Search Results for ‘sites’
Makin’ it worse: Packers.com redesign
September 1, 2006
Yesterday the Green Bay Packers launched their latest redesign of Packers.com, the official website of the Green Bay Packers franchise. At first I was excited to hear about the redesign, hoping that they would improve upon their 2005 redesign, which was a giant step forward. I’m sad to say however, that the new version of Packers.com is a step backwards in many aspects.
What are your RSS habits?
October 11, 2006
I’ve read a couple of postings over the past few days on the state of personal websites these days (Jeffrey Zeldman’s “Blahg” and Greg Storey’s answer to that over at Airbag titled “Boxes”) and they (and some of their comments) have gotten me to thinking about how people use RSS feeds.
This isn’t the first time that I’ve wondered about this, but lately it seems like there’s more and more talk about how RSS feeds are being used, and what the “best” way to serve feeds to your readers is. With IE7 (and it’s built in RSS support) about to hit the main stream, RSS is also about to be exposed to most Windows users who haven’t previously heard about the technology.
Gravatar 2.0
February 27, 2007
A few weeks back I was asked about the comment avatars that are displayed on my site and how to use them. Since August of 2006, I’ve been using a great service called Gravatar that allows users to have an avatar associated with their email address.
Having a Bad Dream(host)
March 29, 2007
For the past 16 months I’ve been using Dreamhost to host this site. For the most part, I’ve been pleased with their service and support, but lately things just haven’t been the same.
I originally switched over to Dreamhost at the recommendation – either personally or through what they’d written about Dreamhost on their sites – of quite a few “high-profile” designers (Mike Davidson, Jason Santa Maria, Dave Shea, Dan Cederholm, etc.). At the time I sent a few emails back and forth with Jason just about his personal thoughts towards Dreamhost, their reliability, support, bang for buck and a few other things. All in all I came away with a fairly solid opinion and recommendation of Dreamhost, and eventually I made the switch.
Takin’ it All Off for CSS Naked Day
March 31, 2007
It’s that time of year again, time for the 2nd annual CSS Naked Day! If you’ve been following my feed you will have noticed the link to the CSS Naked Day website a couple weeks back. Well, Dustin’s accepting signups now for those who want to take part this year.
Switch Journal: Software
January 12, 2007
In some cases, one of the biggest differences between the Mac and PC is the software applications created for each environment. Although more and more programs are being developed to be cross platform, the majority of really good niche apps (such as text editors, instant messaging software, FTP clients, etc.) are only available for a specific platform.
My switch to Mac has been made easier by the fact that a lot of the major applications I use on a day-to-day basis are available for the Mac platform. Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, and Mozilla Firefox are all great examples of major applications that are available on both. With that said, there are still a lot of programs that I used every day on my PC that aren’t available for the Mac, so I had to go out and find alternatives.
Home or Homeless?
January 3, 2007
Earlier this week a few colleagues and I were discussing the merits of having (or not having) a “home” link in a site’s main navigation. More specifically we discussed whether or not the now standard practice of linking a website’s logo back to the home page is a good enough substitute for not having a specifically labeled home link. We ended up having a fairly good dialogue in which several opinions and points were raised, but I thought I’d take it one step further and open up the topic for discussion here.
NFL Week 17 Predictions
December 27, 2007
Last week’s 11-5 record brought my season total up to 163-77 heading into the final week of the regular season. It’s not a bad percentage (.679), but I was hoping to fair a little better this year.
It’s been a pretty busy week for me with the Christmas holidays, so my apologies for the late entry. With that in mind, I will again try and keep this week’s post a little shorter so I can get my picks up as soon as possible. There are really just 2 or 3 things that I’d like to touch on, so I’ll dive right in.
Web Directions North: Day 1
February 8, 2007
The first day of Web Directions North turned out to be a pretty full day. First off, every session was great and I’ve definitely learned a lot, had old ideas resurface and I’ve definitely thought about things in new ways.
