April 26th, 2010
Recently I decided to switch from Google Reader to Fever. This switch was made partly because of my growing amount of RSS feeds that I had to read though and also the user interface of fever looked amazing.
What is fever?
Fever is a host-it-yourself RSS application that features many useful features like a ‘hot view’ that calculates the most used links in your feeds and posts the according to temperature starting with a base of 98.5. This view is great if you have many feeds that all have similar content (say a bunch of CSS tip sites or car sites et ceta).
The other two views are Kindling and Sparks. Kindling is similar to Google Reader or any other reader where it is a listing of posts that you can assign to categories and flip though using the spacebar. Sparks though are interesting where it is a place where you can put the feeds that put out alot of posts like Designfloat or Digg. These feeds than can in turn affect the ‘hot view’ by making the links in these post show up more frequently.
Save and chill!
The last view to cover is the ‘Saved’ view where you can save the posts of note to read another time by clicking on the little circle next to the title that turns into a plus symbol. You can than see all your saved posts in clicking the ‘saved’ button in the main toolbar, and delete them the same clicking the minus button by the post title.
One free mac add-on the makes fever worth it is Chill Pill by Conceited Software. This application makes use of fever by placing the application in it’s own window (making all the links you click open the in your default browser) and adding simple things like keyboard shortcuts , themes, integrated system-wide support and more.
So where can I get it?
You can get fever over at feedafever.com, the application costs $30, and is tied to one domain (you have to host fever on your own hosted account). Before you pay though you can download the files and the application will check compatibility and if it checks out okay you will be directed to fever to pay for the app.
I personally was weary of fever at first thinking “great, another RSS app…” but after using it for about a month now I thing that it is worthy of it’s calling: making RSS usable for busy people.
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December 29th, 2009
After two to three months of working out a new design, I am finally back with a new design. Some of the goals that I had when creating this design were:
- make the design clean as possible
- make the text clear and readable
- lighten up the design (this was my main goal)
- use wordpress to power the site
Why WordPress?
The main reason for the new design was to switch my blog over from rapidweaver to wordpress. I have been using rapidweaver for about two to three years now to power my blog while creating the rest of the pages in Dreamweaver. While I have been meaning for sometime now to bring all the pages together in wordpress I just didn’t have the time to port everything over to wordpress. Finally when rapidweaver would not accept my serial for some odd reason I thought it was time to switch.
Design, Code, Repeat.
One of my biggest dislikes from my previous design was how dark the whole site was, so that was the first thing I fixed. I redid the whole color scheme using white and green instead of red and black to give the whole site a lighter and more informal feel. Also my old design always felt really cramped so I originally decided to widen the whole page out and use tons of whitespace, that just didn’t feel right. So I compromised with a little bit more space in between the text and the border. The final big change was I decided to use as much CSS3 as possible, the reason for this was: one – it makes the whole site forward looking, unlike like alot of sites that still cater to older browsers and two – it was easier to use than many popular hacks, and does not require javascript to work.
Future Bound…
There are still some ideas that I would still love to play around with someday as well some surprises planed. As far as some topics I would like to cover in the near future are:
Also if you have any questions or found any pesky bugs that are still around feel free to email me.
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December 28th, 2009
In creating this new design I actually took a risk and wireframed the entire site before mocking it up. Some people are very much against wireframing, instead they only mock up a web page in code. While others love to wireframe their website for unity and clarity before actually coding or designing anything.
So what is ‘wireframing’ and does Photoshop count as wireframing?
According to Wikipedia the definition of wireframing is:
A website wireframe… is a basic visual guide used in interface design to suggest the structure of a website and relationships between its pages.
My definition is anything that is created to show the interface of each page the site before the coding. What I mean by this is that Photoshop (unless using tons of layer comps, or multiple documents) is not really designed to layout every page of a website, instead it allows you to create just one general design. Fireworks on the other hand though allows you to use the pages pane to layout changes to ever page.
So to the point, should or shouldn’t I use a wireframe?
It is really up to you, personally I am for it, but as i have learned over the years is each designer has his own set of tools and opinions on each one of those tools. Personally I would highly recommend using a wireframe tool for your site but in the end it is really up to you.
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November 6th, 2009
Okay, so who there hates a million different web-browser windows cluttering up their desktop? Certainly not me, that is why I found a great workflow based on a trick I learned in a Screencasts Online video. It starts by noticing that under the “Window” menu there is an option for “Merge All Windows” this option turns all the browser windows into one big window with many little tabs. This is option great but the problem still remains that if you are on a 20” monitor or dual screen setup it can be a hassle to go up to the top of the main screen and click this little option every-time so how about a time saving shortcut?
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November 6th, 2009
If you are like me you have met or are a web standards zealt and will say or will tell you in a nutshell it is not worth building a website unless you have validated it 10 times plus adhere to the W3C and meet it’s strictest guidelines
. Ok that maybe this is a little over the top, but none the less you have probably heard something like this said by someone or told somebody this by yourself. One day looking at a site called Modern Life is Rubbish
I noticed an article that was titled web standards don’t matter as much as you think
.
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November 6th, 2009
Ever since WordPress came out I have always wondered why there are so many different CMS’s out there? Well, if you have ever tried to mold an exsisting website in to WordPress you will understand with me why the are more than one out there, WordPress is just not that flexible. Many developer’s have tried to fix this problems by making the “content hooks” easier to work with by doing things like making the editable div tag a class with a certain name in it, or creating simple %pathto(‘content’)% tags. While these are okay and a little easier for “code-phobic” designers to work with, they still requires you to fix the code on the actual page.
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November 6th, 2009
For all your Launchbar users here is a quick and easy to lock your screen. Launch Lauchbar and type “login” (without the quotes) and you should see a login user icon, from there just push enter and the cool “cube flip” should happen and that locks you computer with the login panel.
Also, if you go down a little farther there is also a log-out script there as well.
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November 5th, 2009
Quick note before you get confused: this tutorial is made for an intermediate web designer as it uses rather advanced code in its’ example. For more information on how to build dynamic content like this in Dreamweaver check out “Dreamweaver CS3: Beyond the Basics” series that you can find at http://bit.ly/O4NA.
Recently I came across a very unique problem when coding my portfolio page: all the pages where written in PHP using an URL parameter like example.php?nc=SHORTNAME (SHORTNAME is defined in the MYSQL table right after the primary key). This makes the page more memorable and bookmark-able. But there was still a problem: how do you create and forward and back link between the many SHORTNAMES? The solution was easier than I originally thought.
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