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Friday, May 21, 2004 Link
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As is apparent from the previous post, I haven't even had time to give the new features of Blogger more than a curious glance and a cursory nod, let alone post anything. They just had to relaunch the same weekend as we did, didn't they? The nerve. I imagine that you'll start to see comments and individual post archive pages on this site some point before the next moon cycle. Perhaps there's a change that I'll manage to tweak the design around here a might and finally roll out the tableless version of this site that I've been fretting about and delaying for months on end. Yeah sure... and maybe protocol hijacking and local script security issues will be shown to be completely benign after all. As always, stay tuned.
One of the previously hinted at projects that has been absorbing a fairly good chunk of my waking hours was launched two weekends ago. The Veer web site was re-released based on a new development platform, running on new servers, and getting consolidated under one roof at a new co-location facility. I can't claim ownership or responsibility of much more than the preening and tweaking of the outward appearance of this launch. There are many, many other people who deserve those accolades. Suffice it to say that this was an immensely involved, complex and ultimately satisfying project that dozens of people are relieved to have finally pushed out the door. The primary reason it has taken so long for me to even mention the relaunch is of course, all of the post-launch tidying up and technical finessing that always follows events of this magnitude. Anyone who has worked on a large, multi-headed beast of a project knows how things break and crap happens. Regardless of how much stress testing and scenario playing you do, stuff doesn't work the way you anticipated. Anyway, we've had our fill of niggly little checkboxes on our resepctive to do lists over the past couple of weeks that required a reasonable amount of attention.
Most of the improvements that were made to the site were to the architecture and database. You know, under the hood stuff. However, there are definitely a few showroom-fresh features spiffy enough for me to point out. Specifically, registered users can now save and edit separate billing, mailing and shipping addresses. That's nice. You can also securely store information for multiple credit card accounts. And preferences. We've got the start of user-definable site preferences. More on those below.
Site preferences that can be specified include the number of thumbnails per page for search results and lightbox contents, default text for Flont™ type previews (a much requested feature, let me tell you...), the way that product keywords are displayed, and last of all, pop-up detail images of typefaces on search results and type collection pages.
This last feature makes browsing for typefaces that much easier by quickly providing a much more useful taste of each font prior to clicking through to a product page.
These are just some of the more visible highlights of what's new on the product side of the site. Another related, but equally exciting (read: skunkworks) project was to convert our weblog, The Skinny, from what was basically a static Blogger-based include file into a standalone Movable Type site. Along the way, my partner Issa and I smacked together a new XHTML and CSS undercarriage that is standards-compliant, pretty much always valid, and tableless, without sacrificing any of the existing Veer clothing. And boy, are our arms tired.
I don't know about the rest of my office compatriots, but I'd certainly appreciate hearing any feedback folks have on the Veer site, the new features, or the relaunched Skinny. Fortunately, we have the ability to handle comments now too.
Wednesday, May 05, 2004 Link
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Snow and petals at storage facility. Southeast Calgary.
Sunday, May 02, 2004 Link
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If there was actually a [expletive] contest for such a thing, my vote for the best [expletive] title for a weblog post would [expletive] go to Andrei Herasimchuk for his wonderfully rantish I Would RTFM If There Was an FM to FR. It's a [expletive] good read too.
Stumbling about the web this evening, I found two extremely informative, and dare I suggest, useful sites relating to iTunes. Since I seem to spend an inordinate amount of any given workday listening to iTunes-provided audio content, anything even vaguely informative or useful in an iTunesy sort of way will grab my attention. I mention these sites here on the oft chance that they'll grab a small part of your attention as well. Get on with it then. Jim Heid's rather Jobsian-sounding Macintosh Digital Hub Site has been analyzing the snot out of the new features found in the freshly released iTunes 4.5. Mentioned are a few niceties that you probably wouldn't have noticed at first glance. I particularly appreicted the mention of an AppleScript which toggles the function of the playlist link arrows so they point to your own library, rather than the iTunes Music Store. For a iTMS-challenged Canuck such as moi, this functionality now makes hayloads more sense than the default behaviour. And speaking of AppleScriptiness, they don't come any better compiled than Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes. My current favorites? Both Trash Duplicates and Import Selected iPod Tracks proved their worth within minutes of installation. If you spend even a fraction of your day using iTunes, you are bound to find a script here that will make your music listening experience even smilier.
Saturday, May 01, 2004 Link
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The available domain name of the week is mootbutton.com
A rather large pile of stuff will be happening within the next couple of weeks. Stuff that I will be talking about here, probably at length. Stuff that I'm rather proud to have been a part of. Stuff that - for all intents and purposes - has been absorbing much more than its fair share of time, energy and personal grooming. Oh, and there's plenty more where that stuff is coming from. Yeah, just you wait.
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