Another installment of our WTF series to help you understand wtf all this web jargon is all about.

Gravatar is a company that has coined the phrase of the same name. Gravatar means a Globally recognized avatar. You’ll notice in our comments that if a person posts it shows a geometric picture to represent you. Let me explain how to personalize this for use on this and any blog on the web using gravatars (that would be most of them).

Step 1: go to www.gravatar.com

Step 2: If you have a wordpress log in, log in right there on the home page. If you don’t and you want one (you don’t have to have a blog, you can just get an account), go to www.wordpress.com and sign up for one (just opt out of the blog). If you don’t want a wordpress account, just click the ‘get a gravatar’ button and follow the steps.

Step 3: once you have an account, you can update it with your photo and profile info.

See how easy that was? Test it out here in our comments, and be sure to link us back to your own website if you have one.

So this morning as I’m sipping my coffee, reading over my favorite blogs, I check in on a site that I love that’s full of designer portfolios. Most of them are web designers. So many are enviable, they’re at the front of the trends…really they’re setting the trends. It’s inspirational and, as you can imagine - brings a few tinges of inadequacy. Reminds of this funny shirt I saw, but of course didn’t bookmark. It basically says the point of being a graphic artist is to make all the other graphic artists jealous. We must have gigantic egos.

Anyway, as I’m perusing (drooling over) these portfolio sites, I start to realize a few things.

Most weren’t very user friendly

There’s a big trend in design to have a one page portfolio. I really don’t get this, I want people to be able really get to know us and our work through our website, and how could I do that if you only had one page of information to look through?

The ones that did have multiple pages, the navigation was hidden somewhere in the design…either in a font that’s way too small, way up in the top right corner of the page or worked into the design in a way that I didn’t really know I could or was supposed to click if I did happen to see it.

Almost none were search engine friendly

There was minimal text on the pages, and with only having a one page site, google doesn’t like that so much. The more content you have, the more there is to log. Obviously, within reason - and a blog does help this - but just having one page with maybe 500 words total for your entire site is search engine suicide.

Style and function are two different things

I truly believe that you can have both, but function has to win if there’s a time when you have to choose. Who cares if your site looks like an amazing piece of art if A) nobody can find it and B) if they do happen to stumble on it, they have no idea where the heck they’re supposed to go? It’s a mystery to me.

At the end of the day…

It’s really an interesting emotion to look at something and envy the look, but then try to use it, or look at it like google would and realize there’s a major miss. All style, no substance. Hopefully we’ve married the two with quirky bird, because that was definitely the idea.

If the title of this post applies to you, keep reading.

I was one of you.

A few years ago, everyone started blogging. It was primitive, usually personal to a level that I didn’t really care to spend time reading. Design was primitive as well. None of it was really very appealing. It seemed like a lot of technological hoodoo. I was almost completely disinterested.

Then information started trickling through to me that I was interested in. Blogs were becoming beautiful, full of information that I was eager to absorb. I would bookmark them, high on them, and then would never remember to go back.

This orange button started showing up on blogs that I would stumble across. “RSS…WTF is that?” Great, I had just started to get the hang of this and then I found that there was something else I knew nothing about. I googled articles on RSS and was still pretty much lost on what I was supposed to do with them.

WTF is RSS?

RSS is a simple string of information that your blog generates as a way to easily transmit your blog posts out into the internet. You can access this string through a URL. This is what mine looks like:

http://imaquirkybird.com/?feed=rss2

To follow a blog using an RSS feed, you have to sign up for a feed reader - then ’subscribe’ to the blog by saving the RSS link that the blog generated in your reader. The RSS reader will then be automatically alerted and updated with any new posts from that blog.

Reading Feeds

I started off with Google Feed Reader. If you use igoogle, this would be a good option for you - it will post your feeds on your igoogle home page. My problem with Google Feed Reader was that I couldn’t remember to check it. So, it was a bust for me.

A few months ago, I found Feedly - a Firefox plugin. If you don’t use Firefox as your browser, you should. It’s the A-number-1-must-have if you use the internet. Seriously, go right now and get it here: the best browser ever.

Feedly is cool because:

It’s easy to remember to read

I’m a bit of a mad scientist, remembering is not something that comes easily for me. So a top quality in a feed reader is something that’s a little in my face. With the feedly reader plug in, there is an adorable little green rss button next to my url bar. I see it a bazillion times a day. When I have free time, I click it and it takes me to my feedly dashboard.

It’s easy to save sites I want to follow

a) open feedly
b) click add source
c) paste url of feed into the field
d) save

There is also a mini toolbar on your pages that will save an article in your reader, post it to your twitter, or email it to someone with one click. Easy Sneazy.

It’s easy to read

Feedly uses a magazine style layout, so you can see all of your favorites one one page like one big blog. You can create categories for things like friends, living, cooking, etc. Many already exist with some blog suggestions to get you started, you can add/delete feeds as you like.

It’s user friendly

Anyone who knows me well knows that I’m a usability freak. If it doesn’t have an easy to use interface, I’m never going to use it. You’ll be happy to know I use feedly almost every day.

Did I mention it’s easy?

Because it is. Real easy. So easy I can do it - and I was an RSS resister.

I’m a believer

So having found a reader that works for me, I’m officially a believer. One of my favorite pastimes on my computer is reading through the variety of blogs I’ve found to help inspire me, educate me, and entertain me. It’s not as scary as you might think, you just have to have the understanding of what it is and how it works and a tool that helps you manage the feeds you want to read.