Unlike a good portion of the design related blogs on the internet, we at AssaultBLOG try to write as much of our own content as we can rather than just link to other peoples’ hard work. It’s also been awhile since we’ve written an extensive tutorial so I’ve decided to make our own list of best posts from Assault that you may have missed if you just recently started subscribing to our RSS feed.

5 Tips to make your unsigned band stand out from the rest

List of tips to spend your hard earned day job money to make your band stand out from the rest.

HTML emails – A quick rules and primer tutorial

Thinking of writing an html newsletter? Consider these few things first.

When Every Sale Counts

When you launch your first online store, it takes forever to get sales. This article will give you a few insights as to how you can get those first few sales even when your traffic is relatively low.

SEO Tips and strategies the high priced consultants aren’t telling you

Don’t feel like paying $2,000 for an SEO audit of your site? Read this list of tips and it will greatly help you fare better in the SEO world. This is my most comprehensive and one of my best SEO articles to date.

How to float to the top of Google search pages

Interested in what gets you in the top ten search results for Google searches? I list out my secrets for free! (This list is a great list especially if you have no money to spend like I don’t.)

E-Commerce tips explained with some interesting human behavior psychology

Do you know why we sometimes find ourselves excitedly buying things we don’t really need?  I came across this outline from a book by Dan Ariely called, “Predictably Irrational” that had some incredibly insightful information about people and why we at times seem to act completely irrational. It covers giving away  things for free, putting high price points on products to create demand, and even the benefit of arousal!

How to reset your Myspace page using CSS

A brief tutorial with working code to make your Myspace look a bit more respectable. If you don’t want to read the whole post, you can just copy/paste/edit the source code that is supplied.

Tips & tools to improve your conceptual web design

A list of tools that will help bring your web designs one step closer to print designs including non-standard web fonts, custom line breaks, and transparency across all browsers.

Assault Photoshop Brush Set 1

The first set of brushes released from some of our t-shirt designs that were never used.

5 tips & resources to help get your t-shirt company off the ground

During my time at the university of hard knocks in the t-shirt business I learned a few things that I share here with anyone else who may be starting a t-shirt company so they don’t have to go through the same growing pains that I did.

How to create your own Photoshop Brushes

A step by step tutorial outlining how to create your own Photoshop brushes so you don’t have to spend hours scouring the net for the perfect brush.

How to use Photoshop Brush Dynamics

Part two of my brush tutorials where I show you how to use brush dynamics to get some cooler effects with your brushes that you’ve created in the Photoshop brush tutorial.

How to make those trendy lasers and light bursts in Photoshop

I’ve seen tons of ads with cool looking light bursts and light rays, and decided to write a step by step tutorial on how it was done. Originally, I believe I saw them in wired from designer, Tom Muller, so I even got in touch with him and interviewed him to find out more about his design process.

Alternative ways to find design inspiraiton

My personal best ways to find design inspiration when watching tv or going to the park just doesn’t cut it.

Turn a WordPress blog into your own personal FFFFound

A wordpress theme tutorial with included plugins that will allow you to make your own FFFFound blog like I have done on VNovember.com.

Like what you see here?

I write one quality post like this at least every week, and time permitting I make additional posts about the music industry, apparel industry, and design. Subscribe to the RSS feed, it’s worth every penny.

I’ve been a daily visitor of ffffound for some time now, but I have never been lucky enough to receive an invite to actually use it. It’s a GREAT source of inspiration for all types of design, and I constantly refer to it and the QBN pic of the day thread for some good laughs and beautiful pictures. After realizing that I had a spare domain name I decided it was time to try and hack together a WordPress theme with a few plugins that would emulate ffffound, and its related images feature.

