Thinkcage

Wow! It is hard to believe we are nearly two weeks into the new year. I finished 2004 in a flurry and jumped right back in for 2005. The big news is that I have accepted a position at Element Fusion, an internet development company in Oklahoma City. The job is exactly what I had been seeking for the past few years – an opportunity to do what I love all day long – design websites. While I’ve had the occasion to design sites for most of the companies I have worked for, as well as undertaking many sites as a freelancer; I have never been able to work as a web designer full-time until now.

I have spent years coding sites and maintaining this site, keeping up with the latest techniques and technology. Now I have a chance to really push these skills further. And yes, standards fans, web standards and XHMTL/CSS are going to be a big part of the work I perform for Element Fusion’s customers.

But that is just the start of it. Element Fusion also offers me the ability to work for tons of great clients; quite a change from the corporate internal work I have been doing.

This is quite an exciting time for me. Oh and if you’re are looking for a great firm to work on your next web project, check out the best in Oklahoma.

I have lots to share but so little time to write. I hope to catch up over the holidays but here are a few noteworthy topics for the coming days…

• Surgery. I had my wisdom teeth out on Friday and a minor outpatient wrist surgery tomorrow.
• Job News. I have a big announcement to make here and a process to discuss.
• Wireless Woes. My struggle to deal with buying and setting up a simple wireless home network (oxymoron)? Oh and did I mention rebates? Grrrr.
• And of course the holidays and the stories that are sure to come from that.

Stay tuned…

The glaring deviation from the typical blog format that this site has been guilty of is the lack of a comments function. Its a one-way street. I write, you read; the end.

But all that is about to change. I finally got around to coding a comments system. Astute readers might have already noticed the comments link at the bottom of each post which can be used to read and add comments to each. I have done some limited testing and everything seems to be a go, but I’m sure some bugs will creep up here and there. So comment away, and let me know if you break it.

Coding the function was easier than I expected and only took a few hours. I was pleasantly surprised that PHP made many of the things I was unsure about how to implement (like stripping HTML from posts) a breeze. I still need to code the admin side which will allow me to stifle the free speech of those who would make an inappropriate comment or otherwise abuse the system, but I suppose I can delete from the database for the time being should anything like that occur.

All said, coding my own weblog and content management system has been a great learning process and I am really glad I decided to take this road rather than implementing a stock solution like Moveable Type. I will say it again, I have no doubts that MT is a great product but I felt and still feel that my time was better spent learning to build what I needed from scratch rather than learning how to use someone else’s software. And much of what I learned has carried over into my clients’ sites. Very much a win-win.

Future plans? There is not much more that I want to do with the system at this point but there are a few things I may try down the road for the purpose of challenging myself if nothing else. I think categorization of the posts would be nice and probably not very difficult. Additionally, some more robust GD tools would be nice for uploading images to the portfolio section, and along the same lines, tighter integration between the moblog and weblog—perhaps even a full combining of the two. I also have this need to try a Flash version. The goal would be to use the same database (and images in the case of the portfolio) to display the same content via a Flash interface. Theoretically, it seems possible but I haven’t tried it yet. The last thing I would like to try would be a full optimization of the code; creating re-useable functions, making it more easily configurable and installable so that I could distribute it.

I think it is worth a shot.

I was fortunate to have saved some vacation time for the end of the year and that, coupled with some clever scheduling, allowed me to take a couple of weeks off of work to spend at home with my family. It was a great and much-needed break, though its a little bit difficult to get back into the swing of my normal schedule:

• 6:30 A.M. – get up drive to work by 7:30 – 7:45 A.M.
• Work all morning, after scanning the news and various blogs via RSS and NetNewswire.
• 12:00 P.M. – Lunchtime. I try to escape the office, weather permitting, with either my sketchbook, some reading material, my camera, or just a short walk in mind.
• 4:30 P.M. – Usually the end of the work day. Hometime.
• 5:30 – 8:30 P.M. – Family time. Dinner, movies, games—with the kids. And then snuggling them into bed.
• 8:30 – 12:00 P.M. or so. – Back on the computer for some freelance design time. To all of my clients, this is when your projects get done.

