Thanks for the link love! You have a great site here. I especially like the inventive consideration you gave to the idea of framing. Thanks for a wonderfully detailed post. Keep up the great work!

Cheers,
Loren

A very ingightful and complete post… gives me some things to think about. I think I’ll be changing the digital framing of my work relatively soon (and I don’t mean the blog template).

As for the reader question… maybe you could help me learn to code.

Vitor

What type of code?

Actually, I suppose that the real question would be, what would you like to do? Each language has its strengths and weaknesses. C++ is wonderful for crunching data. C# (.NET) is pretty useful for making Windows programs. PHP excels with working with text, such as when making web pages. Java is the Swiss Army Knife of compatibility. That’s only the “C Family.” A lot of other languages exist that have special niches, so knowing what you want to do is the first step in learning a programming language.

The easiest language to learn would probably be PHP, although its usefulness is effectively limited to making dynamic web pages. The second easiest out of the bunch would be C#.

I agree with Jeff… framing as a storytelling device (setting a story in a specific context or genre, with its respective conventions) is a great communication tool.

Framing by using the same medium is a wonderful method, and your examples illustrate this perfectly. A photographer might frame their art in the darkroom (or the digital darkrooms of GIMP and Photoshop) by adding a border around the image. It would still be well within the realm of visual art, but it is adding a distinctly different ‘voice,’ compared to the original piece of art.

The same applies with writing an introduction to a guest post… The introduction isn’t the content, but it does set the content off, either by describing its importance, describing the author, or, in the case of “Once upon a time,” indicating that a story is to follow.

Personal stories can also frame a points by putting those points in context and setting them apart.

Just like with other types of framing, though, it is possible to add too much framing, distracting from the main point. My personal stories tend to ramble on, making the stories themselves seem more important than the point I was trying to make, or making people lose interest and ignoring the rest of the post.

@Vitor:

How to make a decent website, eh?

You already know how to make excellent content, which is the foundation for a decent site. The other two questions to ask are, how are you going to display the content visually (i.e., creating a template which requires knowledge of HTML and CSS), and how would you like to put the content into the template?

There are two main choices for putting the content into the template. The first method is to hand-write all of the HTML to include the content. This is great for small sites, where making a change to one part of your template can be completed in a short time. Unfortunately, if you have several pages, then updating a single element can be very time consuming. If you wanted to change the copyright date on all of your pages, for instance, it could quickly become tedious if you had over one hundred pages.

The second method is to write a program that displays your template and content. This way, a change to your template will require updating a very small number of files, usually only one file, and every page will have the updates immediately.