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Blogs are soo 2005. Wanna tumble?

2008-05-20T23:34:00.005-04:00

So, um, I guess it's been a while since I posted, huh? In the last 5-or-whatever-it-was months I have done literally metric tonnes of stuff, highlights of which I would love nothing more than to share with you here:

• Had a blast at SXSW '08
It was groin-grabbingly transcendent. The topic has already been covered extensively here, here and here but all in all, a great time was had, much was learned, and possibly even more was forgotten.

• Started a new job!
I parted ways with the U.S. Army in February, and started with nclud, an amazingly rad design agency in DC. We moved from here to here, and it is like heaven.

• Did a lot of house hunting...
...and learned that buying a house is a pain in the ass. We narrowly avoided buying this place, couldn't strike a deal on this one, and have probably run up about a $400 bill on our poor realtor's gas tank along the way. Hopefully more on this one later...

• Started a bunch of projects
Currently in the works are my first forays into AS3, Python/Django, Google AppEngine, and the iPhone SDK... No links just yet ;)

• Decided that blogging == FAIL
This might be the point of this post. I use blogger and its gloriously obtuse API (read: I pick apart their ATOM feed) now to run this section of the site, and the process, format, time commitment, etc. aren't working out so hot, obviously. So, someday when I'm not quite so busy, I'll be converting this section to tumblr, which I should have done from the get-go, as this was meant to be a collecting place for snippets and thoughts, not editorial. There is no commenting, but hey, no comment capability at all is probably more convenient than the horrible user flow you get with blogger. So, my dear one reader, add me back to your netvibes, k? I swear I'll post something.

Music to make websites to: The new radio

2007-12-12T10:51:00.001-05:00

One of the more interesting presentations I saw last year at SXSW was a panel led by Jeff Croft, Veerle Pieters, Kelsey Ruger and Bryan Veloso titled "Design workflows at work." While the substance was somewhat of a point of debate among friends and acquaintances for the rest of the day, they hit on a couple of seemingly common-sense issues that deserve actual thought and consideration, not the least of which is: What music do you listen to while working?

Concentrating through the fire and flames
I love punk, hardcore and metal, and have for most of my life, but let's face it, Black Flag just isn't conducive to deep thought and focus, and I can't cmd+opt+shift+4 with one fist in the air. Since getting more into Web design, my musical taste has expanded in ways I never dreamed (or wanted to admit) it would. I'm now rocking (to use the term loosely) Rilo Kiley, the Shins, Jukebox the Ghost, LCD Soundsystem etc. all day at work. Cardigans and turtlenecks are sure to follow, but for now, while I can just pretend I'm 'maturing' – versus getting old and lame – I thought I'd give a rundown of a couple of my favorite ways to graze on some crunchy tunes at work.

1) The Music Genome Project, et al.
You know them, and likely either love or hate them, or love one and hate all the others. Be your preference as it may, Pandora is the O.G. of these musical comparative intelligence databases, dubbed the music genome project. This idea has been in the works for years, but has only been fleshed out fully enough recently to be of actual use. The concept is simple, you go to a website, type in a band you like, and out streams an hours-long playlist of delicious tunes that match up with the collective intelligence of you and those who have listened before you. You can vote individual songs up or down, and it learns as it plays. Eventually, if you're like me, you stop participating in the voting process, as you find you're left with about a dozen songs that fit your criteria once you've finished hating on everything under the sun. Because of that cold reality, these are a so-so means of staying entertained in a hostile environment with no itunes.

Some sites in this genre worth looking at:

Last.fm
This is one of the early players in the game, and they have a good interface, with lots of simple API services. For those of us who are feed-whores on our personal sites, this one will give you your most recently played tracks, top artists, albums and songs, all in RSS format, and even embed code to put your 'stations' on your site. They also let you build your personal taste profile just by listening to iTunes, with a neat little spy-app they call audioscrobbler. This is cool because you can listen to your music when you are at home, and then get similar stuff at work or wherever your music isn't. It also appears that they have videos now. On the con side, the encoding is a bit on the crap side as these things go, but most people won't be able to tell the difference on their 35-cent iPod headphones.

Pandora
As I said, they just about invented the technology as far as I know, and have a very slick flash player with a nice interface. They provide feeds as well, but they're not as full-featured as those at Last.fm. The musical selections are different with all of these sites, and I prefer the assumptions Pandora makes about the fact that I may have Head Automatica in my playlist over the ones that Last.fm makes (no, I don't want to listen to Good Charlotte, thanks). The audio quality here is also superior to Last.fm. All in all, if you don't want a lot of data about what you're doing on the site, this is a great player, with or without creating an account. If you do create an account, however, you have the flexibility to build your station based on multiple artists, tracks or albums, which the others don't allow to the same degree.

