Crystal's Adventures in Webdev Land » Updates

Google Webfonts

Crys — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 23:23:02 +0000

I am such a geek. A font geek! I’m not sure when Google upgraded the webfonts interface or when they went from “alot” of fonts to “hundreds”, but the new interface looks great! Some girls swoon over rock stars and famous actors, but I’d rather ogle sexy font samples, any day of the week. You can view samples of just one word, a full sentence or, best of all, as a paragraph, which will make it a lot easier to decide on a main font without having to try them all out on your website to see how well they paragraph first.

Yes, I just turned paragraph into a verb. I do these things when I’m fangirling.

The Kafka’s a nice touch. I hated that story — because he accomplished what he was trying to do with it, not because it was poorly written. But yes…

Picking just two of these is going to be tough…

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Kudos to Windows 7?

Crys — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 17:56:40 +0000

I know, usually you don’t expect me to say much nice about Microsoft. But I use a Windows7 machine because I need it for work, and I’ve actually been favorably impressed with Windows 7. It strikes me as a great leap forward for Windows. It’s generally very usable and the only real complaint I’ve had with it is that forced updates always seem to happen when I have the least time to spare for waiting for them to finish, like a forced restart after a lock-up in the middle of a project on a steep deadline. It’s nearly caught up to the early versions of OSX in the features that I use.

So I was surprised to discover a nice new feature of it today. Well, it’s not new. Obviously it’s always been part of Windows 7. But it was new to me. The file previews will show you the contents of text or code documents, like OSX does in coverflow view. And today I discovered, quite by accident, that the preview’s text is actually selectable so you can copy parts of it out. Very useful.

So kudos to Microsoft for including this functionality. I’m sure I will use it quite a bit now that I know it’s there!

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Content first

Crys — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 05:25:19 +0000

For my overhaul, I decided to take the opposite tack of many designers. Instead of designing a pretty shell and trying to fit my content to it, I’m going to start with the content and then design around it. For the dynamic content (mainly the portfolio and blog) I plan to use some sample content and the existing entries so that when I design around them, I have a good variety of potential content for these areas to account for different sizes, amounts, and media.

There are a number of reasons why this approach makes sense. The main one? Because the content is what you’re here for. Awesome graphics are pretty, but you’re not here to look at the nice images I can create in Photoshop (unless you are, in which case I would like to direct you to my portfolio, which I will link as soon as I have the new url). If the content is not well organized and easily accessible and, most of all, interesting to peruse, you’ll hit the site and bounce in under thirty seconds.

Choosing content-first also gives me the chance to rework what I’m presenting to be couched in semantically correct html. Previous versions of this site were created before browsers had progressed far enough to allow full-on styling, when sliced images and nested divs were the height of design. Now that sites need to be mobile-accessible, this makes serving up a lower-bandwidth version of the site difficult. Every extra character adds to the time it takes to download a page on a phone or tablet, so it behooves me to remove as much of the detritus of designs past as I can manage, so that I can get the content to you faster.

That’s right. It’s time to start fresh

Crys — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 01:51:27 +0000

Decided it’s time to do away with the old html and site structure. It’s been a good three years since my last redesign, and even then I didn’t update the code, just gave it a new look.

SO.

If this website looks unfinished or unstyled, that’s because it is. I’m scrapping the old themes and building a new one in html5. The content was stale; it’s also getting a complete overhaul.

I am working on it as you read this, and I plan to discuss each of the steps of the new site as I go. But before I can get to that point, I gotta clean up the old site. To that end I’m going to be deleting very nearly everything on this site, so it’ll be pretty sparse here for the next few days.

WordPress 3.0

Crys — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 03:45:14 +0000

Have to say, I’ve got nothing but good things to say about where WordPress has gone. I was a little worried when I decided to switch over to WordPress a year ago. I was worried that the first upgrade would break my theme (which I’ve redesigned about a million times since then), that the upgrade would make me lose data from the database, that every upgrade would turn out to be a freakish chore that took a whole weekend…

…but I figured it was worth it to let someone else worry about coding for security and maintainability instead of me spending my time on it for the blog software I wrote for myself before. If I’m not spending my time worrying about whether or not I escaped something properly, I can spend that time working on other things, like site design or freelance work or drawing *cough*or playing WoW*cough*.

Instead what I’ve found is that upgrading is painless and so far hasn’t caused a single problem. It takes about three minutes and most of that time is actually me taking a backup “just in case”. I’ve had no problem posting code snippets (which seems to cause some blog software to choke) or with putting special code in just for particular posts. And I have made extensive use of being able to save things as drafts. It’s really come a long way. I would definitely recommend it if you’re looking for blog software.

Google gravity

Crys — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 14:24:42 +0000

Ok, this is awesome.

http://mrdoob.com/projects/chromeexperiments/google_gravity/

The collision mechanics are great. Try throwing some of the pieces around.

Reality and I are having an argument…

Crys — Fri, 28 May 2010 10:26:22 +0000

…and I think it’s winning.

I can’t tell if the problem is that I don’t believe in the uncivilized hour of 5 am, or if 5 am doesn’t believe in me.

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design

Crys — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 05:27:49 +0000

So why’s my site so bare and where’d the old design go? Well, I’m working on the underlying css framework so I took everything else off. Should be like this for a few weeks then I’ve got a new style for the new year.

WordPress 3.0

Google Wave

Crys — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 18:25:47 +0000

Google Wave is a promising new form of online correspondence, part email, part IM conference. I recently redeemed my invite and started poking around. The product itself works fairly well and is definitely slick, but it has some usability issues that I’ll come back to later in another post.

The help and feedback areas however, are a nightmare. First, the feeback link doesn’t work. It goes to a survey which has closed, not to an area where you can provide feedback on the beta. The only other place I found to provide usability improvements is the seriously unusable “Product Ideas” area. The Ideas site itself is a good, well, idea, and one that more online providers might want to consider. But functionally, I’m wondering if THAT’s the product that’s actually a beta! 250 characters for usability feedback? Um, not likely in any detail that’s going to help. But even getting around that, it’s useless when those 250 characters generate parse errors when they’re submitted. No special characters. I even removed any ‘ or ” to make sure my entry was entirely alphanumeric. I got it to submit three times out of about ten usability issues I was trying to offer… isn’t getting that kind of feedback kind of the point of extending invitations to users, especially to users like me who work with interfaces and end-users constantly?

such a geek

Crys — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 19:41:55 +0000

I am such a geek. My husband got me a Wacom for my birthday and I’m drawing with it… and multitasking to play the Auction House in World of Warcraft, so when I tab over to WoW… I’m playing video games with my Wacom tablet *facepalm*