Let’s start with the universal note taking app that is available on not only the iPad, but the iPhone, Android, desktops, in fact, just about anywhere you live electronically.  That would be Evernote.  This application can hold text notes, pdf’s, photos, business cards, recipes, well you get the idea. Once your note is saved it becomes not only accessible from anywhere, but it also becomes searchable, even the text within images if the image is clear enough. That feature is brought to you by the wondrous technology of Optical Character Recognition. Big words for a big job. Why do I bring that particular technology up you might ask, well we’ll get to that in a minute so stop being so impatient.

I truly find Evernote to be the most valuable application I’ve ever downloaded.  For me personally,  on the phone I take photos of receipts and have them uploaded and indexed.  On the desktop I save web pages that have code snippets I want to search through later.  Also, after a phone call I’ll pull up my client folder and type in a few notes for quick reference later.  On the iPad I store my meeting notes.

When I first started using the iPad for meeting notes I just typed them into Evernote directly with the on screen keyboard, but to be honest, I missed the actual act of writing things down in a pen to paper sort of way. So I tried to do just that, but quickly found I’m not much of a “writing with my fingers” sort of guy. After a quick internet search I found the perfect implement to simulate the real thing. A pogo sketch stylus. This little wonder has a special tip that functions superbly on capacitive screens like the one on the iPad. My only complaint is that I wish it was a tad bit thicker and had a little more heft to it, but thats just splitting hairs.

Armed with the pen, I needed the paper. Unfortunately, as of right now Evernote for the iPad does not take touch/pen type input directly into the note taking features of the app.  For that I had to look elsewhere.  After trying several different notepad style apps for the iPad I found my biggest problem was the multi touch functionality of the device.  I like to rest my palm on the surface when writing.  For pen input, that simply wasn’t working. But lo and behold after trying about 5 different solutions I found the one. Penultimate. Penultimate has an option for detecting your palm resting on the screen and ignores it. That leaves you free to write to your hearts content. Now this app isn’t without its shortcomings. Namely the lack of adjusting the pen tip size, but that is hardly enough of a barrier to dimish the usefulness of the app. In fact it’s really not much of a barrier at all in the great scheme of things.

So how does this fit into my Evernote workflow? Penultimate has a handy feature where you can email both a single written page, or an entire notebook. Evernote, in their great wisdom, happens to have issue each user an email address that allows you to email notes into your notebook. Voila, a hand written, searchable note is now accessible wherever I am. Did you catch that searchable part? Told you I’d get back to that character recognition stuff (if your handwriting is clean enough).

That’s my iPad note taking workflow. I think it’s pretty solid but if you think you can improve it, or if yours is just better, let me know below.

For myself the answer to that question was rather extensive.  I wanted to use it for entertainment, computing on the couch, taking notes in meetings, and managing our web servers while on the go.  In other words, I wanted to use the iPad like it was a netbook.  I’m happy to report that after a month with the device my netbook hasn’t been opened, and while at home, the laptop rarely is.

I could devote a post to each one of my solutions to the question above (which I’ll probably do for the next few weeks), but for today lets focus on how I’m using the iPad to manage our servers.  Now ideally you’d want to do all your work from the desktop, but carrying a laptop around with you everywhere you go is both cumbersome and inconvenient.  I’ve found a nice padded case from Targus which allows me to securely carry my iPad with me wherever I go.  The whole package is light weight and no more cumbersome than carrying around a notepad.  Power and convenience wherever you go.  So let’s get to it.

One of the services we offer along with our Web Design and Development, is Hosting for your website.  We do this by managing our own servers which are located at datacenters with Rackspace.  To manage our direct interactions with the Rackspace service I use the Rackspace app for iPad.  With this app I can manage virtually every interaction I need to have with the hardware.  Reboots, backups, resizes, I can do it all, even fire up a new server to handle additional load.

iSSH is another indispensable product.  iSSH allows you to do just like the name of the app suggests. You can SSH into your servers or connect via VNC. I’ve tried a few other apps of the same type on the iPad and found that this one is superior.  The keyboard overlay is cleaner and you don’t lose things on the screen.  It’s very readable which is a big plus when you need to get in and get out.  Let’s face it, if your on the go and have to SSH into a server, your more than likely doing so because something has gone wrong.  You want the most efficient and effective way of dealing with the issue, and in my opinion, for right now, this is it.

Finally we come to an excellent FTP client.  With a built in text editor FTP On The Go Pro is the cream of the crop.  If your not comfortable editing files through SSH this app offers a compelling alternative. FTP On The Go also allows you to download files and save them for later review or editing.  If you want to access your Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF, or Image files, your covered their as well.  All in all, a well rounded powerful FTP program for use away from the desktop.

So that wraps up server management on the iPad.  With a huge app eco-system a best in class solution to almost any problem can be found. Am I a fanboy? I am now. Are you?

Well, fear no more mighty wordsmith.  WordPress 3.0 has introduced the cure for what ails you: custom post types.  With custom post types the admin level user experience can now include any post type that you feel like creating.  When you visit the WordPress dashboard instead of just seeing the familiar “Posts”, you can have “Recipe Post”, “Camera Post”, or any other type of post you’d like.  With theme customization these post types can then be styled to look a certain way, and entering meta data becomes a much more user friendly endeavor on the backend.

