So I wasn’t really able to talk about it before now, but the site I worked for has officially launched our new version - of which I’ve been a major part in since I started in January.  It’s also what’s kept me preoccupied these past few weeks as we fixed minor things in it to get it live yesterday.  We’ve already heard good feedback from our users and I’ve gotten lots of compliments on the UI (which is what I do) - though to be honest 90+% of the design work was done by other people, I just did the XHTML and CSS.

Anyways, check it out if you want to see another big example of my work.  There are still large portions I want to change - some of our dynamic boxes should be switched to the sliding doors method for example - but overall I’m quite proud.

Random Tidbit:  Apparently terrorism has spread to the virtual world.  Luckily this kind only affects 1s and 0s (hopefully, although some money may have been lost).  I don’t know much about Second Life and I’m kind of curious how they managed to pull this off - I thought it was more of a social site rather than one in which you could wage war.

I had seen a recent article about 8 things intelligent people, geeks and nerds need to work and I began to realize that my job has nearly all of them.  They’re pretty flexible as long as you get your work done, they have good benefits, most of us share our iTunes (legally on the local network) so we can jam while we work - though some of my co-worker’s collections are questionable, they let us work from home when we need to - the big winter storms we had for example, and they dress code is pretty lax.  Plus it’s a small company, so you pretty much know everyone else and I can’t name one person that I don’t like.

So if you’re a developer looking for a great company, feel free to come on over.  We could use the help and we’re definitely going places.  You won’t be sorry you did.

Random Tidbit:  I found an interesting article about how Microsoft is dead after fighting with a Vista box that wouldn’t behave (or maybe it was and the behavior it’s supposed to have is illogical, who know’s right now.)  This article takes a different slant than others in that they still make a lot of money, but they’re no longer the big scary monster they used to be - Google is - and the only way to get back up there is to acquire a lot of the top quality startups.  Pretty interesting.

I’ve finally started to get my site up and running and have been actively searching for various plugins to enhance my site. So far, I’ve come up with a short list that anyone should start with in order to have the basic functionality - for yourself or a client - without paying a lot from a hosting company or anyone else to have them.

1. Akismet - because of the good code, SEO-wise, that Wordpress generates you get a lot of traffic. Unfortunately, that means you get a lot of bad traffic too - including comment spam. A must have.
2. Google Analytics - a simple google account and you have access to all the advanced stats you could ever want or need - does any more really need to be said?
3. Google Sitemap Generator - with the same google account you can generate an XML sitemap - that will dynamically re-create itself and notify Google everytime you add a post - that will allow the 3 major search engines to index your entire site easier.
4. Share This - nearly every social bookmarking site known to man is included, as well as a feature for people to e-mail your site/post/page to friends. Easily allow your users to index your site for you with popular sites like del.icio.us and get traffic from sites like digg and reddit.
5. Add Meta Tags - although less important for SEO, this plugin lets you dynamically generate keyword and description metatags based upon your categories and the content of your post.

Random Tidbit: Excellent article on five principles to design by.

So I finally got around to that whole GMail thing. You might have heard of it. I mean, it’s not huge or anything, they only have approximately a billion users.

Anyways.

I was a skeptic. Especially with the cell phone invite method they used. But when it went open to everyone, I decided to jump in. I admit it, I’m hooked. I funnel most of my e-mails in through it and it makes my life a lot easier. Of course Google now controls nearly all of my personal, electronic communication but I trust them more than most of the other services I was using and they control nearly everything else, so why not. I doubt that my secret Magic the Gathering deck ideas are of much interest to them anyways.

Besides that neat toy, I’m hooked on the calendar and being able to share it with my friends. I’m sure they have other cool services as well that I have yet to unearth. One I did find, and that I wanted to share, was Google Analytics.

This is a free service, with a Google account, that allows you to have tracking on your personal site. And for (cheap) fiscally responsible people like myself who don’t feel the need for hosting and instead host their site on free space offered by their ISP it allows you to see lots of good information about your users. Enabling you to make your site better for the people that visit it.

I still haven’t figured out all the bells and whistles yet, but I definitely recommend it.

Random Tidbit: I’m really starting to like TechCrunch. I was talking about mash-ups the other day and they have a neat article on several cool tools. Check it out.

I had high hopes as I began to read the early beta versions reviews of IE7 and the numerous fixes they had over IE6.  I had seen some of my work in IE7 and was pleasantly surprised that it worked.  Then I began to dig deeper.

The problems began when you have used hacks or filters to feed specific CSS to IE6.   Now those who use these knew they would potentially cause future problems and that Microsoft approved conditional statements would be the better choice.   However in some cases - particularly in the instances where you inherit code or time is of the essence and you simply do not have the time to separate them all out - a designer would opt for the quicker and dirtier solution of a hack.

The problem is that, essentially, not all of the problems from 6 have been fixed in 7.  So you now have the new star hack - a version of the underscore hack where you can use *property: values to feed a separate CSS to only IE.  Unfortunately, 6 picks up on these as well and typically does not break in the same way - normally on heights and the box model - so you must follow with either an underscore hack or the * html property filter - called the tan and/or holly hack I believe - to fix 6.  So now you have an extra filter in addition to one you shouldn’t have/need in the first place.

Again, the short and simple solution is to use the conditional statements.  While semantically they are very inelegant, they will make your life as a designer much easier.  Hopefully IE8, or future updates of 7, will fix these issues.  It is a vast improvement so I am hopeful.  The fact that they copied many of the good elements from the other browsers out there - including add-ons, a variation of the extensions from firefox - is a good sign.  I don’t typically say this, but my hat is off to the Internet Explorer team.

Random Tidbit: Blog writer Robert Accettura had some interesting Secrets in Websites.  Very interesting and conspiratorial.