ArleyM.com » Work

The Speed of Life

ArleyM — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:47:03 +0000

To say that 2010 has been a blur so far would be a complete understatement.

In the wee span between January 15th – 30th Kristi and I:

Moved back in with the inlaws
Bought a car
Heard our unborn child’s heart beat
Dealt with aggravating issues with our old car
Sold our house
Dealt with a heart-rending family tragedy
Bought a new house
I found my dream job
I got the interview

Since the 30th I had the interview – and I got the job! (I expounded about this in more detail).

2010 has certainly made it’s mark on us, and has been a brainful. We would be content for some routine and boredom at this point. I hope the year isn’t setting us up for this pace.

More about the new job soon.

Debut Creative is Live!

ArleyM — Mon, 04 May 2009 18:24:00 +0000

After being in business for nearly three years I’ve finally made a website. I love how ironic it was to not have a site, as I work on websites every day – but it desperately needed to happen.

I’ve been so blessed with Debut Creative that I’ve never needed a website: I’m insanely busy though I haven’t advertised. I rank well and have never worked on my own SEO. Websites today are more important than ever, and I needed something to show my clients the kind of work that I do.

In the coming months a similar look and feel will be on this ArleyM website. Stay tuned!

http://debutcreative.com/

Project 1up: The Launch of Debut Creative

ArleyM — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:26:00 +0000

I’m entering my third year of freelance and contract work with my business identity Debut Creative, and the website still looks like this.

Yes, as a web designer and developer it is incredibly ironic that I don’t have a proper site. I have rationalized it in several ways:

I’m too busy with paying work

I’ve never needed to advertise at all, why start now?

I love irony

At the same time my colleague, long time friend, and business rival Tim Lum has an equally un-website for his studio PixelFlex.

Tim and I have a friendly competitiveness going on (despite the fact that we routinely subcontract to each other), so we have decided to take part in this years CSS Reboot. Essentially we are going to completely overhaul debutcreative.com and pixelflex.com respectively and launch Alpha on May 1st 2009. At the same time we are going to release “before” shots of our sites as they are before the reboot, along with some site traffic / popularity statistics.

After one year (May 1st, 2010) we are going to compare numbers again. Whichever studio site comes out on top in terms of popularity, wins! The losing studio will then donate time to the charity of the winners choice. We’ll have more details a little closer to the date.

This is a friendly and competitive way for Tim and I to pit our SEO and marketing wits against one another while hopefully finishing the sites that we may otherwise never make the time for.

Data Management

ArleyM — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 16:04:00 +0000

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/

This Week in Learning

ArleyM — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 16:01:00 +0000

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.

CSS Grids

ArleyM — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:14:00 +0000

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.

Blueprint CSS Framework
Yahoo Grids CSS
960 Grid System

Office Spaces

ArleyM — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:41:00 +0000

Office spaces are very interesting to me. I’ve been a heavy computer user since 1995 at the green age of fourteen. I have worked in some of the most ergonomically perplexing setups and I have seen many different office arrangements. Now that I’m a little older (and nerdier) I wish I had taken pictures of the various computer stations I’ve worked at – namely my design station from Mail Boxes Etc. and Multimedia setup from the first Benjamin James office. Oh well, we live and learn. Here are some of my setups from over the years.

You can click to enlarge any of these images.

2005 – Home setup
I have been using dual monitors since 2001 and I can never go back. In ’05 I started using triple monitors by purchasing a decent PCI video card. I have had the ability since then to go quad, but desk space becomes an issue. That was also the year I stared collecting vinyl.

2006 – Benjamin James Marketing Communications (panorama)
I wish I had a more conventional photo of this setup. This is a 360 degree panorama I made of the bullpen right after we moved into the McIntyre studio. I used two computers here (one was an internal server I used for testing). That monitor was huge.

2007 – First Debut Creative office
Amazingly I don’t have any pictures of this setup where I’m not the dominant element. This office was really small, and on humid days would reach nearly 45 degrees. At a point a couple months after this photo I would have four computer systems setup as I was transitioning.

In March 2008 I went to Tennessee with my wife who had a staggering five weeks of training. This was my “temporary” office. Five weeks is a super long time; especially when one is in an unergonomic chair that is about 8″ too short (heck, Kristi’s feet could touch the ground!). Adjusting to one monitor again was also more than I cared for, but it was all better than no wife for over a month.

2008 – Debut Creative
This is by far the most comfortable and radical setup I have ever had. Still, I do have some ideas for improvements. Two things set this apart from all other systems I’ve ever worked on. One; this is by far the fastest computer I have ever worked on, even after a year and a half (buydirectpc.com) and Two; ergonomics. Any computer user basically interface the chair, footrest and keyboard tray constantly, I did a fair bit of research before settling on these (humanscale.com and Lover’s at Work)

I love looking at office spaces. Want to talk about yours?

Good Students and Good Causes

ArleyM — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:07:00 +0000

The second of two very large sites I recently worked on just went live this week. Nipissing Universities Prospective Students site is geared towards high school students that are Post-Secondary-Shopping. The site is built using the institutes standing ASP framework, which I have to say is quite optimized in terms of how many includes and variable calls are used. I definitely learned a lot of tricks on this one. I also brushed up quite a bit on some CSS techniques like rollovers.

You can see it here http://www.nipissingu.ca/prospectivestudents/

The other site I wanted to feature on this recent work post is a charity piece I did for the North Bay & Area Community Foundation’s Stache Bash fundraiser. This was a quick-turnaround site that had to be out the door in a couple of days, but it was a lot of fun. I even got to do some of the ‘manly’ writing encouraging men from my old community to grow moustaches for a good cause.

http://stachebash.ca/

The Eighth ArleyM.com

ArleyM — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 20:47:00 +0000

Today marks the launch of the 8th version of ArleyM.com! It wasn’t too long ago that Phase 7 was launched, but with all that I have learned about CSS and accessibility in the last few months I knew I needed to give the site a bit of a face lift. I was recently enjoying looking at previous installments of my site at http://www.archive.org/ and I will endeavour to restore my old image folders so these work for years to come. Seeing the rocky old sites reminds me of how far I have come. I also get a kick out of the early work I did with divs and layers before it was even hip to do so.

I do owe some thanks to Tim Lum as well as Paul Boag and the Headscape crew all for openning my eyes to tableless development.

Independent.on.ca revive is live

ArleyM — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:46:00 +0000

About a year and a half ago I started doing weekly updates for a local Kincardine newspaper. Their site was a static HTML site with the purpose of delivering the news to a couple thousand viewers a week. The Kincardine Independent is the only locally owned and independent news organization in the area, so they are regarded as straight shooting, and not under the thumb of nationally owned syndicates.

With the launch of their redesigned paper we wanted to give the site a bit of an update too. This version of Independent is made with the Drupal CMS and is a lot more interactive for readers. I didn’t want to alienate the current reader base so I kept the redesign simple and familiar.

This is the first Drupal site I have made to this scale, check it out
The Kincardine Independent.