freshivore

This from Appleinsider “Addressing a developer conference in Sydney Australia, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the idea of using WebKit as the rendering engine within its web browser was “interesting” and added “we may look at that.”

Think of the hours of development time that would be saved! Can you hear me big baby Jesus? This is what I want for christmas!

Let it be known that if Microsoft adopts WebKit then forces it into the base of OS installations effectively eliminating IE6/7/8?. Although highly unlikely I will immediately give them my left testicle, and promise to not to bad mouth them to everyone I know. I would much rather be a one-ball wonder, than continue on in a world where the most used browser interprets clean modern markup much in the same way a dyslexic person reads a newspaper article.

But that’s what we have to deal with when a lot of people think the internet is the blue “e” on their desktop.

CB175 Frame stripped down

On the way home from work, I spotted a cool little Honda on the side of the road for 200 bucks. After thinking it over… and talking with the man selling it I found out that it had been in storage for nearly 30 years and hadn’t been registered since 79. I’ve been looking for one of these little hondas for awhile so in a way it validates my impulse buy.

I strapped up the tired old bike and brought the little honda to it’s new home. Now for some initial inspection. The tank was rusty, the carbs were rotted and full of varnish not a good start. I dropped the tank off at a radiator shop to have it cleaned. Did my best to clean the carb, replaced the oil, threw a new battery on it, slapped my newly cleaned tank filled it up with a little bit of gas and gave it a good kick. To my surprise it fired right up!

Luckily the electrical worked except for the brake light ( Which later I found out wasn’t completely hooked up ). So now I am beginning the process of tearing everything apart and doing a frame up resto-mod to it. I like to think of it as my winter project. I just hope it really only takes the winter to complete it.

Dear Senator McCain,

I am a writing this letter as a cry for help. I beg of you to stop your campaign from continuing to barrel down this negative trail with the serious and frankly dangerous accusations towards Senator Obama. I understand that you are trying to win this race, but what you are doing in the process is rallying and strengthening radicals that thrive on fear and hatred.

In your relentless quest for the White House you are dividing the country and instilling fear. Implying Obama is a man of mystery, questioning funding, relationships, and portraying him as an outsider.

With eyes blurred and nothing in focus but a chair in the oval office this may seem like a good strategy, it is not. You are opening Pandora’s box, ultimately leading to an act of violence on Senator Obama by radicals.  This would be a huge tragedy for all of America and would be a giant step backwards.

While attempts at un-Americanizing Kerry, and Clinton in the previous elections were out right wrong, there is a fundamental difference, they are white, he is not. Unfortunately, the repercussions of portraying a black man to be un-American by questioning his patriotism in an unstable America is down right dangerous, and may lead to a violent end, which he does not deserve.

I have watched you speak in a documentary and I respected you as a person, although now that is coming into question.

If you truly are the maverick, you portray yourself to be. Please ignore the right wing push to “un-Americanize” Obama. He has worked very hard, and has many achievements that in it self is the embodiment of the American dream. Proving that you can come from obscurity, work hard and rise to the top. That is what all people hope for when they first set their eyes on the statue of liberty or are welcomed by the proud colors of our great flag. Both are symbols of hope, and freedom.

The smear tactics lately are an attack out right attack on both. Trying to win an election by using fear and hate is un-American in itself.

Please take a moment to realize this, also try to remember some of the terrible acts that have been committed throughout US history due to intolerance, fear and ignorance. Racial violence and assassinations being just a few of them. Please do not provoke a resurgence of intolerance, ignorance and hated.

Thank you for your time Senator,
Vincent Franco

Well after putting some serious thought into the layout of this site… I have decided to give it a total overhaul! Seeing as how I never fully finished this design I feel that this is a very needed step. So if anyone wants this wordpress theme feel free ask and I will provide!

6 Places that Flash Does Not Belong: “It’s recently occurred to me that I’ve been doing Flash sites now for 10 years and have seen it come a long way since Flash 4, where I first cut my teeth on Actionscript, tweening, and pixel fonts. Over the years, I’ve seen and done many projects, some of which utilized Flash in very useful ways, while others had no business using it. Sometimes, a Flash implementation hurt the company, detracted from the site’s purpose, and had poor results (all the while costing them more to build the site in the frst place). So in a world where too many companies want Flash websites and too few designers use Flash very well, here is a brief list of places that Flash currently does not belong (with very few exceptions):

1. Website Intros
Let’s get the obvious out of the way. Websites exist for their visitors, not the other way around. I see almost no use ever for a Flash intro (or really, any website intro), unless your website strategy includes annoying visitors and wasting other people’s time. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t have a decent preloader or a smooth transition into your site, but anything more than a second or two of Flash before the actual site is a bad idea.

2. Sites with SEO Objectives
Although it’s possible to get semi-decent SEO rankings in certain situations for a Flash site, you’re just not going to achieve the kind of SEO success for a Flash site that you can for an HTML equivalent. Granted, SEO isn’t an easy game to play even if you don’t use Flash (see our SEO tutorial), but if your website strategy has any SEO expectations, stay away from it.

3. Menus/Navigation on an HTML Site
Menus have a singular and key function on every website — to get visitors quickly to the content they want. The words ‘pretty,’ ‘cool,’ or ’smooth’ should never be in the same league as ‘accessible’ when it comes to navigation. A Flash menu runs the risk of leaving many users stranded (not everyone has Flash, including an increasing user base that surfs with mobile devices). Furthermore, search engines won’t get around too well on a website that lacks true links for its menus. And if you really can’t live without the ‘cool’ menus, there are more than enough DHTML/Javascript based menus that can transform simple list tags into great looking navigation systems.

