This is splorp.

Feed me.

2008-05-17T21:48:00.003-06:00

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.

Dungbeetle.

2008-05-08T12:15:00.003-06:00

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.

Snowed on.

2008-04-10T16:01:00.003-06:00

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.

Get a haircut.

2008-03-20T21:59:00.000-06:00

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.

South by ride.

2008-03-18T19:35:00.002-06:00

A semi sedate bubble sedan, donkin’ it in a parking lot near the Austin Conference Center.

Skinned.

2008-03-16T22:11:00.004-06:00

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”.

Launcher.

2008-03-13T14:42:00.004-06:00

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.

Deep toast.

2008-02-26T20:58:00.004-07:00

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.

Up. Down. Up. Down. Up.

2008-02-13T07:35:00.004-07:00

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.

What are you doing?

2007-09-21T08:13:00.002-06:00

Why, Twittering from my Newton, of course.

Dan Benjamin’s Newton

2007-09-12T21:52:00.003-06:00

Back in July, Dan Benjamin and John Gruber mentioned the Newton (and alluded to yours truly) at the tail end of the third episode of their podcast, The Talk Show. You can listen the original snippet of audio here. One of the stipulations of “appearing” on the show was an informal agreement to provide Dan with a specific technological point of reference. In other words, an actual, functioning Newton device which he could compare and contrast with an iPhone. The easy part was agreeing to the transaction. The tough part was the interpretation of that darn word “functioning”.

After several weeks of diddling with software, reconditioning battery packs, installing drivers and finally getting a creaky 3Com EtherLink card to talk to my Mac – it’s done. Dan’s Newton MessagePad 2100 is packaged and ready for shipment, along with all of the necessary accoutrements worthy of a personal digital assistant.

Yo Dan ... what you see is what you’re getting.

View a full-size image in my Flickr account.

Well, cheers.

2007-07-18T16:08:00.000-06:00

I just noticed that 11 years ago today, I registered my first domain name.

If the shit fits.

2007-04-24T21:54:00.000-06:00

While catching up on the newsfeeds this weekend, I stumbled across a perfectly wonderful quote by Evan Williams. He pretty much sums up every discussion I’ve ever had on this particular subject, to wit ... “I only point to Alexa graphs from now on when they help illustrate my point, since in general it’s full of shit.” I think I’ll just point to this post the next time someone attempts to use Alexa data to prove their point.

Build it and they will nominate you.

2007-04-19T07:52:00.000-06:00

Cool. Veer’s Build Your Own World feature has been nominated for a Webby Award in the rather convoluted category of Interactive Advertising: Other Advertising: Game or Application. Whew. Register on the People’s Voice site and cast your vote. The deadline is April 27th.

Wussypants.

2007-03-15T12:58:00.000-06:00

The following quote was plucked from a recent web development e-mail. “When building a new [server] farm, create better server names ... WUS is like naming a boy Sue.” Here’s the deal ... the internal names for Veer’s web servers are prefixed with the acronym ‘WUS’, theoretically representing ‘Web: United States’ or our North American-based web servers. I’ve always referred to the servers ‘wuss-oh-one’ or ‘wuss-oh-three’, but it wasn’t until this e-mail that I realized how dumb the naming really was. Makes we wonder how we’ve named our proxy servers.

Sneak peek.

2007-03-06T20:14:00.002-07:00

Nearly a year after I intended to redesign my personal site for Spring 2006 CSS Reboot, I’ve started up again. What happened last time? Life, work, etc.

What you see above (and here) is the latest incarnation of the design. For comparison purposes, here’s an early iteration of last year’s model.

My standard high contrast avatar is now the site’s ‘logo’. Consistent branding being a concept hammered into my brain on a daily basis. The logo may or may not harbour an easter egg at some point (you’ll just have to wait and see). A slightly tracked Gill Sans Bold now pops as the headline face (at least for Mac users) and Lucida Sans remains for body copy and typographic incidentals. What the Windows user will see has yet to be decided, but it will probably be a heavier weight of Arial or some such utility-grade sans serif.

The predominant use of whitespace in the previous design has been replaced by darker framing elements. A simple “sheet of white paper on a surface” look.

So what makes me think that I can actually launch this design before the next CSS Reboot? This one was built directly in code, not Photoshop. Barring any IE6/7 snafu-shas during tweaking, it’ll happen.

Comments? Please.

Retrospection.

2007-03-02T00:31:00.000-07:00

As a lame attempt at refocusing and reevaluating, I’ve been going back through the blog archives every once in a while. Sweet mother of crap, I used to blather on about an awful lot of really good shit™. My fave ‘out of context’ phrase from nearly six years ago? “... mine has a trackball the size of a hamster ...” Heh.

Veer tweets.

2007-01-30T20:02:00.001-07:00

Do you use Twitter? Do you like to know what’s going on over at Veer? Well, have I got a deal for you. I’ve just started using Twitter as a channel for site updates, new feature announcements, status alerts, and other web follies ... fresh from our team that actually builds the stuff. Tune in to our fresh stream of tweets and tell me what you think.

It's that immutable green brick factor.

