MATT FELTEN

If you follow me on twitter, you might have saw me mention earlier today that I was working on a really nerdy blog post. In an effort to post a little more, I decided that I should share a simple PHP function I wrote today so that maybe someone can get some use out of it. You can use this function on your website to consolidate your follower counts into a single number that you can then style and display. Right now, it supports Feedburner (most blogs RSS feed provider. If you aren’t using it, I’d suggest it.), a Facebook Fan Page and a Twitter account. You can mix and match out of the three if you don’t use all three services.

Another thing worth mentioning is that when you’re pulling data from other servers, especially with how popular Facebook and Twitter are, it could potentially make your site stop rendering the page at the number while it’s waiting for the results. This function caches your follower count (which you can turn off) into a text file so that any page loads for the rest of the day won’t have to queue up all three additional servers.

If you are running a Wordpress site, just pop the function into your themes functions.php file. The cache text file will be saved into your theme folder. If not, it will be saved to the root directory of your site.

Here’s the function:

////////////////////////////
/*
Function: Subscriber Count

$feedburner is the custom extension of the feedburner url. http://feeds2.feedburner.com/XXXXXXXXX
$facebook is the extension of your Facebook Fan page. http://www.facebook.com/XXXXXXXXX
$twitter is your Twitter username. http://www.twitter.com/XXXXXXXXX

*/

function subscriberCount( $feedburner, $twitter, $facebook, $cache = true ) {
	$count = 0;

	if( $cache == true ) :
		$interval = 24 * 60 * 60; // 24 hr
		if( function_exists( 'get_bloginfo' ) ) :
			$cache_path = TEMPLATEPATH;
		else :
			$cache_path = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'];
		endif;
		$cache_path .= '/subscriber_count.txt';

		if( file_exists( $cache_path ) && ( time() - $interval ) < filemtime( $cache_path ) ) :
			$file = file_get_contents( $cache_path );
			if( !empty( $file ) ) :
				return number_format( strval( $file ) );
			endif;
		endif;
	endif;

	if( $feedburner ) :
		$xml = simplexml_load_file('https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri='.$feedburner);
		$count += strval( $xml->feed->entry['circulation'] );
	endif;

	if( $facebook ) :
		$api_page = 'https://graph.facebook.com/' . $facebook;
		$json = file_get_contents ( $api_page );

		$profile = json_decode( $json );
		$count += strval( $profile->fan_count );
	endif;

	if( $twitter ) :
		$api_page = 'http://twitter.com/users/show/' . $twitter;
		$xml = file_get_contents( $api_page );

		$profile = new SimpleXMLElement( $xml );
		$count += strval( $profile->followers_count );
	endif;

	if( $cache == true ) :
		file_put_contents( $cache_path, $count);
	endif;

	return number_format( $count );
}

To use it, just run the function wherever you want the text to be displayed:

<p>I Have <?=subscriberCount('arkitectdesign', 'mattfelten', '')?> Subscribers!</p>

As you can see, I’m using my Feedburner account and my Twitter account. I don’t have a Facebook Fan Page so I left it blank.

Leave me a comment if you find this useful at all. I’d love to see if it was used somewhere.

For the longest time I didn’t have a voicemail message for my cellphone. I just left it on the automated, “This number is not available. Please leave a message after the beep,” or whatever the AT&T computer says. I prefer to do business by email so that I can draft what I want to say so getting phone calls were either from my parents or wrong numbers. Now that I’m on my way to being self-employed, I figured I should probably take another look at leaving a message. More people are calling me now then ever and being that I don’t always answer my phone, leaving a message to at least notify the caller that they hit the right person is probably a good thing.

Since the fully-automated message is out, that leaves two other options. A) A semi-automated message where you say your name like a zombie into your phone and let the computers do the rest or B) A fully-custom message. I tried option A a couple times (in private of course) and I never sounded like a real person. Option B it is.

Drafting a message is tough, especially for me since I over-think everything. Do I want to say something funny? Yes. Would that be good for business? Probably not. I also don’t want to sound too business-y and have my friends and relatives feel unwelcome. I decided the simpler the message, the better. “This is Matt. Leave me a message and I’ll call you back.” But wait, why do I need to say the “Leave me a message…” part? It’s 2010. Everyone knows to leave a message after the beep. The beep has been around since answering machines have been invented (The 30′s but not widely distributed in the US until the 60′s. Thanks Google.)

Why do we still say that? I left it in my message because without it all I’m saying is my name. I don’t want to just say “I’ll call you back,” because would really much rather send an email then talk on the phone and I’m not going to call someone back if they don’t leave me a message. I couldn’t figure out a suitable replacement. Anyone have any ideas?

My friends Randy & Erin over at He & She Photo recently asked me to help them with their website. They wanted to redo the entire site and combined their Flash portfolio with their Wordpress blog. No sense in having multiple places to have to update any time you do something new. We brought it all under one roof. It just went live last night.

