Wordcamp Melbourne - Alister Cameron.
Posted on November 21st, 2007 by Simon ChenI actually can’t do Alister Cameron any sort of justice with this post summary because I’m not a technical junkie. I managed to watch the entire video, but as soon as Alister started talking about tagging, semantic query, CSS, Sandbox etc, I drifted off to somewhere calmer in my own mind and found myself thinking about Jessica Alba, coconut oil and a secluded beach in Tahiti.
Or something like that.
I’m actually going to ask Ben, our resident geek to comment on Alister’s session later today. Ben was the one behind the camera.
So, while I’m not technically inclined and not a credible witness, one thing I am confident of is my ability to pick passionate, smart people. This is Alister. He was in his element. And you can easily tell that he’s passionate about design, passionate about finding a better way of doing things on the web (from a technical perspective) and smart enough to build his own plugin for Wordpress - called “Classy Body”.
He’s a self confessed “code-junkie”, a “best practices junkie” and to him, “coding matters”.
He knows his stuff. If you were a corporate person watching this video or meeting Alister, you could be confident that you’ve found your man, in terms of 100% technical competence. And I’m sure if Alister was presenting to a non-technical audience, he would be easily able to explain things in simple english.
As I said, I’ll ask Ben to weigh in below in the first comment section with his thoughts. You can find out more about Alister at his site here and the Classy body plugin Alister refers to in the clip is here.
And keywords that are important to this discussion and post are (Tagging, Semantic Query, Classy Body, Yahoo User Interface Library, Grid/Font/Reset, Wordpress Themes, Sandpress).
Bottom line is this - Alister is a hard core blogger. His own blog is living proof. The thing is packed to the roof with content about the niches he plays in. He has focus and is a smart marketer. If you’re a techie, watch the entire clip. If you’re not, make your techie watch the clip and take notes.
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November 21st, 2007 at 9:33 am
Simon, Alister’s presentation focused on a WP theme called the Sandbox (). While this theme is, as installed, fairly plain, the key benefit over the other themes available is that the XHTML it generates contains the necessary class/id attributes to completely change the style via CSS alone.
(aside)
This is nice because a cleanly-designed site uses XHTML for structural information only (”this is a post”, “this is a paragraph within a post”, “this is a heading belonging to a post”), with the presentation of the site defined in CSS (”headings belonging to posts are 28pt dark grey Verdana, with a light grey underline”).
By separating structure from presentation, you get all sorts of nice benefits, like being able to change the layout of your site without hacking around in your theme’s PHP, reducing bandwidth (since the CSS can be cached), and enabling other people to access your content in whatever format suits them (since they can override your CSS rules, say to optimize the site for a 160×120 pixel mobile phone screen).
(end aside)
Alister’s contention was that essentially all the “knowledge” the PHP side of WordPress has about a post, page, category, or whatever should be exposed in the XHTML, so designers can make use of any/all of that when they’re designing the page, without having to get a programmer involved. I agree, although I think the Sandbox uses class and id attributes in a number of situations in which it would be more appropriate to use CSS selectors to specify elements.
November 21st, 2007 at 4:55 pm
Hi Simon
I’ve been enjoying the video coverage, not being able to make the trip, so thanks for making it available
I can’t get this one to play, however. Is it just me?
November 21st, 2007 at 5:19 pm
Meg, thanks for the note. Dont worry, next time I’m sure you’ll be able to make it. I hear a rumour that we’re scheduling a big Aussie Blogging Conference in Sydney sometime soon. I’m pretty confident you’ll get a speaking guernsey! Let me check the video - it is all working from our end.
November 21st, 2007 at 6:12 pm
Simon,
You are FAR too kind! I’m sure I’m not vaguely as interesting as you make me out to be…! But thanks
I had a great time at Wordcamp, and we sure had some fascinating and talented people there.
Thanks for putting the video up online.
Cheers,
-Alister
November 22nd, 2007 at 1:39 am
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December 7th, 2007 at 10:58 am
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