When I rolled out the redesign of this site back in March, I admitted that not everything was going to be properly bolted down. One thing I neglected to do was redirect the old RSS feed to the new location. Some of my faithful readers who have historically received their regular dose of splorp via newsreader have been stuck in an update stasis for the past couple of months. Tonight I fixed that particular issue. Now, all I need to do is start posting more things actually worth reading.
Posted 9:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)
It was tough keeping this under wraps for so long, but the project I have been working on for the past six months was finally released last week. The longer we worked on it, the more impatient we became about letting everyone in on the story. A handful of people probably managed to pick up a few prelaunch clues during conversations at SXSW back in March, but for the most part, no lips were flapped. What I’m referring to is the swanky new Veer Ideas. We haven’t made a lot of noise about it so far, since the plan was to soft launch now and then sand down the rough edges over the next several weeks. Now that the garage door has been opened, it’s as good a time as any to talk a bit about what’s under the hood.
The “Ideas” section of veer.com was always intended to provide a home for inspiration and exploration beyond the products we represented and sold. Six years ago, it started out as a Blogger-powered weblog and a crappy little JavaScript image randomizer that I slapped together in all of ten minutes. It wasn’t much, but it was an incredibly divergent tack for us … certainly compared with our competition at the time. Specifically, The Skinny allowed us to reach out into the design community as peers, not just operators of some vending machine spewing out digital content. “Ideas” became, in its own way, a significant part of the personality and voice of Veer.
Eventually, we moved from Blogger to Moveable Type, integrating comments, contextual RSS feeds, and a lot more design flexibility along the way. The fact that we no longer had direct FTP access for publishing to the server also necessitated the switch. Moveable Type served us well for nearly four years, but it was time to move on to something else. Something we could tweak and preen and noodle and adapt to our own specific needs. We decided to build our “something else” from scratch.
It was determined that our existing web development diet of Visual Studio, the .Net framework, and Microsoft’s SQL Server would simply not fit with the rapid development and release schedule we were proposing. All of our shiny, happy new bits were built from the ground up using Ruby on Rails, powered by MySQL, and organized using Subversion. New environments, new tools, and new languages meant rather steep learning curves … but incredible satisfaction … as the code, the interface, the Veer voice, and the content all started coming together.
For some nittier bits of gritty, my good friends Issa and Jon can explain the larger concepts of the project much better than I intend on doing in this space. Suffice it to say, we are all experiencing a significant feeling of accomplishment comprised of equal parts of pride, relief, excitement, gobsmackedness, and exhaustion.
So why is this post titled “Dungbeetle”?
Every major site redesign I have worked on over the last ten years or so has had a code name associated with the top level navigation. “Gatorflop” was the EyeWire site, circa 1998, fresh from our break from Adobe. “Hamstermuffin” was the 1999 “widescreen” edition of eyewire.com, all 800 horizontal pixels of it. Then came “Crunchybox”, which actually applied to an entire set of mockups for the initial release of the Veer site in early 2002. “Shovelfudge” was the name attached of the redesign of veer.com which we revealed just before Christmas in 2005. That leads us to “Dungbeetle”, the name that my compatriot Yuval gave to the navigation framework for the new “Veer Ideas”.
Building a site from the ground up allows you to rethink how everything is glued together. The HTML, the CSS … everything. We needed to maintain the identity of veer.com, but didn’t want to have to slog through a bunch of legacy page structures and stylesheet declarations. Personally, I’ve learned a hell of a lot since building out the “Shovelfudge” edition of veer.com, and wanted to apply that knowledge this time around. Although the design of the navigation looks virtually identical to the current tabbed navbar on veer.com, “Dungbeetle” eschewed the superfluous nested div elements, the dozens of individual linked images with multiple display states, and the overly complex JavaScript required to make it all work. Instead, I styled simple unordered lists using a modified CSS sprite technique. All states of all tabs are contained in this single .gif image. I say “modified” because I had to adjust the width of each sprite window depending on the state of each tab. Since the tabs appear to overlap each other and cast shadows, they do not have clean, defined edges. The width of the each viewport displaying the sprites needed to expand or contract in order to accurately display the appropriate state. The design and technical considerations are unique enough for me to consider documenting more of this technique. Watch for more detailed information regarding “variable width sprites” to appear in a future post. A heap of gratitude goes out to Ethan Marcotte for helping me nail down a basic, functioning solution that I was able to pretty up all nice.