Since they have such a distinct style they wanted to keep, I took a strictly developer role in this project. I turned their mockups into a Wordpress template, customized the back-end of Wordpress a little bit so that adding to their galleries and referrals pages would be as easy as possible and added some security features. All in all, I think we’re all pretty happy with the product. Click here to view the site.

While in college, I used a lot of books as inspiration for all the work I was doing. You know the books, the ones with maybe a paragraph of text every page but a ton of decent looking work, I call them picture books now. A ton of images, no descriptions or anything. They’re nice to flip through while walking around a bookstore but really doesn’t do anything in the long run.

I don’t remember when it exactly was, late 2006 – early 2007, I stumbled across a video by Hillman Curtis. It was a short documentary on Pentagram, the grossly famous design agency with branches all over the world. I’m not sure exactly what it was about the video, something one of the partners said, but it really affected me. It made me understand that design isn’t just coming up with visuals, it’s not just spitting out a poster or a logo for someone. Design is about solving problems.

Since then, I don’t think I’ve bought a single picture book for myself, although I’ll still look through them if I’m walking around at Barnes and Nobles. I’ve also really followed the work of Pentagram. It’s not the most stylistically edgy work out there, that’s what FFFFound is for, but it’s, to me, the most thoughtful and intelligent work I’ve found.

Well, since I guess I’ve finished this site and now I have a blog, I guess I should start posting some of my work. American Strong is a clothing line started by a friend of mine. He had a lot of products to sell but other then a Facebook and Myspace page, he didn’t have a web presence. We spent some time coming up with a few simple goals for the site that we wanted to acheive, and created the design for the site around that.

I decided on creating a Wordpress backed website and Big Cartel for the storefront and shopping cart since both of those provide dead simple edibility. I also made the storefront the homepage so that any visitors to the site see the goods right off the bat. Click here to view the site.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love lists, but most of the time authors cloak a list as a helpful and informative post, and they hardly ever are. You can look at any ‘big-time design blog’ (Smashing Magazine and any of its off-shoots and clones) and find more lists then you can count and less actually useful information then you’d hope for.

1. A good list should be short and concise. You can go into detail later.
2. If you are ranking or comparing things, show a summary at the bottom.
3. If the title of your ‘article’ contains any of the following words, you’re wasting my time: awesome, rocks, best, great, fresh
4. You aren’t doing anyone a favor if you aren’t providing links.
5. Bring something new to the table. Just a list is not enough.
6. You are not the top most resource on the subject. Don’t act like you are. Your post is an opinion.
7. Don’t post about something that you haven’t actually used or affected you. It’s how you separate garbage from quality.
8. No matter what, it’s been done before.
9. You aren’t an author if you’re just curating.
10. It’s usually way too long. I’ve got time for 10 bullet points at the most.
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The lines are movement, the black spots are areas where my mouse was stopped. This was one day at work, 9-6.

I just read an interesting article tonight titled Are Homepages Dead Or Are We Missing The Boat? over at Drawar, which looks like a nice site I might add. I find it funny because I’ve had to talk through how to design a website over the past few months to a couple friends and the point the article makes was the exact way I explained to them what a good homepage design should be.

A homepage should summarize any information that will make the user stay on the site. Using my website as an example, there are two distinct sections of my site that I want people to see. My portfolio and this blog. I also wouldn’t mind more twitter followers so that is the third column but besides that, those two sections are what people are going to be coming to my site for, to see my work or read what I have to say (thanks for reading this by the way.) While I am particularly proud of my about page, I’d have to be pretty popular for people to come to my site and want to know more about me before seeing anything I’m spitting out.

To relate it to print design, a homepage is not the front cover. On the internet, no one has time or cares about the front cover (that’s why you always hit skip on flash animations). It’s about getting in, finding the content you want to see and leaving. The homepage is the table of contents.

If I get linked to a page on a website, and I liked it, I want to be able to hit the home button, figure out what the site is about, quickly decide if I’m interested in it and move on. I don’t want the homepage to be paragraphs of some silly marketing jargon or some long-winded grandiose bio. That doesn’t tell me anything about the website. I want to see what content this website will provide me.

Of course I’m sure there are successful exceptions to this rule. Not everyone has dynamic content flying in all the time (or at all) that they can just feed into the homepage. Not everyone has a blog (although they probably have a Facebook or a Twitter account, which serves the same function.) Some websites are meant for wordy intro paragraphs that don’t really tell me anything, but I guarantee I’m not on those websites for very long.

Earlier this month, Pantone announced the color of the year for next year to be PANTONE® 15-5519 Turquoise, as seen above. Get ready to see a lot of websites change around their color scheme to match, just like with last years Mimosa.