cdcstudios.com | portfolio v8.1

So I’ve hit a point where I’m happy with the background for the site. It’s about as close to what was in my head as I could get given the amount of spare design time I’m allowed at home (word to the wise: babies (especially those that can walk/run/climb) do not let daddies work on their computers).

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 :)

I was just featured on Portland On Fire! For those not in the know, Portland on Fire is a site started January 1st that each day showcases a quick profile of a Portlander. Totally free and refreshingly open. There’s quite a few awesome people on there already (especially me…erm yeah). Anyhow if you’re a Portlander you should head over and register to participate.

The man behind the site is Raven Zachary, who I just met at my first ever barcamp meetup. I’d always meant to get “into” the whole being proactive about how I feel about technology and the entire FOSS movement but never had the right mix of desire to do so and actual availability. Overall I’m totally thrilled I got to go and am really looking forward to far more interaction with the Portland Techie community. This city is so friendly and culturally diverse and the tech community here is phenomenal so it’s an amazing mix to me.

In other news you may have noticed that the site is back to looking like it did. Well this is hopefully only temporary since I just noticed all of my plugin posts have gone poof (those will be coming back shortly) due to a database issue. I’m also experiencing a few problems with a rogue htaccess script setting a few pages to show directory structure (not that I can actually find the damn htaccess. I wiped all of them by hand which makes me think the issue lies with something on the server. If only there was a resultant set of htaccess policies tool I could use.

Well I’ll get going now but this has been a great week and will hopefully keep going to make a great year :D

Oh one last thing my son is apparently a Sithlord. Don’t believe me? Here’s proof:

So it’s been a really long time since I’ve posted a new entry. Long story short (and to paraphrase Shrubya) Parenting is hard. It’s a long hour, tiring messy job and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

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 food 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.

Taking the site offline this week to upgrade to wordpress 2.1 as well as to migrate over to my new server space :D Happy day!

So I get a lot of requests from friends to reskin this and reskin that. I have no problem with this. I enjoy it and seeing friends smile when they look at their new blog, myspace profile, or just about anything else they ask me to reskin/recolor. Most of the time it’s a relatively quick job without any real issue.

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/Ajax 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)

I was thinking today about the differences between designing sites for clients such as businesses and/or designing sites for political or ideological organizations. I for one typically won’t choose to do sites that disagree greatly with my own personal ideas. While some may see that as a income limiting point of view I think it keeps me honest to how I see myself as a worker.

As a profession design is about content delivery and content framing, I think underlying all of that though is the job of an artist. Without going off onto some long tangent I see webdesign as an artistic medium balancing the responsibilities of an artist with that of a technical writer with a smattering of marketing and interior design. While some if not many may disagree with me staying true to your inner sense of artistry has greater merit than simply churning out code in attempt to pay off your new car/laptop/plasma tv.

In my personal experience when I decided to devote myself fulltime to design and all that it enfolds I promised myself that I’d try and do at least 2-3 free sites for people who either inspire me or fight for what they believe in a year.

My main question is though: Would you choose to do a site for a business or organization that you disagree vehemently with their opinions?

Your thoughts?

Cascading Style Sheets celebrate their 10th anniversary this week, making websites more attractive, flexible, and making for easier cross-media publishing. Good old CSS Level 1 was officially published on December 17th 1996, and even though many people chose to shun it back in the day, the majority of web designers rely on it today to make highly functional, standards-compliant web properties.

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?