I’ve still got a bunch more work to do (cleaning up the widgets, tweaking here and there, bringing the iphone theme to be more in line with the main theme (based upon n-design studio’s excellent iTheme) and putting the big ass links list I had back up. I’d thought there was a plugin to help manage large link lists but I seem to have lost the link (alliteration much?). Anyhow enjoy the new site and now that I can more easily update the themes I cando things like release more plugins and new wallpapers.
In other news, just a few days till Ignite Portland hits and I’m quite excited to hear all of the presenters, plus hopefully meet more awesome folks to talk tech with.

In totally unrelated news I’m currently turning into an Obama fan, partially because the cynical part of me is intrigued and partially because Randall Munroe of xkcd fame is endorsing him and Randall is the awesome.

Now I’m off to enjoy my xbox 360 and play some Burnout :)

In other news, we’re moving out of our new apartment due to heavy water damage that the management “forgot” to mention. The place seemed really nice until we noticed the black mold seeping through the paint (not good for a place only 3 years old).

Also in other news I just baked my first banana bread from scratch and it is was really good. yum

More news later. In the meantime I’m no longer participating in the cssreboot. It now appears that the new site is nothing more than a digg traffic generating engine. The from scratch gorgeous site former owner Benjamin Adam designed has been replaced with an unskinned Pligg install and all registration info was dumped in the move. Very sad.

Of course since it says annoyance up at the top of this post obviously there are times when it’s not. Some of you will probrably immediately roll your eyes at this little rant of mine but whatever. Go read /. or fark…

So I’m in awe of some of the open source developers out there and the amazing products they write/code/make/bleed their hearts into. But is it really that hard to take 5 minutes and write out a clean(ish) html page with all the divs/classes/tags in it that calls the same css they have running the layout of the actual app? Getting under the hood of an app is something I obviously love since I spend 50+ hours a week doing exactly that. But when I’m trying to learn the ins and outs of some new RoR or php app I don’t want to have to hunt through 500 files in the includes folder so I can find that view_penguincheese.php is what makes use of the #penguin div. Granted I just want to be able to see a big standalone html file with no php so finding the aforementioned php file isn’t something I necessarily care about (I just wanted to say “penguincheese”)

I understand that the OS movement puts an astounding amount of work into their projects and can’t always be expected to have the same graphic knowledge to compare with their php/asp/mysql/Ruby on Rails/jquery knowledge. That’s fine. Just make it easier for those of us that do excel at making things pretty make your apps look better. Most of us will do the right thing and upload them to your site so more people can and will use your application because it looks more professional.

All that said (over a year ago when I first started writing this post) I’ll add one last thing: don’t skimp on making things use CSS without making sure it’s sensible. You won’t necessarily always be the developer/designer for something forever and it really makes those who follow in your footsteps admire your work as opposed to thiking you’re likely just drunk.

Oh yeah, I just overhauled the look of my myspace profile and it’s quite a bit nicer looking without all the ugly color combo’s myspace devs liked and most importantly it’s currently glitter graphic free (yay)

In order to celebrate the occasion, the W3C is inviting developers to submit their favorite CSS designs that will be integrated into the CSS 10 Gallery. Sites that are currently on the list include CSS Zen Garden, A List Apart, and the CSS Validator. Here’s to another 10 years, CSS!

Here’s a look at Microsoft’s CSS Gallery from 9 years back.

Sadly after 10 years Microsoft still doesn’t quite get css. :( maybe IE9 will understand it?

I ended up using a few different elements in this that I hadn’t been familiar with. First off was a far greater bit of attention being paid to the actual method of building each page. I made sure to keep the sidebar content as well as the navigation system be called via a php include to make editing that content far easier in the long run. Handling those items via php will allow far greater scalability in the future as a variety of scripts can quickly be added in without requiring a full rewrite.

I also used a slightly different method of Faux Columns than usual in creating the layout. I made sure to make things just slightly different in IE to illustrate to prospective clients why standards compliant browsers are better in a very subtle way. I’ve also used a twist on the “onion skinning” css technique on the Firefox version of the site.

Since part of the spec required a backend client management script I decided to go with a rather Basecamp-esque open source script called WebCollab. It’s an excellently written project management system with a whole slew of useful functions such as:

• Easy to read and intuitive screen layouts. Most users can use WebCollab without training.
• Individual users are assigned rights and permissions. Users can also be put into groups with controlled rights and permissions.
• Projects and tasks progress and approaching deadlines are graphically highlighted.
• Changes are personally highlighted for other users to see.
• Changes and new items can be emailed to affected users.

It took a bit of time to see how the system handled CSS and in the end I had to rewrite quite a bit of the backend in order to have the look I wanted. In the end it both complimented the front end layout and provided a secure area where clients can communicate with the dev team.

Overall the time invested in this project gave me the chance to sit back and really formulate how I wanted things to look as well as to continue to wrap my brain around integrating design ideas with existing Open Source software. One of the best parts is for everything I did the pages validate as xhtml strict using the application/xhtml content tag so it’s not tag soup in any way :D

For now head over to lotusmg.com and register for the announcement email.