Mike Giant at Mediamatic – Time-lapse

During my internship at the Mediamatic foundation in Amterdam, Mike Giant flew in to do a mural on one of the walls from the Mediamatic exhibition space. I set-up my tripod, camera and remote and let it be. I was quite happy with the result, especially because it shows the amazing freehand drawing skills of the Giant.

Graffiti Keuken
Together with Roy Valk aka Karski  from Mooiemuur.nl and Thyz we’ve been at it a full day to create something Funky. Karski had some amazing ideas on how to bring a painting to live and thanks to his (freaking awesome) spray can control we were finished before we knew it!

CFYE at the Revelry

For the CFYE exhibition ‘CFYE at the Wise men revelry’  in the Sugar Factory, Amsterdam we invited three street / graffiti artists with a link to Brazil: Gais from Rio de Janeiro, SjocoSjon from Amsterdam and Roy Valk / Karski, from amsterdam as well. During their creation of the most amazing mural the Sugar Factory had ever seen, I set up my camera and captured the whole creating of the mural. I might re-edit this one as I feel it might be a tad long.

Mooiemuur – Kids Rights

Once again with Karski /Roy Valk, this time on assignment from the Kids Right foundation.

Snik
UK (street) artist Snik came over to Amsterdam for the annual ‘Paint & Beer’ festival. He brought a 4x2m stencil with 6 layers, something I had to capture. This is actually the first Time-lapse video I created.

Of course, I had to do a few normal long exposure shots as well! By the way, if you like this you might also like the shots I’ve done on the ice earlier this week.

The explanation

To explain why it can be incredibly imporant to have important keywords in your title, I’ll use one of the websites I built – http://cfye.com – as an example. This site uses both categories as custom taxonomies.

Let’s have a look at the title functions in a default twentyeleven theme header.php file. This is everything between the title tag:

[php]
/* Print the tag based on what is being viewed.*/
global $page, $paged;

wp_title( ‘|’, true, ‘right’ );

// Add the blog name.
bloginfo( ‘name’ );

// Add the blog description for the home/front page.
$site_description = get_bloginfo( ‘description’, ‘display’ );
if ( $site_description && ( is_home() || is_front_page() ) )
echo ” | $site_description”;

// Add a page number if necessary:
if ( $paged >= 2 || $page >= 2 )
echo ‘ | ‘ . sprintf( __( ‘Page %s’, ‘twentyeleven’ ), max( $paged, $page ) );
[/php]

First, the theme adds the title of the currently viewed item with the wp_title(); function. Second comes the blog name, this is the name you’ve filled in under settings>general in the WordPress back-end. Third, the description (which you also fill in under settings>general) gets printed if your viewing home / frontpage. Last, the pagination is added if necessary.

It’s all pretty good, as it does creates unique titles for every item and it adds the website title to every end, except the front-page where it starts with the website title, just as it should. Taking cfye.com as an example it creates titles like:

• Front-page: CFYE | Street art, Graffiti, Photography, Music and independent film
• Category: Interviews | CFYE
• Custom taxonomy term: Photography | CFYE
• Single article: David Richardson | CFYE

The single article I’m talking about is an interview with photographer David Richardson, so it’s filed under both category ‘interviews’ and custom taxonomy term ‘photography’. You might already see where I’m going with this: The taxonomies ‘photography’ and ‘interview’ are nowhere to be found in the single item title tags, even though they are very relevant. Of course they are relevant, that’s why I affiliated the article with these taxonomies in the first place!

‘David Richardson’ by itself is a pretty generic name, so If I’d leave the default single-item title ‘David Richardson | CFYE’ people could be searching for all kinds of David Richardsons. If they are searching for the same David Richardson as CFYE interviewed, chances are the photographer’s site and social pages will pop up in the search results way before the interview on CFYE does. But chances are that there are a lot of people that will be looking for something more specific after trying ‘David Richardson’ as search term. They might be looking for ‘David Richardson photography’ or ‘Interview with photographer David Richardson’, and that is what we’re anticipating on.

The Code

Now to the point: Adding your taxonomies (category or custom taxonomy) to your articles is pretty painless!

If you’re not making use of any custom taxonomies, all you need to do is add this simple piece of code to your header, preferably between the page title and the site title. the != is_attachment is to make sure it doesn’t print the taxonomy on attachment posts, as they don’t have any categories and will generate an error between your title.

[php]
//Add the current category/categories when viewing a single post
if (is_single() != is_attachment()):
global $post;
foreach(get_the_category($post->ID) as $category) {
echo $category->name . ‘ | ‘;
}
endif;
[/php]

If all is well, your Title code now looks like this:

[php]
/** Print the <title> tag based on what is being viewed.  */
global $page, $paged;
wp_title( ‘|’, true, ‘right’ );

//Add the current category / categories when viewing a single post
if (is_single() != is_attachment()):
global $post;
foreach(get_the_category($post->ID) as $category) {
echo $category->name . ‘ | ‘;
}
endif;

// Add the blog name.
bloginfo( ‘name’ );

// Add the blog description for the home/front page.
$site_description = get_bloginfo( ‘description’, ‘display’ );
if ( $site_description && ( is_home() || is_front_page() ) )
echo ” | $site_description”;

// Add a page number if necessary:
if ( $paged >= 2 || $page >= 2 )
echo ‘ | ‘ . sprintf( __( ‘Page %s’, ‘twentyeleven’ ), max( $paged, $page ) );
[/php]

