Marktopia

They say that writing helps people through difficult times, I thought I would give it a go. Many of you know that Rebekah and I have three cats, Purrball, Star and Hera. In the last week, Hera had a major change in personality for reasons yet unknown to us. The long and the short of it is, she now attacks the other two cats as if she does not know them with little to no provocation. She did this first Monday night and then again on Friday.  We have to keep her isolated, which causes her to cry throughout the night.  Because of this, we are boarding her until we can get into the vet this Tuesday. All of this information is purely factual, and some of you may say that all of this work is not worth it for a cat. I won’t argue that she is “just a cat, ” but the fact of the matter is, she is part of our family, and as our family will grow in March, it is difficult to possibly lose a member of that family now.

I want to describe Hera a little now to share with you some of what makes Rebekah and I happy every day.  Hera has more personality that Purrball and Star put together.  We love both Purrball and Star just as much as Hera, but I know that Rebekah and I could not handle three cats with as much personality as Hera.  In the morning when Rebekah eats breakfast, Hera hops up next to her to say and to try and sneak a bit of breakfast.  Hera doesn’t even like what Rebekah is having, she is just so curious to see what it is.  And that is Hera’s defining trait, curiousity, sometimes to the point of annoyance, but always to the smile of Rebekah or myself.  She has this amazing ability to make either of us smile, even in difficult times.  That is what makes not having her here so tough, she brings a joy to our lives that cannot be replaced easily.

We still don’t know what will happen with Hera.  Rebekah and I are hoping and praying she will be able to come home and go back to normal, that it is some goofy physical thing that can be fixed and next weekend I can write about how great it is.  If that isn’t the case though, I hope that others can think of Rebekah and me and of Hera too, that we call can find life just as joyous as we did two weeks ago.

Hera in the Fridge

You can click on the picture above to find all of the pictures on Flickr of Hera.

P.S. Sorry if this makes you cry Rebekah

My wife has known this for awhile now, but I am now willing to publically admit it, I am addicted to typefaces.  The more and more I designed for the web, I began to notice how important the selection of typefaces, or fonts if you choose, was to a site.  I then watched Helvetica, a documentary about type throughout the 20th century, and I was hooked.  Now I notice type all over the place.  It is very easy to fall into this because type is all around you everyday.  Look at a road sign, an entrance to a resturant, various web pages or whatever, and you can start to notice trends.  You will see styles you like and others you don’t like.  If you get more interested in it, you will even find typefaces you prefer and start to remember the names of them, it is crazy.

The point of this post is that content is always king, but how that content is displayed is a close second.  You can write a great story, make a great web page, or make a clever sign, but all of that is supported by the choice of type you use.  If you are more curious about the subject, I would recommend checking out ilovetypography.com.  It is a great place to start out to learn about type and find other resources if you are so inclined.

Today I decided to take a break and run down the street to buy an apple from the local food market. Walking back, I decided to start eating it. I was getting close to work again and had some apple left, so I sat on a bench outside to enjoy the rest of the apple. I got back to work invigorated and ready to get going again. It made me think that with smoke breaks going the way of the dodo, people might not have a good excuse to take a breather during their busy work day. If more organizations offered free fruit, people could take a fruit break for a nutritious snack and take a rest from their work. I am looking to organize a committee here to investigate the feasibility of fruit breaks. I encourage all of you to do the same and we can start a change in the eating and break habits of the American workplace.

Once again, Marktopia has a new design with some changes to the way some stuff was done with the organization of the site as well.  The first thing I want to do is give credit to PSHero.com for their Interstate Road Sign tutorial in Photoshop.  The wonderful detail it gave set the theme for the new design and allowed me to add more texture to the site.