Download the theme and necessary plugins: VNovember_ffff.zip
To see the final working version of this theme+plugins: VNovember Image Bookmarking

Preface – What this theme + plugins will/will not do

I knew my version wouldn’t function exactly like the real thing, because I don’t really know how it works, and because I am somewhat limited to what WordPress has to offer. There were a few key elements of ffffound that I felt were the most important and useful part of its service, and I’ll be trying to replicate that functionality with WordPress and a few Firefox addons:

• Related images and recommendations based on post content and tags
• Displaying related images on homepage and post pages
• Displaying tag counts on the left side of the page
• Come up with an easy way to post the images via iPhone, Scribefire (direct from Firefox) and an easy way to thumbnail the images. (CSS for now)

***I recommend using a blank, fresh WordPress installation with no posts. (Not even the Hello World post) Or else you’ll have to go through your database and unpublish all your content posts or else they will start showing up in your related posts section when we only want images to show up

Upload the theme + plugins

I was able to accomplish most of this with some fancy CSS for IE and a few workarounds. For the most part the site is very easy to post to and looks very similar to ffffound. All you need to get this theme working is the VNovember_ffff.zip which contains the WordPress theme and the necessary plugins. To get these plugins individually you can go to their respective homepages:

• Yet Another Related Posts plugin (This one you’ll have to take from my zip as it is modified to work with images instead of using only text)
  
• Configurable Tag Cloud plugin
• SEO Friendly Images plugin

After downloading the zip do the following to get your files in the right place.

1. Unzip the theme
2. Upload the files in the “plugins” directory to your wp-content/plugins directory
3. Activate Configurable Tag Cloud plugin, SEO Friendly Images plugin, and Yet Another Related Posts plugin via the WordPress Plugins page
4. Upload the theme files to wp-content/themes so that the vnovember_ffff directory resides in yoursite.com/wp-content/themes/vnovember_ffff

Configure the plugins

Now that you have all the files in place you need to configure them. The Yet Another Related Posts plugin has settings, but I’ve made custom function arrays for them so you should not have to modify the settings page for this plugin. If you would like more/less related images to show up you can edit the functions in the single.php file and the index.php  file included in the vnovember_ffff theme directory.

From your WordPress Administration you need to add the Configurable Tag Cloud plugin to your sidebar. There are two sidebars with this theme, one on the left column and one in the bottom above the footer. Add the Configurable Tag Cloud plugin to your sidebar1 and apply these settings:

Tags, Uploading Images, making it work

The way this theme works is by using the tags you apply to each post to determine which images are somewhat alike. Every time you tag something the plugin will search through your posts and find other images that are similar and display the closest matches.

The easiest way to get images posted quickly is by using the Scribefire Firefox plugin. It takes just a few seconds to upload an image, add the tags, and publish the post all from your browser window. (You can still post from the WordPress Admin if you’d like) You can also snap pictures with your iPhone and use the WordPress iPhone application to post images directly from your phone.

If you decide to use the Scribefire Firefox plugin I recommend turning off the max image with option so that Scribefire isn’t trying to put inline styles in your image tags.

Some important things to remember:

• This theme does not have any commenting or trackbacks enabled
• There’s no need for multiple categories-just use tags
• This theme will only work and display properly if you only post images in your post body section
• You can hot link to images or upload them. I recommend uploading images to your own server and putting them in your posts rather than stealing someone else’s hosted images.
• This theme assumes your WordPress blog only has images, no textual, content related posts. If you want to have content related posts as well then I recommend using pages.

Plans for the future

A couple of plans for the future of this experiment (hopefully with some help from others!) would be to:

• Automatically pull the images src attribute for creating a link to the full size image from individual post pages using JQuery. (I haven’t quite gotten this to work yet)
• Create and cache thumbnails to related images on the fly with phpThumb. (not quite sure how to get this done either)
• Keep thumbnails to their proper aspect ratio (currently the related thumbnails scale improperly if they’re too tall)
• Possibly port this to WordPress MU so you can actually have user accounts with their own image bookmarking

A head start on the JQuery solution that I couldn’t seem to get working:

$(function() {

var imageSrc = $(“div.entry-content p img”).attr(“src”);
$(‘<a href=’+ imageSrc +).prependTo(“div.entry-content p img”);
$(“</a>”).appendTo(“div.entry-content p img”);
});

This seemed to get the proper image source URL, but it would never append the proper link href to the images. Please let me know of any problems you are having as well as bug reports in the comments, and if you can offer solutions to any of the three items I outlined above.

Happy image bookmarking!