It is intended as a guide for content creators and Web developers who wish to  create webpages pleasing to people and search robots.

The book contains dozens of examples of HTML techniques to add style to any website. Plus, an entire chapter is devoted to using HTML on blog posts, eBay selling pages, Google Docs, Wikipedia articles and in email marketing.

This edition, published by Addison-Wesley, is the fourth edition of HTML Manual of Style originally published by Ziff-Davis Press in 1994.

Links to HTML Manual of Style pages on the Web.

• Pearson Higher Education / Addison-Wesley – My publisher

• InformIT – Look for my articles on HTML5

• Amazon.com – get the Kindle Edition: $9.99!

• Safari Books Online – Download selected chapters

• SoftPro Books – Yet another bookseller.

• Facebook page – a work in progress.

• Follow @HTML5pro on Twitter – My alter ego.

Their marketing director was looking for new ways to connect with their current clients and customer base but didn’t have to budget to do a full redesign of their web site. Recreating the current site’s structure and design in WordPress, adding social sharing and other functionality with plugins and widgets  looked like the solution but there would be challenges in the project.

• There were over 300 html files on the existing site without much organization. A major overhaul of the web site had apparently been done 6 or 7 years ago but the earlier generation of files had not been deleted. Internal links and navigation menus were a mess.
• A two column front page that pulled post lists from different categories needed to be built and it had to be editable by the client. Templates for other special page types would need to be created.
• Oradell needed a way to manage their busy calendar of events which included everything from special lectures to pet bereavement group session at multiple locations.
• A large amount of content had been collected over the years that needed curating and conversion including profiles and pictures of 100 doctors and staff. I would need to duplicate their doctor-popup windows.

Lisa Davis, Oradell’s director of marketing and I worked our way through the content sorting the pages into a navigable hierarchy. We played with the front page’s features and layout over the course of the project until it finally looked and felt right. I built a special template for the Services & Staff pages that included a dynamically generated menu of all of the hospital’s departments. Each department’s page is a child page of the Services & Staff page.

I installed the WordPress events manager. This is a powerful piece of programming. It’s highly configurable and easy to use but, otoh, required a lot of configuration for Oradell’s requirements.

The most fun was writing shortcodes – one to show posts from a specific category in the content of a page and another to insert a doctor or staff profile in a post or page. The first  shortcode:

[showposts category="featured" display="title"]

in the content of a page produces a listing of permalinked post titles in the “featured” category. The other choices for the display option are “excerpt” and “post”. These are used throughout the site.

The doctor shortcode was more complicated because doctor information needed to be displayed in different contexts with different requirements: in the body of a post, on the various departments pages and in the complete directory of personnel. For each doctor or staff member, the profile consisted of the person’s name, academic credentials, job title, image and bio. Since several of their doctors were interested in blogging, I decided to register all the doctors and staff as blog contributors and use the extra IM user fields to store the titles and credentials. For example, using this shortcode in a post:

[doctor name="John Dolittle" role="true" creds="true" hide="false"]

will cause Dr. Dolittle’s (not an real Oradell employee) complete profile to be inserted, including his credentials and job title following his name plus the bio with a left-aligned photograph. Setting the hide parameter to “true” will hide the bio and photo but with a jQuery toggle, Somewhat like this:

John Dolittle, DVM, MD – Chief of Staff

Dr. John Dolittle lives in a little town called, Puddleby-on-the-Marsh in a little house on the edge of the town. The house was quite small; but his garden was very large and had a wide lawn and stone seats and weeping-willows hanging over. He is very fond of animals and keeps many kinds of pets. Besides the gold-fish in the pond at the bottom of his garden, he has rabbits in the pantry, white mice in his piano, a squirrel in the linen closet and a hedgehog in the cellar.

All in all, I liked working on the new Oradell website. It presented interesting challenges and the people I worked with were wonderful.

Even though I gave her my standard disclaimer that I am an information architect, not a graphics designer, she gave me full reign on changing any design elements. “Just don’t make me look at a bunch of themes!” was her only requirement.

“That’s fine.” I replied. “you’re already using the MistyLook theme which I like so much that I’ve used it on my own site.” All that was needed design-wise was a change from MistyLook’s muted grays and greens to patriotic reds, whites and blues.