The next thing you will notice is that the Categories are back.  When Wordpress introduced the tagging feature, I jumped all over it and abandoned the categories.  It allowed me to do the tag cloud I had on the previous design and made me feel all Web 2.0.  When working on this new design though, I realized without categories, I had lost some focus for what I blog about.  I decided to look at my content a little harder and found everything could fit into 5 neat buckets, Music, Personal, Pick of the Week, Reviews and Web Technology.  I went through the lengthy task of adding a category to each post so now if you only want to follow one type of post on my site, you can use the RSS feed for that category.

This is also a nice lesson for other bloggers, use categories and tags together on your site.  Combining few categories with many different tags gives you a well rounded organization for your site and can also help you better define what you want your site to be.  I would love to hear opinions of the site, so feel free to comment below.

I recently read Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke and found much of it compelling.  There were a number of ideas in the book that made me think about the way I design and how I could improve upon my designs.  Two things in general stuck out and after a couple of weeks, I have come to really like one of the ideas and dislike the other.  I will tackle the one I don’t like first.

Always Using Semantic Code

Semantic code is great.  For those of you not in the web business, it means not making up your own stuff for HTML that exists, i.e., don’t make a class called “heading”, using one of the HTML heading tags.  The book encourages the use of semantic code throughout your site.  If you have a grouping of pictures on a page, instead of putting them in a general container, but them in a list with each picture being a list item.  Then identify the list and each item on the list and use those IDs to style it in CSS.  With this method, the world of absolute positioning can open up to you and you can do some really inventive and cool designs, outside of the normal box model.

All of this is well and good if you are the one maintaining the site.  This starts to fall apart though when you have end users updating their site and have no knowledge or care of semantic code.  Tools like Contribute, Dreamweaver, etc, allow users to make new paragraphs, insert images, and make new lists.  This is all good and required, however it might not be what the designer intended.  With the power of absolute positioning comes the responsibility of making semantic HTML, and once something unintended is introduced, things can go haywire pretty darn quick with a design.  Because of this, a balance has to be struck between perfectly semantic code and something the end user can update easily.  If you are doing your own site, then I recommend going crazy with semantics, otherwise, just be reasonable.

Don’t Design For the Bare Minimum

When I started as a web designer with CSS, it was always my goal to make the site look the same in all browsers.  This sometimes meant some hacks to get some of the “not quite” supported features of CSS to work on all browsers at the time.  As time has progressed, different browsers still have differing levels of support for CSS.  Combining that with the evolution of CSS and you could make a huge chart of CSS selectors and the browsers they work in, and in fact some people have!  By designing for the lowest common denominator, a designer was restricted from the CSS available AND still had to deal with the nuances of each browser.

Clarke proposes different versions of a site for different browsers.  If a browser is supporting cool and new technologies, then why shouldn’t we take advantage of them.  This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t take other browsers into account, you still have to make your site look nice in Internet Explorer, but there is nothing to say that you can’t make your site look nicer in Firefox or Safari.  Yes this takes some extra planning, but as a designer you can play with new technology and encourage other people to use browsers so they can see the stuff that is possible with web standards.  On a side note to this, if you want to see what is possible with CSS3, check out an examples page in the latest update for Safari.

Overall, the book was fantastic.  It made me think about the way I am doing design and while I didn’t take everything from it, it was still worth checking out.  I know the next design for my blog will incorporate some of the new web standards and will also use a lot of semantic code, I just don’t think I can do the same with the HTML on a customer’s design.

As I mentioned in my 500th post, I am working on a new design.  Before going too far though, I wanted to get some thoughts from the people that read the site.  Right now I have a single post at a time on the site with links to the last 5 further down.  Do people prefer having more posts on the front of the site, is one good or do you read the site through RSS so it doesn’t matter?  What about colors?  I have a fondness for more natural blues, browns, greens, etc but would a cleaner (read: less color) design work better?  Also, because the single post is at the top of the page, do the things like tags and other content get lost or forgotten for you?  I am looking for constructive critism so feel free to post any and all suggestions.  I realize this is my site, but I also want it to work for you, the reader.