Finetune
Famous for their Wii player, Finetune was a later addition, I think. They don't let you build a multi-artist station, but rather encourage you to build playlists, a veritable online mix tape. These playlists consist of 45 or so specific songs (gasp!), a feature not allowed on any of the others. The downside is that they probably don't have the song(s) you want. Selection is a little thin here, but the artist radio is pretty good. Sound quality is about equivalent to Last.fm. The bottom line here is that this one is great for parties if you only have a Wii, and no computer hooked up to your home theater setup (quel dommage!)

Launch.com
Ugh, ok so I own some Yahoo! stock (it was really really cheap), so shouldn't knock it, and this site has been around since I was on a 486 PC with a 40 Meg hard drive, but something just doesn't do it for me about launch. Yahoo! needs to apply the same ingenuity they poured into Flickr to the rest of their work. 'nuff said, this one's a skip.

2) Streaming Radio—One Station to Rule Them All
Ok, after throwing all that out there, I must tell you that I have saved the absolute best for last. The only thing I listen to at work anymore is actually on iTunes radio, a little station called WOXY. Born in the 70s as WOXR for Miami of Ohio students, the "future of rock and roll" has taken things online (a couple times) and is cranking out great college radio and indie tunes all day long. You should definitely listen to it, and so should everybody that you know or have ever come in contact with. Of note here are the annual 97 best albums countdown, which you just missed, but will be re-aired new year's day, and their lounge acts segment, on which DC hometown favs Jukebox the Ghost will be performing January 10th. The only downside is the 64kbps stream they broadcast in, which is totally forgivable for the quality of selection.

So, what are you waiting for? Hop on over to woxy.lala.com and start rockin!

Design cliches: Where do you draw the line?

2007-12-01T10:39:00.000-05:00

Sadly, I missed Future Of Web Design this year, but I managed to catch up at least a little on some of what was discussed after the fact. One presentation I particularly enjoyed was Elliot Jay Stocks' piece on destroying the Web 2.0 look. The slides were short and sweet, but it looks like there would have been a great discussion on the topic in person. I found myself instantly nodding my head and even wanting to add a few things to his list of clichés, namely:

• Leaves in logos
• Corner Ribbons
• Cutesy vector ornaments
• Anything I can tell you downloaded from DeviantArt

Now, obviously as Elliot said, these are not things you should never use, you just have to use them correctly, and perhaps not in a way that everyone else already has...

...And this is really what I got to wondering: There's been some interesting talk the past week or two regarding designers, developers, in-betweens, and how they all fit together. Feasibly it's safe to assume that all three of these categories of people do solo work. So what's wrong with a developer cranking out some clichéd, templated crap once in a while, and should we really jump down a designer's throat for putting up some rock band site that's more or less a sliced .psd? The answer I'm hearing most often is yes and no.

Yes, we as a community should make an effort to ensure that on the whole the products that succeed are interoperable, accessible, attractive and forward-thinking, but no, it's not cut and dry. So where do you draw the line?

As a developer, I read A list apart on a regular basis, I keep up with some tech blogs, dev communities and resources that interest me, and I even read Subtraction, Jeff Croft and other designers' feeds who I think really are doing things right. But I haven't seen everything out there, and sometimes I'll wrap up a project that I'm feeling real good about, only to realize that crap, some piece of my aesthetic's been done to death. There are enough people in this business now, that the million monkeys/million typewriters rule has come into play; and two or more people can end up with nearly the exact same thing by completely honest means. I realize that design isn't my strength necessarily, but I have a hard time looking at the project the same way that I did before, and as we slowly start to Web-2.0-aesthetic ourselves out of a profitable future in the industry, It's clear that innovation on all fronts is a must in order to remain relevant. Finding that due diligence point of originality can be tough, so to what ends must we go?

Hello, World! Meet Lily.

2007-11-19T00:50:00.000-05:00

This weekend Andrea and I adopted a 3-month-old Beagle puppy. She is pretty much the cutest thing on legs...

VerticalFillJs: Auto-resize text to fill available space

2007-11-01T15:49:00.000-04:00

In designing my new site, I quickly became aware of something missing from the vast arsenal of CSS and Javascript widgets out there for general consumption; at least as far as I could tell—I needed something that would give me the ability to place variable-length text on top of a background image, as seen in the twitter feed above, and the title of this blog post (provided you're reading this on my site, and not the blog).