Its a long day, and quite a shock to my system after two weeks of staying up late, sleeping in, and generally lax days. But that said, I’m slowing getting back to work. 2004 looks to be a busy and exciting year for me and I hope to keep you up with my doings here. Stay tuned.

(Now I’m off to the watch Steve Job’s MacWorld keynote. Is this the year they finally break me and I buy an iPod?)

I want to start off by admitting I am a statistics freak. I religiously read sports stats and regularly check the website traffic statistics for my site (and all of the sites that I manage).

I especially enjoy referring links — seeing which sites are linking to yours. The nuts and bolts of the internet.

In the past week I’ve noticed several new links from weblogs, For example, www.mikesspot.com, www.jennifersblog.com/, www.a-b-l-o-g.com have all linked me.

At first glance these appear to be just another blog but closer inspection reveals a few interesting things. They are completely generic. There is no personally-identifiable information, no contact info, the posts lack any personality; they are just little news blurbs (no rants, no posts about ‒my cat”, etc.). The links to comments and trackbacks are are dummies. One has a link to a textamerica photo blog, but it appears to be positioned to push a clothing line.

These blogs are fakes.

But I can’t figure out why. A little digging reveals that all three domains (and perhaps there are more) are registered by the same company — a hosting company. My guess is that these are somehow used by this hosting company to funnel traffic, or perhaps to fool search engines. Clearly, they are trying to benefit from the traffic generated by the linked news stories. Maybe its a scheme to show high traffic to potential advertisers. I am not quite sure but I am curious.

The link to this site has appeared in the links column of each of the sites on several occasions, though the list seems to me to be dynamically generated and perhaps even harvested by robots.

Interesting if nothing else.

Update: As quickly as they came, all of those sites and the others that appeared to be similar are now down. Maybe nothing more than a failed experiment.

I’m sure the serious members of the “blog” community would scoff at my silly little web site that talks about itself. And I realize there is little value in it for anyone but the most regular of visitors here, but that also is the appeal of this kind of publication. The Internet lets me publish to any audience, regardless of size and/or commercial feasibility. There are some issues I wish to sound-off on here, but I will likely not address them until I feel the site is finished.

Though this is really the 4th or 5th distinct version of the site since 1997, when I created my first personal site on a University server (it’s since been removed but I wish I had archived it), this is the first one I would consider robust enough to label version 1.0. For the first time, I have a journal, resume, a decent portfolio, and some information about myself on a fairly complete site. It’s mostly valid XHTML/CSS and even has a nice content management system that permits me to add blog entries and portfolio items through a web-based system.

The content management system is my own design. It is a modified version of what I’ve been doing for clients for over a year now. I’m not really a programmer, thought I am getting a good handle on PHP, so I am certain it could be better. But that said, it is 100% mine. I wrote every line of code and every feature so that it would work the way I want on this web site. I was very tempted to try a tool like Moveable Type, which so many talented people are using to do amazing things, but I really wanted the control and pride of doing it myself. Furthermore the complexity and robustness of Moveable Type really turned me away; I would much rather start with very limited functionality and add features I need than be overwhelmed by things I don’t use.

The funny thing is I am primarily a designer. I have been an artist my entire life and earned a BFA in Visual Communications. I have since really added a lot of technical skills that allow me to do XTHML, CSS, PHP, ASP, SQL, JavaScript, etc. But more and more I find doing those things repetitive, time-consuming, and uninteresting. I am most happy when I am doing design, even after all of the technology I have learned.

Recently I began to do some identity design work on contract from an agency. It has been delightfully refreshing to do just design. No worries about how I would make my ideas work in HTML, no concerns about browsers and PHP errors. I just make beautiful designs and then move on to the next one.

That is what is funny to me about this web site. I have spent so much time creating clean code, semantically-correct structure, and custom functionality that to me the design got lost in the process. Certainly, it is useable and clean, but it lacks the visual look and feel to set it apart from the rest of the web. To me it looks like a database site.

So now I am going to focus completely on the visual design for awhile. I want to make the current content beautiful and then I am considering a second version of the site that uses a Flash interface to access the same content. Already the weblog and portfolio content is stored in a database and I think that if I move the static content as well, I can use the same data pulled into Macromedia Flash™ to present the same content in a different way. That’s really what the whole idea of separation of form and content is all about, right? I hope to detail my process here at a later date.