The opening keynote with Molly Holzschlag was both enjoyable and interactive. I’d never heard Molly speak live before, but she’s definitely a very talented presenter. Her session entitled ‘WSI:Vancouver - Crimes Against Web Standards’ was an interactive session where she both demonstrated some of her own crimes against web standards and also got the audience to open up on some of their crimes. It was almost like a geek therapy session.
New(er) Beginnings
October 1, 2007
This may seem like déjà vu to the regular visitors of my site, but life is changing again. After a brief cup of coffee at Blue Coat Systems (actually, several cups thanks to the impressive coffee machine in their kitchen) and an unfortunate incident involving my car, I have decided to take my career on an exciting new adventure.
Portfolio Updated!
October 4, 2006
Well, it’s been in the works for a while now, but I’ve finally gotten down to finishing up the updates to my portfolio. So, go ahead and check it out!
I’ve decided to let my portfolio take on more of a standard blog format rather than the typical portfolio format that I’ve seen on other sites. Here are some of my main reasons for following the blog format:
Briefly
September 8, 2007
There’s a good chance that you’ve already heard about this from some of the other sites that you frequent, but on the off chance that you haven’t, I thought I’d point it out just in case. On Labour Day, Khoi Vinh and Liz Danzico launched a great new design opinion site called A Brief Message. Rather than trying to explain what the site is all about myself, I’ll just echo what came straight from the horse’s mouth:
Relocation
May 9, 2007
So things have been a little quiet around here lately and I haven’t been posting as much as I want to. I haven’t been actively reading or commenting on other sites or articles either, which is a little different from my usual routine. In fact, I haven’t been spending as much time in front of a computer at all recently (which is arguably a good thing anyways). Outside of work lately, most of my time online has been spent checking emails and very casually sifting through my feed reader.
reinspire.net
June 9, 2005
Welcome to reinspire.net
Eventually, this site will be a personal collection of anything I feel like putting online. Pictures, thoughts, interesting links, etc. I’ll also have a blog on the site that will be updated regularly with anything pertaining to the world of Web Development. Design, Coding, CSS, XHTML, Standards… You name it, it’ll all show up at some point here at reinspire.
This site started off as a free blog on Blogger, but from the beginning I knew that was just a temporary home. Being influenced by sites like Stopdesign, mezzoblue, SimpleBits and Mike Industries, I decided that I wanted to start my own site mostly as a programming project to see if I could do it. I knew I could, but I thought I’d put it all to practice and actually produce something.
Firefox 1.5 Review
December 10, 2005
Firefox 1.5 has been out for about 2 weeks now, and after using it since it came out, I thought I’d post my thoughts on Mozilla’s latest offering.
The newest release of Firefox offers several enhancements and upgrades to existing features, some of which are really nice and negate the need to use a few popular extensions. As far as new features and major upgrades, anyone hoping for those will probably have to wait for Firefox 2.0.
Sony DRM Update
November 12, 2005
What a difference a week can make! Exactly one week ago I posted my frustrations regarding Sony’s Digital Rights Mis-Management. Over the last 7 days there has been a few major developments in this story. It seems that I wasn’t the only person who was frustrated by the way Sony is going about their content protection.
Sony’s Digital Rights Mis-Management
November 5, 2005
The other day I purchased a CD that ended up making me angry. Not because the music is angry in any sense, not because the music disappointed, but more because of Sony BMG’s ridiculous Digital Rights Management (DRM).
Unknowingly, I had purchased a disc that included copy protection software that not only limits the amount of times you can copy the CD, but also forces you to use a protected Windows Media audio format if you’d like to copy your music to your computer - which makes it extremely difficult to copy the CD to your iTunes music library, and ultimately, your iPod.
CSS Hyperlink Styling
September 19, 2005
In this CSS tip, we’ll be looking at various ways to style hyperlinks using CSS. There are many different methods and techniques that you can use to create uniquely styled links, and we’ll explore some of them here.
By default, hyperlinks in browsers are underlined. Normal links are blue, visited links are purple and active links (depending on the browser) are red. Designers do not want to live life by default though, so CSS provides some powerful ways to style your hyperlinks, allowing you to create a look and feel that best suits your design.
