Web 101 for Designers: What you should know before your first site

March 20th, 2009
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I gave a talk yesterday at the monthly meeting for the Twin Cities Creatives Group: we’re a group of professionals in the Twin Cities metro region, mostly traditional graphic designers, product designers, photographers, writers and few web designers. We have an email list and generally try to help each other when there are any questions of a design or technical nature.

Since there was much interest at a previous meeting in web sites I offered to give a talk about what a graphic designer, or any designer, should know about designing for the web. Just the basics. A fast overview. Nothing too in depth. Forty people showed up, and I ended up recording a screencast of the talk and distributing a PDF of it afterwards. I thought I’d put it up here so that those of you who missed it could see it, and perhaps benefit from it.

It’s a long talk: 1hr 40mins. I spliced it up into 3 parts, each a little over 30 minutes in length. They’re hosted out on Vimeo as part 1, 2 and 3. I’ve also embedded the first part down here for viewing. The video is available in HD, so be sure to maximize it to see the full quality of the slides (and my handsome face of course).

How to get 3 free months of XM/Sirius Radio (for current subscribers)

December 23rd, 2008
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So, just like everyone else, I’m tightening our collective family budget belt. One of the first things to go was the XM Radio subscription that conveniently gets charged to my credit card every quarter. Sure, it’s small enough not to be that bad but every little bit helps: $60/qtr is $20/month after all.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating you play the system here… this post is just supposed to be about my experience with the XM Radio service person and what she offered. The first time I called the number from their website, I was asked to verify my account information and then I was transferred over to another department. At this point, I got cut off! I’m sure it was a technical mishap on their part, so I called back and just asked to be transferred again, which I was. The customer service rep was very nice and when I told her I was canceling because of budgetary reasons, she asked me if I had enjoyed the service.

“Of course I enjoy the service”, I said.But I still want to cancel. She asked if I would like 3 free months. I asked “Would I have to call back and cancel after 3 months?”. “Yes,” she said, “I would.” I declined — I just wanted to be done — I only ever listen to it in the car and it just seems like it’s not worth it.

After I hung up, I realized that I could have just taken the 3 free months if I had said yes. But, then again, I would have to remember to call them again and cancel. So that’s how I could’ve gotten 3 free months of XM/Sirius Radio.

WIRED Magazine is 56.2% fullpage ads

November 22nd, 2008
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I received the December 2008 issue of WIRED magazine in the mail today. Yes, I’m a subscriber. Not because it’s the right thing to do (I get all of my tech news from the web) but because I like to flip through an actual magazine and read the articles. I don’t have as much time as I used to, but I do try to give the whole magazine a flip at least once every month. Now, I skipped flipping through the last few months, so after about a 3 month hiatus, I picked up today’s delivery and gave it a once over.

WTF? Where did all the artcles go? Where was the clever commentary? Where were the gadgets of tomorrow I was looking to find? And WTF is all this advertising?? It seems that in the past few months, WIRED Magazine went from respected geek reading material to advertising super-bitch. So I wanted to see exactly how much advertising was in this latest issue. I sat down in my living room and ripped out every single page of the magazine. I sorted them into three piles:

  • pages that have ads on both sides
  • pages with ads on only one side
  • pages with no ads anywhere

The results didn’t surprise me that much. Of the 120 physical pages that I pulled out of the magazine, 28 of them had zero advertising on them, 43 had advertising on BOTH sides and 49 had adverstising on one side and “content” on the other. And by “content” I mean something that wasn’t trying to sell me the latest version of Office, or a great James Bond watch, or whatever. It was either one of those articles I was looking for, or a table of contents for the magazine, or credits, or even a photo of a gadget propped up against a steel number.

And if you do the math, it turns out that the December 2008 WIRED magazine is:

  • 43.8% “content”
  • 56.2% advertising

I guess the only thing I’m wondering now is: why?

Links as a result of a golf outing

July 7th, 2008
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Just a short entry to capture the many geek related things Jon Gordon (twitter) and I talked about on the course yesterday:

If I think of any more, I’ll be sure to add them!

Fortune Tweet

December 12th, 2007
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I was really missing those sweet little fortunes you used to get when logging in to an old school linux terminal way back in the 90’s. So, I went ahead and downloaded the latest fortune app via YUM on a CentOS box I have, and then wrote a little PHP script that posts fortunes to the Twitter API on the hour, every hour.

You can follow the fortunes here:

http://twitter.com/fortunetweet

And you can follow me here:

http://twitter.com/ten7

All in only 18 lines of code. Enjoy!

goinc 1.2 - minor tweaks

May 2nd, 2007
boinc
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so i have had some interest lately about adding certain features to goinc. and as a result, i am making some time to actually following through with the requests. among the features to be added is displaying information from the team stats pages, as well as support for a larger list of boinc projects out there. if there are any other requests before this next round of upgrades, please let me know.

this minor release puts some shameless self-promotion on the gadget, as well as the ability to donate money to me via paypal. if you like the gadget, donate a few bucks to me to keep me motivated and to keep me updating GOINC with new features.

oh. and i also changed the font.

moving hosting providers

January 20th, 2007
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i am moving hosting companies. as a result, you might see some funky data in your trend lines. all your data might seem to disappear, or, just the last few days. this is normal and expected while the dns entries transition the domain from one provider to another. as soon as the dns has caught up, i will merge the databases in both providers, and all trend data should get restored.

more on why i’m moving, and the ordeal that i had with bluehost in a later post. once i have all data off their servers. woooosh.

update: move is complete. all went well… stay tuned for reasons why a goooood web host is hard to find.

goinc 1.1 — host info added

November 26th, 2006
boinc
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tweaked a few minor things, but the biggest change is the ability to monitor hosts by user if you enter the account key (authentication token) instead of the integer user id. the account key is a 32 character hexadecimal number that the project provides to you. if you’ve lost or forgotten your key, you can have the project send you a copy to your email. check the permanent goinc info and help page too, for more information.

this is now goinc 1.1; url has not changed. please add a new module/gadget to your google homepage, if you are still using the old version - prior to 1.0, including 0.1 and 0.2.

the gadget url is

http://stegic.net/gm/goinc-xml/goinc.xml

as always, talk to me if you have any questions or concerns!

GOINC XML - 1.0

November 19th, 2006
boinc
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just finished updating goinc. major new enhancements:

  1. faster: true, asynchronous client-side data retrieval.
  2. smaller: updated css to allow more data on screen, less clutter.
  3. by user project selection: monitor users from different projects, not just one project at a time.

i’m labelling this 1.0, a jump from 0.2 - the functionality for goinc is pretty complete. i would like to add host per user information, but i might not get to that for a while. so, 1.0 it is.

the url of 1.0 is http://stegic.net/gm/goinc-xml/goinc.xml and is available immediately.

here’s a screenshot of what it looks like:

added BBC CPDN to supported projects

April 9th, 2006
boinc
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someone in wales requested support for the BBC CPDN project on GOINC… and hey presto! support for BBC CPDN enjoy!

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