The big unknown in estimating the time and cost of this project was podcasting. The vast majority of Joyce’s posts consist of transcripts following an audio player control. Joyce complained about the difficulty she and her producer, Wayne, had in getting each podcast attached to a WordPress.com post. I hadn’t done much work with podcasts so I couldn’t tell if the problems stemmed from her methodology or from a problem with WordPress.com itself. The only way to find out was to copy one of her audio files and try to setup podcasting on my development site.  I started with PodPress, one of the more popular podcasting plugins. It worked like a charm.

Building a replacement WordPress site is not as straight forward as it might seem. A WordPress installation internalizes its URL. By that I mean the site’s full URL is stored in the database in several places and this complicates creating a new WordPress instance on any address other than the final production URL. There are two ways around this problem, both of which present difficulties.

1. Build the site on a temporary URL and convert to the production URL at launch time.
2. Modify the local DNS on a development machine in order to install the site on the production URL.

The first approach is easier up to the conversion point. The conversion requires dumping the database, running it through a filter to change the internal URLs and reloading. It’s kind of scary since it essentially means killing and resurrecting the site, then waiting a few nail-biting hours for the DNS change to propagate across the Internet before you know if the conversion was successful or not.

The second approach is safer but  has the downside that the new site cannot be seen by the client unless she also has a spare machine on which she can modify her local DNS. Even if that’s the case, modifying your local DNS is not trivial, especially on a Windows PC where, if you don’t do it right, you can screw up your entire Internet access.

Still, whenever possible, I use the second approach and send emails with screenshots when I need the client’s input. I did this with Reimagine America but, instead of email, Joyce and I communicated using Skype, taking advantage of its screen sharing and file transfers capabilities to work together on the design and layout.

For Reimagine America’s front page, I imported the showposts shortcode function I used on Oradell.com. This allowed Joyce to choose which topics (WordPress categories) to feature, how many posts to show in each topic and whether to show just the title or the title and excerpt.

As a bonus, I also copied the “Show All Articles” page that I developed for Profoto-USA extending it with the ability to sort by category as well as by date and title. I find having a page with the full index of all post titles an important addition to any blog. Click on the screen shot to the right to see the page in action. 

Someone had started a blog for Profoto-USA using a customized theme but left it an unfinished mess. The sidebar was all screwed up, the more tag wasn’t working, there were no social-sharing functions and no control over the main menu – to name just a few of the problems. Profoto-USA is about the importance of good photographic lighting with dozens of interesting articles (some of the best authored by Ron) illustrated with beautiful photographs. Please click the screenshot below to check it out.

Fixing the sidebar, installing social sharing widgets and enabling the WP 3.0 menu manager was straight forward. The real challenge was finding a way to give authors more control over the content. The more tag, mentioned above, provides the ability to place a marker in a post so that on the blog’s front page, the post is displayed up to the marker, followed by a link to the rest of the article. I got that working but it wasn’t enough to manage the huge amount of content. The beginning paragraphs of a post often do not make the best summary, especially with long magazine-style articles. WordPress provides the ability to hand-craft a article summary, called an excerpt, but this feature has to be coded into the theme. Some themes show post excerpts on their front page; some show full posts (up to the first more tag.) I decided to give Profoto-USA the choice of which to use on a per-post basis using a custom field.

The previous developer had hard-coded a modified Recent Posts sidebar widget that showed, for each post, the post title and a linked thumbnail image. The thumbnails are large: 304 x 190 pixels, and only the first two or three appeared “above the fold.” The obvious solution was to use a sideshow plugin that cycled through the thumbnail photographs. Now, I’ve used a number of such plugins before and the general problem with them is that they only do what the plugin author designed them to do plus whatever user configurable options that author cares to code in. Imho – most of them fall short. Since most of the code for fetching the post data was already working, I decided to use some jQuery to add the animation effects and navigation controls to make it into a sideshow (click for nerdy technical details.)