Microsoft is on the Standards Train
January 7, 2006
It started earlier this year with Microsoft’s (mostly) standards-based redesign of MSN.com. Now, it’s nice to see that Microsoft is continuing in that vein by designing their new Windows Vista homepage using a standards-based design.
What’s even nicer is that the homepage is actually quite attractive (unlike MSN.com). It doesn’t have a whole lot of content in there yet, but it’s a good start so far. The markup isn’t terribly incredible (no lists for links, etc.) and it doesn’t validate, but that’s not really the point here. As we all know, validation is not the number one priority. Accessibility is.
Random Thoughts
January 25, 2006
Over the past few weeks I’ve had a lot of things running through my brain that I felt like I wanted to share. None of them really constitute a full entry in my mind, so I’ll just post them all at once.
This is something that I know many people do on their sites from time to time and I would imagine that more and more of these entries will show up here in the coming months as well. Wait and see…
Redesign Coming Soon
Well, I said way back when that I had wanted to give this site a facelift, but I didn’t really know when it would happen. I’m happy to say that the redesign is in progress, almost complete and will probably be uploaded this weekend. New site design, new logo, and new posts that actually relate to web development will all be coming in the near future! Check back often.
Seven years ago I was…
August 14, 2006
I saw this over on Cameron Moll’s site and thought I would post it here as well. I left a comment on his entry but thought of more things after the fact, so here’s my extended list:
Seven years ago I was…
- 15.
- Preparing to start 11th grade.
- Working my first job in a bakery at a grocery store (Zehrs if you’re wondering. The particular store has since been turned into a ValuMart, which is still owned by the same parent company of Zehrs).
- Making websites as a hobby and wondering how I could turn it into a career (which I did the following summer).
- Fighting with tables, font tags and spacer gifs.
- Questioning the hype surrounding “Y2K.”
- Single.
- Becoming more obsessed with Football (NFL) and less obsessed with every other sport.
- Dreaming about the freedom that would come along with my driver’s license.
Site Redesign: Design Phase
August 6, 2006
In my limited design experience, I’ve come to realize that the hardest part of any re-design (or any new project for that matter) is deciding on the look and feel of the site. Truer words could not be said about the road I took to come up with the new design for this site. It took me three completely different design iterations to finally come up with something that I wanted to stick with and develop. The process was long and drawn out, lasting two and a half months and getting squeezed into whatever free time I could find while preparing to move into our new house.
Serving Up IE Specific Stylesheets
May 17, 2006
Yesterday Nathan Smith posted a few thoughts on using CSS hacks (specifically the * html hack) inside your main stylesheets. There has been a lot of talk recently on what’s going to happen to sites that use a lot of IE specific hacks once Internet Explorer 7 is officially released, and the consensus is that it’s best to serve up specific stylesheets for IE and leave out hacks all together.
I whole-heartedly agree with this opinion and have been practicing this technique for a while now. If you’ve read my article on how to use transparent PNG images in IE, you should already be familiar with these methods. I realize that this is not a new technique that I’m posting, but for those of you who haven’t seen it on this site or anywhere else on the web before, I thought it would make a nice addition to my collection of CSS Tips.
New MSN.com = Yahoo!?
May 15, 2006
I was browsing around the other day when I stumbled across the new MSN.com. Now, originally I didn’t think much of it because it looks very similar to the old version (or current version at the time of this writing) of MSN.
It wasn’t until today that I felt a little déjà vu though when I went to the Yahoo! home page and was reminded of that new Beta version of MSN. Perhaps I’ve been under a rock for a while, but I can’t help but notice how similar these new designs look. In my defense, I never use Yahoo.com, I never really have. I just have never found their site to offer me better products or services than other sites - but that’s hardly the point of this.
CSS Tips
September 6, 2005
I’ve been thinking about this for the past few weeks now, and I’ve finally decided to move on it. I’m going to start a CSS Tips library that will be updated frequently and filled with tips and how-to walkthroughs of various CSS techniques.
These tips will probably start off at the beginner level and will progress in difficulty as they move forward. In honour of these new tips, a new category has been added to the Blog called CSS Tips, where all of the Tips will be filed.