By the way, “Dungbeetle” is a subtle hat tip to “sticky” web content, “rolling your own”, and working like the dickens to get something accomplished. It has nothing to do with a big ball of shit. Honest.
Posted 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)
Here is a good example of this morning’s snowfall as seen from our front porch. Note that our snow shovel and corn broom are still at the ready beside the garage. You don’t put shovels or snow tires away until late May in Calgary. It ended up snowing another three hours after I snapped this. Here’s a couple more photos from this morning.
Posted 4:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Since December 1998, I have kept a chronological tally of each and every haircut inflicted upon my topmost follicular region. Don’t ask me why … just enjoy the fact that I managed to compile a continuous set of standard data points for nearly ten years running.
Posted 9:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
A semi sedate bubble sedan, donkin’ it in a parking lot near the Austin Conference Center.
Posted 7:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
I’ve always thought it rather interesting that the term “skinned” can refer to the removal of something (as in “I skinned the neighbor’s cat.”) as well as the exchanging of one thing for another (as in “I just skinned my browser to look like a deathstar.”) As you may have noticed, the look and feel of this site has changed recently … as in “skinned”. If you hadn’t noticed, that’s ok. I’ve been yammering about “redesign this” and “relaunch that” for going on six years now, and I certainly wouldn’t blame any of you for tuning me out. Well, last week I finally dropped the gloves, rolled up my sleeves, and pitched the stale layout, moldy stylesheets, and stinky old tables into the dustbin. What you’re seeing now is a transitional design … bare bones structure and style … a small step forward towards what will eventually be a complete, stem to stern rebuild of this twelve year old site. Bare with me as I work through this process of getting “skinned”.
Posted 10:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
When my good friend Issa isn’t herding our collective web development cats at Veer, he somehow manages to find time for things like relaunching his personal site and starting up a non-profit arts venture called Creative Nest. While I congratulate him on both of these personal projects, it’s the idea behind the latter which has really smacked me upside the entrepreneurial noggin. The primary purpose of Creative Nest is to provide artists, regardless of their craft or location, the ability to develop and explore without worrying about where their next rent payment is coming form. It’s residency without relocation, and it’s bloody brilliant.
Posted 2:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Normally, I’m a big fan of coincidence and synchronicity. Today, not so much. On the eve of the tenth anniversary of Apple discontinuing development of the Newton, the Cobalt Qube which had been hosting the Newted Community site for the past nine years suffered a catastrophic hard drive failure. Ouch. If that’s not a coincidence, I’m not sure I could put my finger on a better example. And while I’ve been attempting to resurrect some portion of the site data from a questionably coherent backup, I’ve already had a half dozen offers of replacement hardware. Now that’s a community indeed. By the way, if you’re a Newton geek of any measure, you will have understood the nod to our little green friend in the title of this post. For everyone else, “deep toast” refers to a alert message indicating that some piece of Newton hardware (generally the rechargeable battery) can no longer be reliably used. An arguably fitting salute.
Posted 8:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Between the recent weather-related power outages, an underpowered (not necessarily uninterruptible) power supply, and an increasingly cranky server, e-mail and web services for the Newted Community have been less than reliable this week. To all those community members that rely on Newted for their mail, I apologize for the unexpected downtime. I really wish it were possible to see these things coming, but they tend to sneak up behind you when you’re not looking and smack you upside the head. That being said, I am trying to address the server stability by clearing out a pile of older files to give the memory swap a bit more legroom (or is that headroom?). However, the reality of the situation is that this 9 year old Cobalt Qube may be ready for retirement. That being said, migrating existing users over to a newer server platform from the Qube will be neither simple nor quick (perhaps not even possible, except by manually adding hundreds of individual accounts). The good news is that everything appears to be running normally this morning.
Posted 7:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Why, Twittering from my Newton, of course.
Posted 8:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
ISSN 1496-3221
Copyright © 1996-2008 Grant Hutchinson
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