So, I put together VerticalFillJs the other day, a more refined version of what I'm running on this page. It's real easy to implement, just include the script in the head of your document, and assign the trigger class (default: verticalFill) to any (block) element that should be resized to fill its container, and your CSS does the rest. Works with padding and margins on both affected and parent element, and tested in IE, Mozilla, WebKit and Opera—see the demo for more info.

I love the Internet: October 2007

2007-10-28T17:37:00.000-04:00

Ok, so we all love the intertubes, right? Wouldn't it be great if there were a way to share stuff we like so we can all enjoy each other's favorite sites? What? We already have like 2 dozen sites for that? Haven't I heard of Digg, Del.icio.us, Mixx or StumbleUpon? Yes, I have, but I have this blog, and I don't post to those sites, so here are the spots on the Web I can't get enough of this month:

Whiskey Militia

Once upon a time, there was a subpar outdoor gear retailer called Backcountry.com. They did a lot of grey market deals on watches and other crap, and squeaked by thanks to decent sales as an Amazon retail affiliate.

Then, one historic day, they realized that people liked this site called Woot!. People liked Woot a lot, and they especially liked Woot-offs, selling one thing at a time until they sold out... The gears churned a few more times around, and history was made. Whiskey Militia, and sister site Steep and Cheap, also sell one item at a time. That item is cheap, and, unlike on Woot, it is probably rad. On Whiskey Militia, that item is a hoody, skate shoes, sunglasses, or even a snowboard deck. I have probably spent more money on this site than any other one place in the last couple of months...

Ask500people

Recently launched by the good people at Wondermill, this is the "Everybody Votes" Wii channel on the platform nearest you. Think of it as a free focus group, the answer to your drunken bar bet, advice on what shoes to buy... if you can think of it, people will answer you. Watch for this site to absolutely explode in the very near future.

Welp, that's it for now, see you next month!

Is that a crackhead? No, sweetie, that's a Web designer. Now stay close to mommy...

2007-10-25T08:28:00.000-04:00

toothpastefordinner.com

Something occurred to me as I was standing groggy-eyed in the line at Rite-Aid this morning to buy Visine and Vitamin Energy for the day ahead, racking my brain to come up with the word "credit" to describe the thing I was handing the cashier: At this rate, there's no way I'm going to live to see age 50. As of Thursday morning this week I have slept for a combined total of 13 hours, worked on one thing or another for 49 hours, and consumed about 120 ounces of coffee/energy drink. I still manage to keep my car inside the lines on the way to work, but clearly something's got to give.

I don't know the numbers, but I'd be interested to see what percentage of Web workers suffer from some form of job-related physiological malaise—hypertension, high blood pressure, or even TMD/mandibular arthritis from subconsciously clenching their teeth at night. Based on A List Apart's 2007 survey of the Web Industry, 65% of Web workers spend between 30 and 50 hours at their regular jobs, and 72% have their own blog, so I'd be willing to bet there are quite a few of us out there coming home from our paid jobs to a plethora of other self-motivated work, funded or otherwise. So what drives designers/developers to do this to themselves? I'm gonna throw a few of my own reasons out there, and maybe somebody else will chime in with theirs:

1) Overwhelming desire to create!
Cliche or not, this is a huge factor where free time is concerned. Everybody's got ideas, and like it or not, somebody out there has your ideas—it's only a matter of time before someone else does it faster and better than you would have. What's worse, you don't even have to be better these days to become the next craptacular Myspace or Kodakgallery.com

2) Upward ambition
Whoa, hold the phone! People want... to improve... their lives? Building a deep and polished portfolio is the key to developing professionally, and ultimately, landing a better job (though chatting idly on a blog is fast becoming a close second). The more work you do, the more you have to offer as a designer or developer, and if you're crazy enough, you can do an awful lot in a short amount of time.

3) Fear of obsolescence
I recently had the occasion to give some "advice" to the son of my wife's co-worker who is interested in getting into Web design. He showed me his portfolio—mostly flash work, crudely designed but well intentioned—and I gave him some pointers on Photoshop tricks and frame rates. I think I can safely say that I got more out of the experience than he did (sorry dude). It is scary to think that sophomores in high school know more about ActionScript today than I did my senior year of college, and while I welcome the incredible advancement in Web technology that will surely result from these kids pouring into the job market, I refuse to be left in their dust ;)