<div id="post-slides">
    <div class="post-slide">  <!-- first slide -->
        <a href=..." title="..."><img ... /></a>
        <h3><a href=".." title="...">...</a></h3>
    </div>

    <div class="post-slide">  <!-- second slide -->
        ...
    </div>

    ...
</div>

<script type="text/javascript">
    $(document).ready(function() {
        $('#post-slides').show().cycle({
            fx: 'fade',
            speed: 1000,
            timeout: 10000,
            next: '#next_slide',
            prev: '#prev_slide'
        });
    });
</script>

<h4>Recent Articles</h4>
 <div id="slideshow-nav">
   <div id="prev_slide">
     <a href="#" title="previous article">&lt;&lt;</a>
   </div>
   <div id="next_slide">
     <a href="#" title="next article">&gt;&gt;</a>
   </div>
 </div>

This took much less time than I anticipated – less time than it would have taken to find and configure a plugin to the client’s specifications. With the extra time on my hands, I decided to give Profoto-USA a feature they didn’t ask for but felt the site definitely needed: an index to all articles showing only the permalinked titles and the meta-info line with author and publication date. I added it to the footer menu without telling them about it.

This site was a blast to work on. I had done a couple of other small repair and rescue jobs for Tom. He is wonderful client; tech-savvy and patient, he pushed for solutions that stretched my skill set and forced me to learn new techniques. Some of the interesting features of onPhilanthropy.com include: customized widget headings, a revamped advertising manager, a Twitter slurp and feeds from companion sites such as, DotOrgJobs.com.

If you are in the dot-org space, please visit onPhilanthropy and check out how good technology can advance good causes. And, of course, feedback is always welcomed.

As with another law firm blog I recently built, the Air Safety And Law authors wanted thumbnail versions of their portrait photos to appear with the articles they published.  Instead of hacking the template files as I had done with the previous site, however, I formalized the technique and wrote a WordPress filter. Read my recent article on how this works.

A plug-in search turned up nothing. No surprise—Wordpress does not support user profile pictures natively. There’s no field in the database for an user’s image file name. Then I remembered reading an article in Smashing Magazine about filters a couple of months ago. They had an example where a subscribe request was appended to the end of each post’s content. Maybe that technique would work to prepend a photo.

In WordPress, a filter is like a plug-in except for two important distinctions: It’s not packaged for distribution and it’s associated with the theme. That is, you can’t manage the filter from the dashboard’s plug-in manager and, if you change themes, it disappears. That was all right for my purposes. The clients were quite happy with the theme we’d chosen – Mistylook, by Sadish Bala – and I could provide instructions on how to remove the filter from the theme’s functions file should they ever want to “deactivate” the feature.

I got the images from the client for the four lawyer/authors—a wallet-sized image and a thumbnail for each. The larger image would appear on the author’s profile page and the thumbnails would be placed at the beginning of their posts, floated left of the text. For the larger image, I modified the author’s template (author.php) as I had with the previous website. For the thumbnails, I would use the filter approach since post content is accessed in several templates and I wanted a unified solution. For the sake of brevity, I’ll skip the part about the author template mods in this article. If you’re interested in that piece, leave a comment and I’ll write another article.

I created a new directory, /wp-content/authors for the larger images and a sub-directory, /wp-content/authors/thumbs for the smaller versions. In each, I renamed the images files to match the corresponding login usernames. If, for example, there was a user with the login username of ‘bobama’, then the two images files would be: /wp-content/authors/bobama.jpg and  /wp-content/authors/thumbs/bobama.jpg . I did this with an ftp program but you can use the dashboard’s Media manager, in which case, the image files will be somewhere in your /wp-content/uploads directory with your other media files. All of the other work described in this article can be done through the dashboard’s theme editor by an admin user but I highly recommend using a good code editor with color syntax highlighting. BBEdit is my favorite.

A WordPress filter goes into the theme’s functions file (functions.php) and consists of two parts: A function definition and a call to add that function to a named WordPress “hook”. I called my function: add_author_photo() and  added it to the ‘the_content’ hook. You can think of this hook as the point in the page building process when WordPress gets the page or post content from the database and starts to get it in shape for the web page it’s building. WordPress passes the content to the function as a string and expects it back in return. Roughly, the outline of the process looks like this:

<?php
     function add_author_photo($content) {
         ...
         return $content;
     }

     add_filter('the_content', 'add_author_photo');
?>

Note how the entire filter is enclosed in a PHP container. This is important!  Now, all we need to do is fill in the “dots”.

