June 5th, 2009 | Comment | Tech
May 25th, 2009 | Comment | Personal
My quest for the ultimate hand held gadget began as a dream in the 80s. Day after day Penny would help her uncle save the day with the aid of her incredible computer book.
April 21st, 2009 | Comment | Personal
Do you ever watch the bottom left status bar in Fire Fox when a page is loading? I have been noticing amazon.s3 in the loading URLs on sites like Twitter and DropBox. I have also heard of it mentioned it in interviews with developers. So what is Amazon; a book retailer doing on these websites?
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is a web hosting service that can be used to host files such as images. You wouldn’t host your site here, just assets which would be called into your site.
So why do this? Their data rates are a lot less expensive than many hosts. For example Amazon charges $0.15 per GB per month for the first 50 TB of data transfer downloads (by viewers visiting your site). The Hosting I use allows for 1 TB of transfer and there’s an additional charge if I go over this.
For the average site this would be overkill and a needless expense, but sites like Digg.com that see upwards of 40 million unique visitors a month have to watch every kb that their site makes users download.
It goes to show that Cache can save your site money!
April 2nd, 2009 | Comment | Personal
It seems to happen all too often, some Div is being uncooperative and I spend a handful of minute trying to reign it in. When I was in college the only CSS I learned was the colouring of scroll bars in IE6; so positioning for me has been pretty much self-taught and in times of trouble I often resort to some trial and error. Today I finally took the time to get the definitive answers about positioning and found this excellent post http://www.barelyfitz.com/screencast/html-training/css/positioning/
February 17th, 2009 | Comment | Personal
This past weekend as a part of celebrating our two year wedding anniversary, my wife and I turned the house into a rustic resort. For two days we had no lights, computers, internet, video games or TV. We used only kitchen appliances and music. It was very nice, and more relaxing than the average long weekend.
When we did return to civilization I booted up my laptop and found it doing one of its classic moves: not connecting to the internet for absolutely no reason. With this came the return of some familiar feelings toward technology.
This lead me to some interesting thinking about the internet and what it represents in my life. I find with daily internet use come some pressures. I feel a need to be up on the latest content on my regularly visited sites; news, social networks and emails. Looking back I’ve been feeding this monster daily (with the exception of some vacations.
This information craving can’t be all that healthy, so I’ve decided to have more computer + internet-free days. Preferably at least one a week.
If you agree, high five! Here is one of the results of one of my constant content-hunting;
January 19th, 2009 | Comment | Personal
Growing up I was always drawing; I would bring a pen and paper everywhere I went making comics and scrawling monsters. Since college though I’ve been drawing less and less. It’s gotten to the point now where I get frustrated trying to draw without the same dynamics and precision I used to have.
This Christmas I got a Wacom tablet and was eager to start drawing again. I was surprised how incomparably different the digital version is from paper. As you can see my first attempts were to try to draw in the traditional sense; then I took advantage of the bizarre control to make some more abstract illustrations. The last one was an attempt to draw straight lines. It’s hilariously bad.
You can click to enlarge.
January 5th, 2009 | Comment | Personal
Happy new year! It’s hard to believe nine years have passed since Y2k. 2008 is gone now, and I’m looking forward to the new year. Looking back here are some milestones for 2008 as a web developer.
Tabless design with CSS
I’ve been making tabled sites for ages, but finally decided to give the CSS route a chance. At first I really didn’t see the benefit, as creating in design mode is much more appealing (and often faster). CSS markup takes less chars and is more flexible to change.
Using Libraries
Working contract for a marketing agency has me creating multiple sites a year (guessing around 15 for last year), which means I spend a fair bit of time recycling code. Collections like CSS Grids and jQuery are incredible resources for saving time and having standardized practices. Open source libraries really changed my workflow last year.
Drupal FTW
Last year I developed my first site in this super powerful CMS. I will still use WP for most client-managed sites, but Drupal offers a lot of powerful tools.
Boag World Podcast
The guys at Headscape have really changed the way I approach CSS and accessibility. This is one of the best podcasts I have ever listened to, on any topic.