Custom Taxonomies

If you make use of custom taxonomies, get_the_category(); will not retrieve them for you. Instead, you’ll have to use get_the_terms(); In my case I use both normal categories as a custom taxonomy terms. My custom taxonomy is called ‘filter’, this should be replaced with your own custom taxonomy name(s). I added the following lines of code between the previous if (is_single()) statement we created:

[php]
//add the current taxonomy when viewing a portfolio item(replace ‘filter’ with your own taxonomy)
if(get_the_terms($post->id, ‘filter’)):
foreach(get_the_terms($post->id, ‘filter’) as $term) {
echo $term->name . ‘ | ‘;
}
endif;
[/php]

Making your whole code between the title tags look something like this:

[php]
/* Print the tag based on what is being viewed.
*/
global $page, $paged;

wp_title( ‘|’, true, ‘right’ );

//Add the current category and taxonomy when viewing a single post
if (is_single() != is_attachment()):
global $post;
foreach(get_the_category($post->ID) as $category) {
echo $category->name . ‘ | ‘;
}
//add the current taxonomy when viewing a portfolio item
if(get_the_terms($post->id, ‘filter’)):
foreach(get_the_terms($post->id, ‘filter’) as $term) {
echo $term->name . ‘ | ‘;
}
endif;
endif;

// Add the blog name.
bloginfo( ‘name’ );

// Add the blog description for the home/front page.
$site_description = get_bloginfo( ‘description’, ‘display’ );
if ( $site_description && ( is_home() || is_front_page() ) )
echo ” | $site_description”;

// Add a page number if necessary:
if ( $paged >= 2 || $page >= 2 )
echo ‘ | ‘ . sprintf( __( ‘Page %s’, ‘twentyeleven’ ), max( $paged, $page ) );
[/php]

And that’s all! It’s a simple but effective way to improve your titles for SEO purposes. Note that in any case, pimping your article titles isn’t enough to get noticed out on the web. You’ll need relevant content and meta-descriptions to make this stuff work. I’ll be talking about including meta-descriptions, tags and og meta in the next tutorial.

Alternatives

Of course we could also type out descriptive site-titles, but from an editor’s point of view you don’t want to be forced to keep SEO in mind while making up exciting site titles (granted, just a name is not the most exciting article title, but you catch my drift).

Another alternative is creating a custom field for every page and single post, something that many SEO plugins do as well. This way you can fill in a title specifically for the title tags and have your normal title as exciting and SEO unfriendly as you want. Downside of this technique is that you does take extra effort from the effort and doesn’t have any effect if no-one fills it in. If you do insist on custom written title tags I’d advice you to use this technique as fall-back.

As I build a lot of sites which are centered around visual content, a great slideshow is a must. Of course you can build your own slideshow with some of the nifty jQuery plugins out there (think SerialScroll), which is what I would be doing if I didn’t came across Portfolio Slideshow Pro, made by Raygun. This slick plugin has everything you can expect from a WordPress slideshow, and more. By default it works based on the standard media library / gallery, but it can also work with video! There’s plenty of features (check a full list of features here), supports fluid layouts and is mobile friendly as it works with swiping!

Thanks to the shortcode, you can integrate Portfolio Slideshow Pro directly in to the template with all the settings needed. This way your clients only have to upload their photos and publish the post to create a new article with slideshow. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

Of course, integrating the plugin directly into the template makes it a bit less flexible then putting the shortcode in the article, as the options are already set in the template. Luckily, (developers) custom fields + portfolio slideshow pro are easy to combine: I’ve added a custom field value to change the class of the div wrapped around the shortcode, and a few to the shortcode itself. This way, all the settings that need to be flexible, stay flexible and the options that shouldn’t be touched are neatly hidden away within the template.

You can download the normal ‘Portfolio Slideshow’ from the WordPress plugin site. If you need more features, check out the Portfolio Slideshow Pro version. A single site license is $18, a developers license only $45! In my  opinion the pro version is well worth the money. Besides tons of extra features you get lightning fast support from the good people at Made by Raygun.

You should also have a look at their other plugins and themes as they’re all high quality for a great price! I will personally take at the ‘mobile gallery pro‘ soon, which is also compatible with Portfolio Slideshow Pro. I feel that it might be a winning combination for the ultimate desktop and mobile gallery / slideshow experience! I’ll keep you up to speed!

Have a look at my own portfolio and the sites featured in it to see how I apply portfolio slideshow pro in different situations.

This is when I came across the powerful ‘developers custom fields’ plugin by Steve Taylor. It’s been essential to my WordPress projects ever since. This plugin is more like a kitchen with appliances and ingredients then a microwave-meal. There’s no settings page so you’ll need to declare everything in the themes function or a site specific plugin. As I usually don’t require my clients to create their own custom fields, it’s a perfect lightweight solution!

The tools included in ‘developers custom fields’ are very powerful. The plugin contains all the fields you’d need like text, text area, WYSIWYG, file upload, date picker, Google maps and plenty more.  You can attach them to all the scopes you can wish for (categories, post-types, etc) and there are also plenty of capability options. Check the whole list and a how-to on the plugin page.

Steve also delivers excellent support. He accepts updates and bug-fixes, replies quickly on questions through the WordPress forums and lets us track all progress through the plugin page and Github. If he’d ever decide to stop with support, the code of the plugin is well understandable so you could probably wrap the necessary functions into your own plugin or theme.

To wrap it up, DCF has all the ingredients a plugin requires!:
It’s clean and lightweight – It does what I require it to do, nothing less, nothing more.
Powerful – it has all the fields, scopes and capabilities I could wish for
Excellent support – If I would miss a field or scope, the author is always open for feature requests
Understandable code – If support would be dropped, it wouldn’t be too hard to continue the development.

Happy WP’ing!