4. Informational/Content Sites
A couple years ago, I did a website for a large church organization that had dozens of menu items and many pages of content per menu item. They insisted on a Flash site where you never had to use the browser scroll, and at the same time, it should look just like an HTML site (which of course, begs the question, ‘Why are we using Flash?’). Needless to say, they ended up with a very cumbersome website that costs much more than an HTML site, both to build and maintain. Furthermore, visitors complained about the site usability, preferring even a simple text-only site where they could actually get the information they wanted. In general, you’d be surprised how often a visitor will take information accessibility over a great-looking Flash one. If your website’s primary purpose is delivering informational content, avoid Flash.

5. E-Commerce
Anyone who has followed the development of the Flash platform will concede that it has come a long way in terms of functionality and programmatic flexibility. With the advent of Flex, Flash is more equipped for application-type usage than ever before. There are even some really great-looking examples of stores built on Flex. However, I think Flash for e-commerce should still be avoided for two primary reasons:

• Flash stores can still be pretty complex. Your typical HTML e-commerce site is straight-forward with a catalogue, account, and checkout system, all of which can be edited and modified independently with relative ease. Although a Flash store will have the same basic components, you’re still dealing with a platform with more integrative complexity and less room for error. In the last few months, I’ve come across two websites that have attempted to implement a Flash e-commerce solution. On both, I managed to somehow find a weird functionality bug, and having lost confidence in the site, went elsewhere for my purchase. So unless you have a great Flash developer and a solid understanding of consumer UI, stick to non-Flash e-commerce for now.
• E-commerce conventions are very powerful. For the last decade, online shoppers have become accustomed to how e-commerce sites work. Any great derivation from what they’re used to will often result in lower ROI. Although some Flash carts look really snazzy and have more functionality than their HTML counterparts, the proof is always in the customer conversion rate. And having worked on and seen sites that have attempted both types of carts, even ‘ugly’ HTML e-commerce sites will often outperform Flash carts. Online consumers are used to clicking on items, not dragging items to a ‘cart section.’ They want to click ‘Add to Cart’ and ‘Checkout’ and go from page to page. Sure, this may change in the coming years, and yes, innovation is a good thing, but e-commerce conventions still hold too strong a sway to go with Flash e-commerce just yet.

6. Sites Requiring Heavy Management
Although Flash has a few solid options for content management, if you or your client will be constantly editing a website, Flash can easily become more of a hurdle in keeping it updated. This is mainly because clients always end up wanting to edit more than you tell them is possible. And there are few things worse in a freelancing business than maintaining parts a Flash site for years. If you know a client has high maintenance needs, make sure you address such future issues before even starting the site.

Of course, there are some websites where Flash can be a good choice or at least a ‘possible’ choice. Some such sites include portfolios, promotional sites (movies, product ‘exploration’ sites, etc.), sites with videos or games, and small boutique sites for creative agencies or possibly high-end design products (and even then, it’s never a bad idea to have either an intermediary HTML portion or a full-fledged HTML version). Just don’t ever forget that every website has a primary purpose, and if Flash doesn’t contribute to that, it’s probably a detriment and a liability.

(Via Wake Up Later: Freelance + Passive Income.)

After spending sometime looking through this unfinished site, I have decided to do a total typographic refresh. The baseline is broken and needs to be fixed. Soon I will re-do all the math my neglected settings and try to finish up what I started.

It’s been very difficult lately with a full time job and a demanding personal life, I feel like the mechanic that keeps his clients in tip-top shape… but drives an old beater.

If you tired of having nasty little conditional comments like this “<!–[if lte IE 6]>…<![endif]–>” in your clean markup. Here is a quick and simple PHP function for checking what version of explorer your visitor has.

function isIE($version) {
   if ( preg_match('/MSIE (6|7)\.0/', $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], $ver) ) {
     if ($ver[1] == $version) return true;
   } else { 
     return false;
   }
}

And here is how you use it:

<?php if (isIE(6)): ?>
<link href="ie6.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<?php endif ?>

Simply change the number to test for IE7! Now your markup doesnt have those nasty hack comment/conditional statements and you can sleep easy at night.

Beanstalk+Versions has been my tools of choice for version control. Which has worked out great so far, I have no complaints about Beanstalk. The one area that versioning always got a little out of control was deployment.

In comes springloops!

Nice versioned deployment of development, staging, and production servers. Now I can easily deploy across multiple servers for application upgrades to all clients, leaving configuration the way it is supposed to be for each site while just upgrading the back-end pieces to make sure all the clients have the latest and greatest app.

I love it when I find services that make my life easier.

The site progress is creeping along and I am pretty happy with the way everything is coming out. The contact, about, and portfolio page still needs some tlc, a few quirks are still lurking in the stylesheet and I need to fix some of the markup to make it more semantic. Yes I know that is almost all of the site, but this is my site to be free with, no constraints on deployment no holding back on the options. So I constantly think of things I want to implement and change… Maybe I jumped the gun setting the site loose to the outside world? Oh well I’ll just think of this site as a work in progress!

With this being my first experience with wordpress and my first blog design I am open to comments and suggestions about the site.

It’s that time again! A List Apart is calling on all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. I found last years survey to be a very insightful look into our industry. So with all said and done, “I took the survey and so should you.”