Akismet is definitely the main one. It works great for human spam but is less effective with machine generated spam in my experience. The other plugin I now use in conjunction with Akismet is FV Antispam. It’s VERY light on CPU and I see no spam and 0 false positives. It replaced WP-Spamfree for me which I no longer recommend. I’ve actually stopped using Sabre and Simple Trackback Validation too on most projects and stick with Akismet and FV Antispam: http://WordPress.org/extend/plugins/fv-antispam/

Thanks for your comment!

Thanks for your comment!

btw: Nice guitar
– even if it does have a locking nut (:

We recently outsourced for the building of a new website. I have been able to create something equal if not better to the site that was made by someone else.

WordPress is definitely my go to.

I highly recomend book room instead.

But feel free to choose your own topic — why not?

To prove it how? Many people are not willing to listen even to reasoned arguments. They use what’s familiar to them and are unwilling to change and maybe improve their workflow because they do not see it as problematic in the first place. And, quite frankly, who am I or anyone else to tell them otherwise? I have already made the case for Fireworks here (that is the second most visited page on this site) and countless times in the past in forums and other venues. I’ll leave that to others now as this is of absolutely no interest to me anymore. Being a Fireworks evangelist has consumed a lot of my time in the past for very little reward. I’m done. What I’m interested in at this time is provide useful tips and sharing key parts of my Web design workflow with people that are interested in possibly learning new things. That includes Fireworks of course but there’s much more to it than Fireworks and I want to place it in context of the entire process. I spend a lot more time in Dreamweaver, the WordPress admin and the Headway UI than in Fireworks nowadays. Fireworks is still an essential part of my toolset but it’s no longer the center of it.

I do want to start with Fireworks related material for my eBooks though because I’ve been using it for so long (+12 years) and I want to share how my usage of it has evolved.

So, I’ll ask you what I asked the others: Is there any specific topics (related to Fireworks or not) that you believe would be particularly useful to you or other people?

Thanks again!

Personally, I haven’t lost faith in Fireworks itself but I did loose faith in Adobe’s desire to bring it to its full potential. Maybe the next version will finally move the app forward but we’ll see.

In the meantime, Fireworks still has no equals as it is right now for Web design work. I still use it and do not intend to stop using it any time soon. As for Photoshop, as great an app as it is, I still think it’s a terrible “design” and “layout” application. Completely the wrong tool for that kind of job IMO (Web or print… especially print).

Linda’s “Playing with Fire” was indeed one of the best FW books ever released. My approach will be far more focused on specific tasks and workflows as they relate to creating modern Web sites.

As for WordPress, maybe you just need to find the right tools like plugins and themes, especially the right theme framework. I will post about all that soon too because it’s now been about a year since I started doing client projects with WordPress and I would not go back. I can now concentrate on creating the right user experience and solving my clients’ needs and not recoding the same stuff time and time again. It’s very liberating. A strong CSS knowledge is mandatory though IMO. With the right theme framework, that will help you more than knowing PHP but that comes very handy as well.

Check out the Headway Theme framework if you are serious about integrating WordPress into your workflow. WordPress with Headway have rocked my site design and development process. If you decide to purchase it, I’d appreciate if you used my my affiliate link (either through the banner on the right or the link in this paragraph).

To conclude, is there any specific topic (Fireworks, WordPress or other) you think would be beneficial to cover?

Thanks again!