything that comes with it, so the main audience will probably be persons who would like to do the same, or who already did it. The main audience of the website will be interested in one of the main topics of the website, as stated in post What do I have to tell.

What you will notice is that there’s a grey zone. In this blog, I will also discuss content of the website, so there might also be posts about photography, writing and travelling. And on the other hand, on the website there will be topic “Web development” which is actually some kind of continuation of this blog. So you see that the two flow in each other.

When the website is up and running, this blog won’t be abandoned, it’ll only be continued on another place on the web.

Another reason for starting this blog first is because I need to get a routine. For the website I will need to be able to provide content at a regular base. That content will involve first of all the blog posts, but also articles and photos. As this is the first time I do something like this, I have no idea on how time consuming this will become.
So therefore, I decided to publish a new blog post on this blog every Friday. That’s a fixed schedule where I’ll stick to. In the meanwhile, I have still the time to post photos and articles on an irregular schedule to other websites (they will of course be mentioned here). Once I get used to the “blog schedule”, I might be able to have a better idea on how to fix the other schedules too, so my audience can be sure of new content on a regular base.

As I said before, this is the first time I jump into such a project, so hints, tips and advice are always more than welcome!

What do I have to tell?

2009-06-26T13:00:00.004+02:00

This is a question I didn’t find easy to answer. It has some kind of philosophy hanging around it, because in fact it also means “who am I?”, or actually, “who will my readers think I am?”. It’s all about profiling. Most of you have never met me in person, and some will also never do, so the image I give you on my website about myself is who you will think I am.

If you follow some blogs, you probably have noticed that lots of them are about one niche topic. This can go from “Photoshop” over “yoga initiations” to “Greek philosophy” or “Sudanese for dummies”, but you won’t often find a blog about a combination of topics (and especially not about the combination of my example topics).
The advantage of this strategy is that your readers will be more devoted. I can’t imagine someone reading a blog about playing the trombone without being interested. And normally the reader won’t only be interested in that certain article she or he is reading, but also in 90% of the other articles in the blog. This will make the reader come back more often, or subscribe him/herself to the newsletter or news feed.

Because I’m not planning to use my website only as a blog (but also for photos and articles), I found it not really a problem to combine different topics. And the topics I’ve currently chosen are:

Travelling
Photography
The written word
Web development

The first two speak for themselves, I guess? These are my main interests (or hobbies as you like), and I’m quite certain that I have one or two things to say about them.
About “The written word”: I like reading since I was a kid, both fiction and non-fiction, and with the integration of the internet in my daily life, I started to read more and more online. On the other hand, I also started to write stories on my own. This began with an article called “Iceland for beginners”, published on BootsnAll , and the plan is to write these kind of articles more often. And of course the blog has also quite some writing involved.
What you can expect from the fourth topic “Web development” is not strictly some source code of how I did “this” and how I could do “that”. In fact, I would like to stick more to theory in this part, for example “what are good ways to attract the attention”, “how to make a website more user friendly”, and so on. Also, I would like to discuss differences between CMS software and these kind of things. So even for the non-programmer, this might be an interesting topic.

One last question I’m asking myself is if there should be room for evolution. Should I stick to my main four topics, or if the visitors or myself find it necessary, should I expand? Maybe it’s too early to already answer this question. But with not deciding at this very moment, I’m probably already leaving room for evolution…

Post Numéro Uno

2009-06-25T15:23:00.004+02:00

This is where I’m supposed to put an introduction, right? So my readers (yeah you!) can decide either to put this link into their bookmarks or move on to never return.
Here I’m supposed to give you the best of myself, promise you all kinds of things to make sure that you return at least a couple of times a day and generate loads of traffic for me.
Well, I might have to disappoint you, because honestly I also don’t really know what can be expected here in the future…

Let me take a minute to explain why I started this blog.
A couple of years ago, I decided that I wanted an own website. At school we learned to use some web design tools, and we got some basics of HTML and PHP, and in order to maintain these skills I needed a website. So I rented myself some space and I bought a domain name, and www.nicolasdecorte.be was born. Now the next question was “what do I want to share with the world?” What is interesting or entertaining for my visitors? What do I have to tell? At that time, I didn’t really have an answer to these questions, but I was a passionate traveler, and I figured that at least someone could be interested in my travel pictures. So I downloaded the source code for an image gallery, created the website, and I’ve put my pictures online. Now that was that.

My parents and friends were my main target audience. After each journey I made, they didn’t have to gather around my pc anymore, but now they could see my travel photos where they wanted, whenever they wanted (and most likely at the speed they preferred). Some time later, I found my website too static, it had too many boundaries so I couldn’t always do whatever I wanted. That's why I started creating version 2: a travel photo website, totally created by myself, and dynamically enough so I could easily adjust it later. This is the version you can currently find at nicolasdecorte.be, with both a main menu on your left hand, and a top submenu. The design doesn’t look very awesome, but at least I have a gallery where you can see the images in three sizes…

Now again, I’m at my boundaries, because next to a photo gallery, I want to implement written content: a blog and articles. So what this means is that it’s time for version 3.
In the meanwhile, I discovered the existence of CMS systems and I recreated my business plan:

Start again from scratch.
Create a website using either Joomla, Drupal or Wordpress, with a blog, articles and pictures, and with also room for video clips.

Of course I also need a revision of the subject of my website. What will my blog be about? What will my articles be about? Will there be other pictures than travel pictures?
As a matter a fact, not only do I need to recreate my website design, I also need to think again about the same question as years ago: “What do I have to tell?”

And here we’re getting to the purpose of this blog. Because I don’t want to jump into creating a basic website again about the first thing that comes into my mind, I will take it slowly this time, and use this blog to document my progress. Here, I will try to post my ideas and thoughts, screenshots, snapshots of articles, etc.
Both the design and the content will be made available for comment. And for those comments, ladies and gentlemen, I need you!
It doesn’t matter if you are a traveler, a writer, a web designer, a blogger, or just someone who surfs by, your opinion counts!

So may I ask you, please pass by every now and then, have a look at my blog posts and let my know when you like or dislike something, if you have a different idea about something, if you see things from a different angle, or if you just wanted to say “hi”. Every contribution is highly appreciated!

Now what’s in it for you?
What you will find here is a story that still has to be written. A story about a website being established, ideas being created and thoughts being changed. It’s a story about success and failure.
But most of all, I hope you'll keep visiting to be informed and to have fun!