First, we need to make sure that our function does its work in the right place since it will be called anytime WordPress fetches the content from the database. We want the thumbnail photo to appear in posts on the home page and on single post pages, but not on static pages (which are, in a sense, “authorless”) nor on the archive and search result pages and especially not in RSS feeds. The following if statement does what we want:

if (is_home() || is_single()) {
    ...
}

Next, the code needs to check that the image file we want for the current post author actually exists. The client may add more authors and contributors before their photos are available and we don’t want an ugly, empty missing-image square to appear where a nice photo is expected. This is a bit tricky. There’s a PHP function, file_exists(), for checking whether a file exists or not but it takes, as its argument, the full Unix path to the file, as opposed to a URL fragment. WordPress provides a function for doing this: get_theme_root() which returns a string that, depending on your hosting company’s site configuration, might look like this:

/var/web/clients/abc.com/htdocs/wp-content/themes

Since my ‘authors’ directory is at the same level in /wp-content as the themes directory, all I have to do is replace the ‘themes’ part in the string above with ‘authors/thumbs/’ and append the image’s file name. The following two lines of code will assign the username to a variable and do the replacement using  PHP’s  str_replace() function.

$author_uname = get_the_author_meta('user_login');
$author_photo = str_replace(
                    'themes',
                    'authors/thumbs/' . $author_uname . '.jpg',
                    get_theme_root() );

We can check whether the file exists with another if statement:

if (file_exists($author_photo)) {
    ...
}

Now we are ready to add the image tag to the beginning of the post content. I’ll add a CSS class, ‘authorImage’, to the image tag which I’ll use to make the image float left and set appropriate margins and padding (see below.) I’ll also enclose the image in an anchor tag that links the image to the author’s profile page. I’ve laid this out here in several lines for readability. The dot at the end of each line is the PHP concatenation operator.

$image_src = '/wp-content/authors/thumbs/' .
             $author_uname . '.jpg';

$content =  '<a href="/author/' .
            $author_uname .
            '"><img class="authorImage" src="' .
            $image_src .
            '" alt="' .
            get_the_author() .
            '" /></a>' .
            $content;

Here’s a screenshot of the final code I pasted into the theme’s functions file. Because I’m a nice guy, I added  /* comments */ to explain what was going on. Click on the image to open a text division with the actual code you can copy.

[RAW]

<?php
/*  Add authors' photos to posts on the home and single-post pages.
     Copyright 2009 Larry Aronson.

     For a post author identified by username, if the image file:
	/wp-content/authors/thumbs/username.jpg
     exists, it will be prepended to the content, floating left
     of the text and linked to the author's profile page		*/

function add_author_photo($content) {
  if(is_home() || is_single()) {
    $author_uname = get_the_author_meta('user_login');
    $author_photo = str_replace('themes',
         'authors/thumbs/' . $author_uname . '.jpg',
         get_theme_root());
    if (file_exists($author_photo)) {
	 $image_src = '/wp-content/authors/thumbs/' . $author_uname . '.jpg';
	 $content = '<a href="/author/' . $author_uname .
             '"><img class="authorImage" src="' .
	     $image_src . '" alt="' . get_the_author() . '" /></a>' .
             $content;
     }
  }
  return $content;
}

/* remove the following line to deactivate the add photo feature */
add_filter('the_content', 'add_author_photo');
?>

[/RAW]

The final version took a bit of debugging to fix some stupid typing errors but it worked as I wanted it to. A look at the source code for the home page shows the generated image tag and link:

<a href="/author/larryaronson"><img class="authorImage"
   src="/wp-content/authors/thumbs/larryaronson.jpg"
   alt="Larry Aronson" /></a>

All that remained was adding some simple CSS to the style sheet to float the image to the left of the post text. The rules shown below does that and sets appropriate margins.  The images already incorporated a border so I removed the border set elsewhere in the CSS and removed the drop shadow background that Mistylook adds to images as a matter of taste.

img.authorImage {
   float: left;
   margin: 0 1em 0 0;
   border: 0;
   padding: 0;
   background-image: none;
 }

That’s it. I hope you found this article useful. Suggestions for improvements are welcome.