2007-01-15T21:31:00.000-07:00

You have to admire Leander Kahney. He has a nose for news, especially when it relates to anything ‘of the cult’, as it were. Case in point, who would be the first group you’d survey for a reaction to the iPhone announcement? Why a bunch of Newton users, of course. What demographic would embody the emotional clamoring for a modern, multi-function, touch-screen handheld device? Why, the vociferous, jilted community of Newton users of course. Last week, Mr Kahney queried several Newton fanfolk (including yours truly) on the following topic ... “Who’d want to lug the old green brick about when they can have a shiny new iPhone?” You can probably guess the outcome. See who comes out on top in Apple Newton Versus iPhone.

We have liftoff.

2007-01-09T19:34:00.000-07:00

After the ground-shaking, bladder-emptying, adrenaline rush of this morning’s rather interesting announcement, Mr Haughey makes an astute observation. Why is something as mundane as a product announcement so exciting and important to us? Because Apple is the new NASA, that’s why. Matt, thank you from one Apple fanboy to another. Thank you for putting into words that ethereal concept I could never seem to nail down. Go Apple, go.

The self-aggrandizing flotsam department.

2007-01-08T06:17:00.000-07:00

Please note that the delightful pair of vociferous Mac-heads, Dan Benjamin and John Gruber make an ever so brief mention of Newton (and yours truly) in the recently unveiled Hivelogic Podcast. The first two episodes of the podcast are a casual discussion of their ideas regarding what new products might appear during the imminent Macworld keynote. Episode 1 is mostly about the possibility (or not) of an iPhone. The Newton makes an appearance around the 50'40" mark of the second episode, during the “tablet” speculation. Doesn’t that just figure?

Several years late and a dollar short.

2006-12-29T15:50:00.000-07:00

MacNN reports that Big Blue has finally released an OS X-savvy version of its venerable Lotus Notes collaboration suite. The press release states: “ ... with IBM Lotus Notes 7.0.2 for OS X, Mac users have the collaboration power they’ve been waiting for ... ” Mac users? As in multiple? Shouldn’t that read “ ... the one Mac user we found who actually knew that Lotus Notes still existed ... ”?

Final eviction notice.

2006-11-21T20:09:00.000-07:00

Early adoption is for masochists. Cohesive workflow and performance comes from being stubborn, sticking with what you know, and not drifting away from your comfort zone. Those who blindly accept and implement change are weak and tend to bend to peer pressure.

Yeah, ok. Whatever.

Six months ago I was done rationalizing. Enough dragging of feet. I was finally ready to say goodbye to Claris Emailer, Internet Explorer, Goliath, and very reluctantly, KeyQuencer. Most importantly, I simply couldn’t justify wasting any more time or testing any more patience whilst slogging about in OS 9. Every other machine I used was running either Panther or Tiger, with the exception of my box at home and my web server. The G4 tower under my home office desk received a series of transplants earlier this year. Now the web server is about to get the overdue upgrade it deserves. The dual processor 9600 which serves up these very pages isn’t OS X material, so a full hardware replacement will be necessary before the shift happens. There’s a spare G4 in the basement sporting a pair of 450MHz heaters. That’ll probably be enough to do the trick.

I’ve managed to hold on to OS 9 a lot longer than I had ever anticipated. But aside from the residual joy of a Finder that’s actually responsive and being able to set my folder lists in 9 point Geneva, the bloom is off. I was tired of punching the restart button whenever Internet Explorer hacked up a lung and hung hard. I was continually unimpressed with Korean-encoded spam causing Emailer to choke on its temp files. I have long since grown out of the quaint tidiness of 31-character file names. I expect to be able to stuff more than 2GB into Retrospect archives. I require a standards-savvy browser that isn’t named iCab.

The final smack of the reality mallet came down this week. The ten year old hardware running this server has been suffering from a worsening case of the “inconvenient freezies” ... and there’s little hope of a full recovery. I’ve managed to patch things up - yet again - with the software equivalent of bailing wire and chewing gum, but it really is time to move on. Goodbye, Fortissimo. Hello, Tiger. So long, WebStar. Howdy do, Apache. Farewell, years of painstakingly modified host configurations and request rules. Very nice to meet you, platform migration headaches ... oh, crap.

Ah, well. Wish me luck, regardless.

The new webmail, man.

2006-10-26T22:19:00.000-06:00

Apple unveiled a revamped .Mac webmail today. As expected, it’s chock full of delicious Ajaxy goodness and mimics quite a bit of the functionality of their desktop Mail application. The .Mac Address Book gets a swift kick in the interface as well. I’ve documented some of the major changes in this Flickr photoset. The best part (besides looking one hell of a lot better than Gmail) is that it actually works very well. Nice job, Apple. My webmail is useful again.

That showroom shine.

2006-10-03T21:45:00.000-06:00

Well, adjust my tracking and call me Caslon. Adobe finally freshens up their languishing type products page, renaming it the Adobe Type Showroom. However, once again they’ve neglected to add any new typefaces in the process. The pimped-out, pop-up type browser interface is kinda nice, as is the Flash®-based OpenType tour, but where’s the stuff that keeps customers coming back for more? Surely someone in those shiny towers realizes that you can actually sell new typefaces... not just give them away with every major release of the Creative Suite? Or... maybe not.