After having created a few custom post types myself for current projects, I believe that this feature will provide a surge in the already formidable install base of WordPress.  But as is usually the case, with great power comes great responsibility.  While WordPress 3.0 makes tremendous strides towards creating these custom post types, the actual creation of them is still in the realm of the theme or plugin developer.  That said, I would expect to see several plugins released within the next month or so  that will make this process very easy for the end user.  When WordPress flashes that “Upgrade Available” banner at the top of your dashboard, go ahead and click “Upgrade Now”.  You won’t regret it.

We’re all familiar with the idea of a website sitemap. It’s generally that convoluted page that has all the links that really don’t help you navigate to where you want to be because it’s not structured very well and it just goes on and on and on kinda like this sentence. Well, as hard as it is for us to figure out, the search engines just love ‘em (at least a version of them).

When our Google, Bing, or Yahoo overlords send out their robots to crawl the interwebs, the purpose is to gather all the information stored on your website. In an oversimplification, this is accomplished by starting at one website. Then they follow the links that are embedded within that site which lead them to another site. Those links are then followed and eventually they have a pretty good layout of the entire internet.

So what if you have a page that no one links to? Or you have some pages that you don’t want to be included in the search engine listings. This is where you can take control of your content. The first thing a search bot does when it visits your home on the web is look for a little file called robots.txt. This file should be located in the root folder of your domain. It is within this robots.txt file that you give the search bot either its all access pass, or a cease and desist order. It is also where you can point it to your xml sitemap.

The XML sitemap is the roadmap to your world but written in a format that computers can easily understand. The search bots like that XML part. We won’t go into details regarding exactly how to read or write XML, but if you’d like more information I encourage you to learn more.

Providing the search engines with this “map to your stars” will help you keep your entire site indexed. This is true whether the page in question is linked to from another site or not. Bear in mind though that the XML sitemap is not a magic pill. The XML sitemap won’t necessarily help this page rank higher within the search listings, but at least it will be accounted for.

So how do I make an XML sitemap?

I’m glad you asked. The easiest and most powerful way to include a sitemap in your Worpress powered site is through a plugin called Google XML Sitemaps. This plugin will not only make a map of your site but also notify each of the major search engines whenever you update your content. As an added bonus the plugin also adds the location of the XML sitemap to your robots.txt file. Overall it’s a win win for both you and the search bots.

What if I’m not using WordPress?

Well, that’s not ideal, but all hope is not lost. For Drupal you can find a module here. For those of you still using Movable Type the process requires more work but you can start by looking at this page.

The benefits of helping the search engines index your data far outweigh the time it will take to get an XML sitemap up and running. I encourage you to add this task to the top of your website priority list and help your search engine overlords help you.

So why would you choose WordPress as content management system? Because it’s one of the most versatile and supported open source content management systems available today.

WordPress traces its history to 2003 as a replacement for a now defunct blogging platform know as b2. So I know what your thinking, “Blogging platform? I don’t want a blog, I want a website to tell people about my business. I also want a storefront to sell items.” See I told you I knew what you were thinking. Bear with me.

Although the roots of WordPress are founded in a blogging platform (and it still is the best platform for blogging out there) it’s also evolved into so much more. The modern WordPress is a full fledged site management system with a list of over 8,488 plugins available to help you add functionality to your site. And if for some reason you can’t find the exact functionality you want, WordPress has a built in API so any one of a large stable of independent developers can build that functionality for you.

“But I know what a WordPress site looks like, and they look like blogs.” Are you sure? Does this look like a WordPress site to you? How about this one? Did you notice each one also had ecommerce functionality built in? Certainly a WordPress site can look like a blog, it can also look like a store, or a landing page, or any other type of site you can think of.

This is accomplished by themes. You can think of a theme as what the world sees when they visit your website. The window to your content. Their are theme showcases for you to browse, and several theme repositories with a nice selection of premade selections for you. Oh, and a WordPress developer can make a theme from any design your own designer may come up with.

Need more convincing? Ask and you shall receive. Leave a comment and I’ll be sure to answer any question you may have.

Join us next week for part II: How To Install WordPress.

So now that you know a little bit about my taste in cinematic comedies, how about what I do here at Adcuda. My specialty is front end web development and PHP. That means I bring all the web components together for the excellent sites Adcuda builds for it’s clients. HTML, XHTML, CSS, JQuery, PHP. That’s me.

What does that mean for those not familiar with internet buzzwords? It means that when you view one of our clients sites in your web browser, I’m responsible for the way things fit together and are presented. Not the design or look of the page, that would be Craig’s job. But rather the glue that holds all of the elements together. This also includes any interaction you may need to do on the site.

Let’s recap what you know about me so far. I have a keen sense of humor ( see movie reference above ), and I’m a rockstar ninja web developer.

With that knowledge in hand what can you expect from me on this blog? On a weekly basis I hope to bring you a little nugget of information that will help you understand the technologies that make websites tick. This may be in the form of simple code tutorials or highlighting plugins and technologies I come across. In fact, if their is some technology or trend you would like learn more about, leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do.