Once Gregory started posting on blog.gpoelaw.com, we realized that his style of writing detailed legalese needed some additional typographic punch so we darkened the text and block justified the paragraphs for additional readability. Under the hood, I added my standard mix of plugins for SEO, Google Analytics and advanced editing.

Well…, yes, that is right. Easy because services exists that create usable websites using templates and wizards friendly enough for the Internet illiterate.  And free – or at least it’s free in the sense of approaching zero initial software cost. But, in order for your website to grow, you’re going to need that technical knowledge, HTML, to keep your content publishing costs under control.

How amazing it is that we can create and globally distribute content, on zillions of Web pages, to inform and entertain ourselves without moving physical stuff anywhere! The Web page is irrevocably becoming the World’s most common form of communication. It’s the lowest cost replacement for articles, pamphlets, brochures, manuals, directories, flyers, commercials, letters, announcements—almost any kind of document you can think of. The Web does this instantly, adding interactivity, links and searching as a bonus!!

But here’s the problem: By doing so much for so many, the Web has become irreducibly complex. It’s also rapidly evolving. The learning curve never gets any less steep and climbing it is not easy. There just is so much to know about and we all know that even just knowing about what to know ain’t easy.

Content Is Kingdom

For many small website owners, creating and maintaining their own content is paramount. So Web editing tools are the keys to the content kingdom. There are two choices: using a wysiwyg editor on a local PC, downloading and uploading files; or using a Web-based editor to edit content directly on a webserver. The former approch allows you to create Web pages rich in structure and interactivity. The latter is easier by far and can be done anywhere you browse the Web. Unfortunately Web-based wysiwyg editors are rather puny and often frustrating to use when the content has any structure or is already marked up with HTML from another source like Microsoft Word. Knowing HTML helps you avoid many of problems and resolve others before they frustrate, no matter which editing method is used.

When Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web about twenty years ago, he thought that most HTML would be written by software programs. How did that work out? You might ask. Not very well, actually. One of the Web’s great strengths – a dictate that browsers must gracefully tolerate crappy code – is also a weakness. The early browsers; Mosaic, Netscape, AOL and Internet Explorer, went to war competing for market share by introducing new elements into the HTML language. The people writing wysiwyg editors couldn’t keep up with the rapid pace of HTML development, delivering mediocre products that generated bad code, while competition among Web designers to create unique and compelling pages encouraged  advanced HTML techniques beyond the capabilities of the wysiwyg editors.

The Rise Of The Robots

It’s 2009 and although they look much like their counterparts of a dozen years ago, Web pages are coded quite differently in this century. For one thing, good cross-browser support for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) make it possible to code Web pages with far less HTML markup. Also, a large proportion of Web pages are dynamically generated using HTML templates. These templates are bits of code that may be reused millions of times a day so there’s high value in using the cleanest, leanest HTML markup possible.

By far the biggest change is the rise of search technologies and the role that today’s search platforms: Google, Yahoo, Bing and others, play in our experience of the Web. A modern Website seeks to increase its find-ability and raise its search engine ranking. These requirements has spawned a new business practice called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Companies providing SEO services specialize in writing HTML that’s very easy for the search engines’ automated scripts (the robots) to understand.

This is Web 2.0, where websites continually exchange information with other websites and where what other websites “know” and “think” about your website can be as important as your site’s content. Knowing the basics of HTML, how it works to add semantic information to page elements and how that information is gathered and used by robots will give you an edge in meeting your online goals.

I built the Humintell.com website in WordPress on top of Minimal, a free theme from The WordPress Theme Shop that features variable width columns and other nice enhancements. The wonderful graphic design, typography and layout is from Dean Meyers, who added some of the playful visual effects used on the site. Dean Landsman of the Landsman Communications Group integrated the various online pieces into a coherent whole, creating/editing much of the initial content.

Congratulations, Humintell! And thanks to Howard Greenstein of The Harbrooke Group for referring me to Landsman.