Preparation and Toolkit

As my new Zudescape is going to be my online “home”, I will be putting a lot of time and effort into designing it nicely. Fortunately I don’t need to worry about digging the foundations for my new home, as the nice people at Zude have done that part for me. I will just be building my house right on top of their prefabricated foundations, and will use many of the tools that their workmen have left lying around for people like me to make use of. But the whole point of Zude, as far as I can see, is that you are not limited to the tools that the developers have put aside for you. The whole of the Internet is my toolbox, and I just have to select the parts that I want.

The Private Pages
In preparing for designing my new Zudescape, I have created a set of “private” pages in my Zude account, which I will use for collecting my tools into, for testing pieces of my Zudescape before I apply them, and also one that is my project headquarters. This last one is not just the place where the workmen sit and drink coffee. It is the central hub for my Zudescape Development project.

Planning
The Planning page is where I keep my “To Do list”, and this Blog, and a corkboard for short notes and ideas, and also links to my toolbox and my testing areas. This is the project headquarters. Specifically, the page contains an embedded WordPress page for posting new blog entries. It also has a WidgetBox widget (or what they call a “blidget”) which I generated very quickly using the RSS feed address of my WordPress blog. This allows me to view all of my blog entries in a widget on my Zude page. The Planning page also contains an embedded Remember The Milk page. This is the site that I am using to manage my To Do list. I have also widgetised the output from Remember The Milk, this time using a widget from YourMinis, which allows me to view the RSS feed of the items on my To Do list. Then there is the corkboard. I am using a widget from RockYou for this, and it is quite awesome! I can add pictures or notes to the corkboard whenever I want to, and it automagically tracks the date and time that they were added. Finally there is a common banner at the top of the page, a page title and description, and links to the other project pages, including the “Playpens” and the toolbox. At the very bottom of the page is a copy of the default Zude object for tracking changes. This history log is going to be useful for keeping track of what I have done on my new Zudescape.

Playpens
I have two pages that I have set aside for tinkering. I call them playpens. Professional programmers would call them a “sandbox”. I’m not a professional programmer! I have a playpen! Basically they are a safe environment for me to practice with new objects, adjusting properties, and tweaking configurations of widgets and other objects before I add them to a page on my new Zudescape. The playpens are practically empty, having only the common banner, page title, description, and a link back to the Planning page. I have already started tinkering in one of the playpens. I have been experimenting with a website statistics and hit counter service called Auriq myRT. I have added the script that they provide into the HEAD block of the page. That, by the way, was one of the really cool things which I liked when I first found out about Zude. Being able to add things to the HEAD block of the page is quite rare. I am sure that you can’t do that on many of the large, popular social networking sites! The jury is still out for me on myRT, as I think it has a problem dealing with Zude’s DHTML pages, as it seems to need a physical URL to attach to, whereas Zude offers up URLs as queries from the index.htm page, using those huge long page ID numbers. I’ll keep you posted of my progress with this.

Toolbox
This page contains a whole heap of embedded websites and URL links to tools that I expect to need quick access to while I am developing my Zudescape. These tools include image editors and optimizers, color pickers, 3D text and button makers, page analysis tools, and widget catalogs. I am constantly adding to this list, but here is what I have so far…

Color Scheme Picker
Farbtastic Color Picker Widget
Glassy Button Generator
Pingdom Tools – Full page test
3D Text Maker
SiteReportCard Image Optimization
Image2HTML (slices up large images into HTML tables)
QuickThumbnail
FlashButtons
Dual Mouseover Machine Generator

As I say, I am constantly adding to this list. If anyone would like to recommend a site that I might be interested in, please leave a comment on this blog entry so that I know where to find it. I am specifically after sites that will help me to build a really awesome Zudescape, including Javascript and Flash based widgets.