We have a milestone, this is the 500th post for My Tungsten Marktopia.  I have spent the last couple of days trying to think of something meaningful or clever to write for it.  I realized that those things didn’t happen for about 75% of the previous 499 posts, so why start now.

I will reflect that this blog has gone through many changes technology and design-wise.  It started as a Blogger site, then to Movable Type and finally to Wordpress.  Blogger lasted about 6 months, Movable Type about 6 as well, and Wordpress has been going strong for about 4 years now.  There was an experiment with Drupal for about 3 months in there, however it was not able to import from Wordpress and I could not export from it either, so those have been washed from memory.

I don’t have an exact list of the number of designs the site has gone through, but I would estimate around 30 or so.  I like making designs and with some books I have read recently, a new one is in the works again.  Every time I make a design, about 3/4 of the way through I start to get new ideas that I cannot implement, but I will say it again, I hope the new design will stick around for awhile.

So almost 5 years after I started, we are at 500.  I hope it doesn’t take another 5 to get to 1000, but who knows.  For all of you that read this, thanks for your support!

Being a primary member of The Content Webring, I take some ounce of pride in announcing a new content module for my site.  Looking at the Non-Blog Content of the site, you will now see An American’s Guide to Soccer listed.  If you are someone who wants to know more about soccer, as new or longtime fan or just someone who wants to know what the hubbub is all about, I hope you will find this a useful resource.

Right now the introduction is complete, but I plan on rolling out the rest of the sections over the course of the next week.  I do not plan on posting here about when each section is complete, but I will post to my Twitter account, so you can follow that if you want to know when each section is posted.

I have upgraded to Wordpress 2.5.  Not too much new stuff for the viewers of this site, but lots of neat stuff on the admin panel.  My hopes are now that the work on the admin panel is done, Wordpress will turn to the reader’s experience next.  To celebrate the new version, I also came up with a new design for the site.  There is still a little CSS tinkering to be done, but in general it is ready to go.  Take it for a spin and let me know what you think.

When I got my Rebel XT, I took an initial look at both Lightroom and Aperture to help manage and edit my RAW images.  After some testing with both, I settled on Aperture and even made it a POTW awhile back.  I was very excited a couple of weeks ago when Apple released Aperture 2.0.  It didn’t have the HDR stuff I was looking for, but that was OK, they made it faster and seemingly better.  In fact, everything was better with the exception of the pricing they put out.  See, Aperture 1.x was $300 for retail but $150 for individual education pricing, or 50% off for those math gurus out there.  With Aperture 2.0, Apple knocked down the retail price to $200 but RAISED the individual education price to $180, 10% off now.  Because of this, I decided to take a second look at Lightroom, which is priced at $100 for individual education pricing.

Before getting started discussing the two programs features, I should note that both are great programs.  You could use either and be perfectly happy.  That being said, I have decided to make the switch to Lightroom after doing some more indepth testing and having better knowledge of my camera and editing pictures.  The biggest difference between the two programs is workflow.  In Aperture, there is no real workflow.  You can edit pictures, metadata, etc from the same screen.  This was great when I was starting out as I didn’t really know what I wanted to do.  With experience though, I am able to be confined into a workflow chosen for me, especially the one that Lightroom has setup.

When jumping into Lightroom, you start with your Library where you can do things like make collections, add keywords, stack photos, etc.  I should quickly note, adding keywords in Lightroom is MUCH easier than Aperture, which is another reason I switched.  After doing organization stuff, one switches to the Develop section where you can do all your edits.  Aperture 2.0 has caught up to the different editing features, but as one who was using Aperture 1.5, Lightroom has an impressive array of tools that I didn’t have before.  After Developing, you have three ways you can share your pictures, Slideshow, Web Album and Printing.  You can also do a basic export, for example to get things up to Flickr.  Being open to this idea of workflow, I was able to jump into Lightroom and go.  For me it just works easier than Aperture, so I made the switch.  I would be interested to get other thoughts from people who have used either or both applications to see what they think.