Brand consistency
2010 June 21
One of the things I pride myself on is consistency. At work our clients start off with what we call a Default Design, a collection of carefully crafted templates and stylesheets which they can then bend to fit whatever needs they have. One of the hallmarks of the Default Design is its consistent markup and interface.
Design reset
2010 April 08
It's pretty clear this new fangled iPad is a reset in personal computing. I really hope this "reset" echoes throughout the web design community. The best example I've seen is from the New York Times.
Thinking about Open Design
2010 February 05
A couple weeks ago my Design Strategies and Methods professor asked us to write a page describing our "Worldview." No one knew what a worldview was and we later found his vagueness was intentional, but I took a stab at it in hopes of finding some personal design philosophy I never had.
Destination: Interaction 10
2010 February 01
This week I'm flying south to attend Interaction 10 in Savannah, Georgia. This is my first IxDA conference and my first time visiting Savannah. I finally started checking out the conference schedule, and I thought I'd share a few that caught my eye...
Less is more
2009 December 01
Hopefully you read my previous post about Sass and CSS preprocessors and felt my angst toward learning a new syntax. I've been using LessCSS for about a week and I'm really impressed. For starters, no new syntax to learn. This is simply an augmentation of existing CSS syntax. You get mixins, nested rules, and most importantly, variables. You also get operations but I've yet to find them that useful. Here's my critique
Sass isn't for me
2009 November 30
I've been window shopping the CSS preprocessor world the last week or so. Sass seems to be everyone's new bicycle. It hasn't won me over and here's why...
Curiosity rewarded the cat
2009 November 20
Good user experience is often found in the most unassuming places. We have a new restaurant opening in my neighborhood this week and I've been anticipating their arrival for a few weeks now. They officially open today but two days ago revealed a very important lesson in user experience.
Interface harmony
2009 October 25
Interface consistency, if done correctly, should go unnoticed. I've slowly been working on a new interface for a side project and thought it'd be a treat for you if I shared my approach.
Working with Python and RabbitMQ
2009 May 20
I recently installed RabbitMQ to handle some message queuing needs at Readernaut and thought I'd share how everything came together. If you'd like to learn more about RabbitMQ please read the excellent Rabbits and Warrens.
Capturing content in Django templates
2009 February 28
As a template designer there are times when you have structural code surrounding a block which is waiting on content from a child template.
What's next
2008 December 13
Does it make sense to reinvent the wheel every time we sit down to a new project? No. My work echoes my past and I stand by it. Some say, "that looks like Readernaut" or "that looks like Playground Blues" and I say yes, they are me.
Save RAM with mobile middleware
2008 October 07
A while back I wrote an article on how to set up a mobile site with Django. Currently I have a Slicehost account which includes 256MB of RAM. My resources are tight and I really dislike having another set of unnecessary Apache processes for a mobile site that, aside from different templates, is using the same code base. The solution is quite simple, write a middleware.
Message Queuing imports
2008 September 05
Last week I ran into some problems dealing with large book imports on [Readernaut](http://readernaut.com). I tested the system for around 50-100 books but had no idea people would upload lists of 900+ books. This begged the question, how do you handle importing very large sets of data before the browser times out?
Creating a basic API with Django
2008 August 11
Creating a simple public API for you site is a lot easier than you may think with Django. You're basically just creating another view and serving it as XML or JSON instead of HTML.
Gadget fast
2008 April 18
My iPhone and laptop will be unplugged starting Friday evening for two days. I've let the fog of distractions generated by these two devices grow too thick so for the next few days (much like China) they'll be turned off.
Capistrano rules
2008 March 17
I've grown tired of committing changes to my subversion repository, logging into my server, updating my live checkout, and restarting python processes. I finally decided to implement Capistrano and eliminate this repetition.
Aspen Simulator
2008 March 13
As much as I'd like to blog about my trip to Austin and SXSW last week I'm just too excited over the iPhone SDK goodies that dropped last Thursday.
Ah-ha Event Delegation
2008 March 05
Wrapping my head around things like OOP took months. It's not because I'm an idiot (I don't think) - it's just because I needed all the explanations to marinate before having an ah-ha! moment.
Going mobile
2008 February 18
Over the weekend, I decided to whip up a mobile version of Playground Blues. I walked into Broadway Cafe around 3pm on Saturday, and by 5:30, I had m.playgroundblues.com. Here's how it went down.
iPhone bookmark iconage
2008 January 15
If you're wondering how to control the icon that gets generated for your webpage with the new 1.1.3 iPhone release, look no further than Apple's iPhone Dev Center.