Other 2008 Milestones
- Nipissing University Prospective Students site – called by some my best site design yet.
- The latest chapter of ArleyM.com
- Craziest Deadlines ever. Not stuff to show off, but impressive amounts of work in an unprecedented amount of time
So what’s up 2009?
December 16th, 2008 | Comment | Personal
I can’t look back on this year without grimacing at the lesson hardest learned: data management. Since the first time I accidentally deleted project content (oops, forgot the “Where” on an SQL Update… heh.) I have always been a hardcore backup guy. My backups are so frequent that when my computer died in February I lost no data. The real problem was that my laptop HDD 80 gig capacity was too small. I only pulled what I needed off of my external drives, so my weekly backups started to become a mess. I have since rethought my entire backup system to keep things as organized as possible.
1. RAID – My first line of defence is a SATA Raid for my data drive on my computer (the OS is on a third hdd). This mirroring makes sure that my data is safe even if a hard drive dies.
2. Sync Back Pro Daily – Every day my system does a backup sync of emails and work files to an external drive using a program called Sync Back Pro. I highly recommend this product that easily allows scheduled backups and syncs of files to HDD, DVD or even FTP. There is a very nice free version as well with a couple less features. http://www.2brightsparks.com/
3. Closed Jobs drive – Since I do a lot of freelance work for a marketing agency a lot of jobs pass through my computer. To prevent redundancy I keep a drive of closed jobs as my only repository for files if the job suddenly re-opens.
4. Off Site Storage - Should the unthinkable happen I do have an external at a friend’s house with a collection of files I update a couple times a year.
5. Google Docs – For those important lists and billing / client information I have started to use Google’s services. I will never have hardware as reliable as this giant.
6. Fire Proof – What paranoid backup system would be complete without considering fire proofness? I recently got a safe for storing data on DVD and external HDDs. Can you really put a price on your data? The answer is yes. http://www.sentrysafe.com/
December 1st, 2008 | Comment | Personal
Too often I find a web project comes with such a tight deadline that there is no time for experimentation. This is one of the troubles when the web dev becomes the last rung on the ladder to a launch.
Last week I wrote about CSS Grids. This is for a rather large project that I look forward to talking about in depth in a couple months. As a key member of the team I have a lot more say – and I get a fair bit of say in the deadline. As such, I have been doing a fair bit of experimentation with some technologies and scripts I’ve had my eye on for a while.
Nice Forms 2.0 Nice Forms is a js / css package that allows for some very tasty styling of forms. One thing that has always bugged me is that form elements are usually controlled by OS and browser. Buttons in particular have drastically different looks from Mac to PC. Nice Forms finally takes back control.
jQuery I’ll be the first to admit I should have been playing with this js library sooner! jQuery is one of the more popular libraries on the market today, and it allows for some very nice effects and functionality on websites. For programmers it’s probably a dream, and for designers and developers there are so many resources for easy to add scripts. It’s delicious.
Web Developers Advent Calendar It’s December, which means the 24 Days Advent Calendar has begun. Everyday from now until Christmas well known rock-stars of the web world are sharing great tutorials and tips for web nerds. There are some great archives as well.
And of course, another great resource is a decent vocabulary. You’re never too old to learn new words.
November 20th, 2008 | Comment | Personal
Do you remember learning about newspaper design in your Pre-Press class? Me either!
Basically a newspaper page is usually broken up into five or six columns (usually 11 picas wide) and separated by gutter space. This allows for some interesting ways to charge for ads, and to create complex layouts including stories and images of varied sizes. The grid allows it to all make sense and have a feeling of uniformity; even though it’s common that every page is entirely different.
So why limit this to newsprint? This last week I’ve been playing with CSS grid layouts. It’s the same principle, now I’m dealing with 24 columns over 950px wide with 10px gutters. There are some really great frameworks available for download which allow you to start a grid layout within minutes. There are even some blank-canvas WordPress templates.
I have been working with a framework called Blueprint and I hope to have something to show soon. Here is a list of a few of the common Grid systems.
