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- I’m Working on a Product.
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Earlier this month I started working on a product. It’s nothing new. It’s pretty basic. It’s going to be really cheap. But I think it will be pretty cool. I’ll post screencasts once I finish more of the javascript. Until then, announcing this is just a tease and motivating factor. I’ve said it; now I need to go forward and finish the first version.
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- What’s On Your Mind These Days?
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Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about peak oil, our place in the world economy, and the harmful industrialization of our everyday food. Simply put, I haven’t been writing as a result of the information overload that I’m enjoying at the moment.
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- Using Presenters in Rails
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Sitting thrugh my first tutorials session at RailsConf we’ve come across an interesting discussion about the philosophy of using the ‘Presenter Pattern’ to refactor code in your applications controller.
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- Blogging is not Technology.
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Last week I was invited to speak at a local NetSquared meeting out in Tempe. Presenting on the topic of blogging forced me to take a step back to look at what I’ve been doing over the past seven years. I realized all of the technological connotations associated to blogging are irrelevant. Blogging is not about the web, rss feeds, or technology. That is just a means to an end. Blogging is about people, it’s about voices, blogging is all about you. Blogging is a medium for distributing both fact and opinion. It’s about discussion and connecting people in a relevant context. The technology just helps run the show.
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- Less Markup Is Better Markup.
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There is a lot of ambiguity when it comes to writing semantic markup in HTML: to what extent should we markup data? How semantically detailed do we need to be? While there is no specific rule of thumb, I will say that the less the better. When writing markup, be as clean as possible without losing meaning. Much like how The Elements of Style emphasizes brevity in writing - a sentence should use as few words as possible without losing it’s meaning - an html document should use as little markup as possible without breaking the context of it’s content.
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- Letting The Page ‘Breath’.
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I’m continuing my way through Robert Bringhurst’s book and at a slow pace. The Elements of Typographic Style is so rich with information that I can only read it in spurts of a few pages and often have to re-read to let the full lesson sink in. Lately, I’ve become very intrigued by how he describes rhythm in the text layout and the concept of how a page must ‘breath’.
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- It’s CSS Naked Day!
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Today’s the big day! I’ve turned off my style sheets in honor of CSS naked day! Aside from the sIFR, which I’m not going to disable for this, you are seeing the pure semantic HTML markup of this site. This ties into a series of posts I started earlier this week on semantic HTML. More to come soon
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- Typography Basics.
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Robert Bringhurst’s book “The Elements of Typographic Style” is an invaluable resource to any print or web designer currently practicing. I purchased this book a while back, and now sitting in the airport after SxSWi, I’ve finally gotten a chance to examine it in detail. Here are some important teachings I’ve gotten so far.
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- Write HTML That Means Something
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HTML is often overlooked in development projects. Rendering errors and other visual debacles tend to shift a developer’s focus away from HTML’s actual purpose: semantics. It’s been said before but I feel we still need to emphasize the fact that HTML has nothing to do with the visual presentation of the layout we are attempting to create whether it be for the web or any other medium.
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- My Last Day at Sitewire
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For the past year and seven months I have been happily employed at Sitewire, an interactive marketing agency in Tempe. I spent my time there initially as their front end architect and flash developer but eventually fell into the role of lead designer. The experience has been great.