We have recently started looking for people who would like to guest blog here at Wohill once or occasionally.
If you're interested - send us information about yourself like name, email, website, profession, twitter id (if you have one) and the blog entry, which should consist of a subject and a body.

We will look at the information and if it fits our profile we will publish the blog entry sometime soon (depending on the interest) - you will be notified. The subject should be related to either design or development in some way and in english.

Wohill has been up and running now since January 2008 and is steadily going forward with a constantly increasing number of unique visitors per day. Your post will be seen by many people and indexed very well in the search engines.

Take this chance now and send your info to info[at]wohill.com.

Post any questions in the comments or send an email to the same address!

There is currently one issue I'm working on with this blog that's really bothering me. And that is that the page (or really the table where all the content is in) moves every time the page is reloaded/refreshed in Firefox and Safari to the right and back. It may be problems with other browsers as well, but it is not a problem in Internet Explorer however.

I have of course been breaking down the page into pieces to find the problem and the problem as far as I can tell is due to some of the JavaScript script tags. If I remove most of the adverts , which are script tags on the form

<script type="text/javascript"> code... </script>

and the Feedjit scripts, the moving/jumping problem disappears.

Now, why is this happening? Is there some CSS-adjustment of any kind or some other thing that I have missed or a known work-around?

A way to solve this is to put the scripts in iframes but that is not a good solution since the scripts rely on the information of the page that they reside on and would loose that being on an "empty" page.

Any help is appreciated!

I decided to start blogging two years ago. At that time I chose to use an existing blog framework. There are several on the market like Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, Livejournal etc. I decided to go with Blogger at that time and I am quite satisfied. Especially Blogger and Wordpress are very good and I really recommend them since they both are easy to use with many functionalities and plugins. Another really really good thing is Blogger indexes very high at Google. I am actually not sure if that is only due to good SEO, a good search engine or the fact that Google acquired Blogger some time ago and gives it some extra points when scoring the site for searches or if it just is a combo. More about that at some other time.

With Wohill we decided to do everything on our own! Sure, a framework like Blogger can provide many things but not everything. And there are a lot of things you would like to have your way when thinking about it. As we own the code and data all the way from backend to frontend (ok not quite true since it's located on a web hotel but almost...) we can do whatever we want to do, we can fulfill all of our wet web dreams! There are almost no limitations which certainly is freedom and that is the reason to build and maintain your own blog software (besides the fun of it).

A blog is a mix of design, user-experience, functionality and good SEO-thinking. I focus mainly on functionality and SEO. This blog is built on HTML, JavaScript (and AJAX), CSS and PHP (querying a mySQL-database). That's what you need to create a blog that can do most of the things you can think of. And lot's of that is thank's to the great capabilities of PHP. If the functionality is not already in the default library, someone else might have written some useful classes for you to use or you can just do it yourself.

A typical blog consists of a few typical elements when looking at it from a visitor's point of view:
- A blog roll
- Links section
- Recent entries
- An archive of all earlier blog posts
-Categories
- RSS-feed
- About/presentation/profile
- An area for the content, the blog post
- Comment functionality

Some blogs have more functionality like:
- Recent comments
- Widgets
- Client scripts
- Visitor stats
- Bookmarking
- Permalinks
- Search function
- More...

In my opinion a blog should at least contain the first list. So how do we build this?
We could do everything static, which means using only HTML, CSS and some JavaScript. But that is boring, ugly and so inefficient and has a very unpleasant 90's feeling about it. So the obvious choice is a dynamic solution where we choose to keep the design in one place and the data in another place. For this blog, the design is created using HTML and CSS and the data is stored in a mySQL-database to which data is added, updated and removed using PHP and SQL. The data is presented into the design using PHP and JavaScript.

But since we don't want to be blogging using an SQL-client or directly in the database we also need an administration interface - which the blogger(s) can use to create new posts and also to manage other things like categories, wallpapers etc. So we need an administration interface and a presentation interface that both communicates with the database to insert, update and remove data. This communication consists of a middle layer that is the core functionality of the blog.

To summarize we need to build the blog in different blocks:
- Frontend

- An interface for the visitors (what you see)
- An administration interface (for the bloggers)
- Support functionality for validation, checks, notifications etc.(JavaScript or PHP)

- Middleware, which works as the communication layer between the presentation and the data. This functionality either functions as servlets or as client functionality to get the data for example.
- Backend (the database that holds all the data, there are no stored procedures in this solution).

Each of these blocks can be divided in more detail but this is an abstract explanation however. Changes that we make to the site either becomes visible to visitors and in this case we modify the frontend. Sometimes we modify the middleware to for example get better performance or SEO etc. And sometimes the backend or database has to be modified as a consequence of changing the frontend or middleware. As you might understand we have full control everywhere (except of possible downtimes on the server).

This is what I do on Wohill and my blogging will be concentrated to these functionalities, new features, aspects, problems, solutions and so on regarding all of these areas when developing this blog, which hopefully will be interesting and come to use to other people. If not, one thing I have learned is that it will certainly come to use to the one that wrote it - working as a notebook or diary.

Please feel free to drop any questions, correct me or add suggestions.

Hi All,
I am Nic. Randolph has already introduced me in two earlier creations; In "Faces of Wohill" - symbolizing us and also a special symbol for me, which I do intend to use. Great work and thank you very much partner!

I am not a newbie to blogging. I am running another blog - Nick's corner - and have been for two years now. This, Wohill, is somewhat different however. Let me explain.

Me and Randolph have been working together on this blog project for quite some time now (at least when speaking in Internet time). If you take a look at the left side of the page, below entries and wallpapers etc, you'll see for how many days it has been running. Actually we started on the 3rd of January 2008 and since that Randolph has been blogging for three times a week with new ideas and constantly cool and fresh designs. During this time we have grown in several ways - the amount of blog posts of course but we have also grown into the design and feeling of the site and become good friends with it.
We have been trying to make the site more exciting and fun and with a better user experience all along, using two main concepts - design and development. Mostly for ourselves but also for our visitors. To be able to continue doing this you really have to enjoy what you're doing - you have to be passionate of what you're doing.

Randolph mentioned that he thinks that we are a great combo and I believe that is very much true. We have been and we will have lots of fun, we will learn many things and we will be able to contribute to the communities to which we address in a very good way. The reasons for this are two in my opinion; The first is that we are two people with expertise in two different areas - design and development. And the other is that both of us are extremely passionate at what we do. The combination of these two is what makes the difference. We will be able to deliver more content, expertise in two areas and a unique combination of design and development that hopefully will attract and help people in many different situations. This makes it funny and incredible interesting in my and Randolph's point of view. I can assure you that money is not the reason to why we are doing this but solely our passion.

So having said that, I will start blogging about what I'm passionate about - development. And web development is one very big part of it. I will write about new features we bring into the site, how we have chosen to take different approaches, solutions to code problems, css issues, tips and tricks, references to other great sites and so on.
Please feel free to comment, it will only help us in creating a better site.

Bookmark us, we will stay and make a difference!