…designing a brand for an ex-vp of advertising. she is giving me carte blanche. bring it on!

(m: that cliché was just for *you*.)

in the past three weeks, i have not only redesigned this blog, but also helped launch one web search tool, two web sites, and one web app. it’s beautiful and so satisfying to see projects run to Fruition. but Fruition is a funny little beast. when projects get to him, you realize that now you need his sibling, Maintenance. suddenly, instead of squashing bugs, you are scouring the project, looking for Tiny Detail and making sure he not only functions but also looks good. you are adding a few pixels of space here, decreasing it elsewhere; you are replacing accented characters with their html entities because you hate it when there is garbage text on a web site and you have Standards. ahhhhh, Standards…there’s a beast that needs a really big cage. really big.

finally a redesign i can live with. i loved the old design but it was dated, didn’t work well on mobile devices, and wasn’t as useful or as pretty as it could have been. but don’t worry – it’s still saved in the background. this is still a work in progress but once finished, should age gracefully. like cheese, wine, and my jokes.

this is the original: Ball Pool

this is the guy who copied the above, didn’t credit him, and even had the nerve to keep the same names of the javascript files: i don’t even want to name him

i’m pretty sure they are not the same dude. i want to write mr. doob and let him know. i want to be a tattle tale. i feel strongly that you should give credit where credit is due. (i put the credits in comments in my code.) maybe mr. doob gave him permission to use his stuff. but he-who-shall-not-be-named was nominated for a css design award. dude, don’t be a d**k.

9:06 a.m.: i did it. i sent him a tweet about the plagiarism. let’s see what happens.

CodeIgniter: “Form validation, while simple to create, is generally very messy and tedious to implement.”

Word.

for most programmers, a search form is ubiquitous and easily implemented. they have been around since the beginning of the internet. lots of content management systems ship with them. they can be programmed in a variety of languages. i have just built my own personal custom search form using 2 languages: xslt (which i used to know in a very rudimentary way and now know much better) and php (which i know absolutely nothing about but have pieced together bits and pieces and produced a snippet of code that i didn’t find anywhere on the internet). i feel pretty proud of myself and am resting on my laurels for the rest of the night in celebration.

why don’t i think of these things: mrdoob.com. do you see the squiggly line underneath the link? so simple and yet it’s the first time i’ve seen this on the web. all it requires is just a few little css rules on the anchor tag and one itty bitty image.

the beauty of the web: i got online this morning to search for a web site that i thought was cool but couldn’t remember the url, or when i saw it, or the scripting it uses. so i started googling cool flash web sites but that really didn’t get me anywhere so i moved on to digg – also nada. then i got the brilliant idea to search delicious and that’s when i started to make progress. so i got to the exciting squiggly line mentioned above by going from here but before that, i was here and before that, it all started because dan cederholm posted it to his site on 27 may 2010. but when i first started my search this morning i couldn’t remember that i saw it on stopdesign, so i did this and remembered.