Web Development

I'm experiementing with two "unusual" typefaces, and I must admit, I am liking the result. Actually, these typefaces are not unusual at all -- they are Impact for headers, and Palatino for body text. Palatino, in particular, is admired by the world of typographers for its elegance, and beauty. Yet, the dogma among web designers is to not stray from Georgia, Helvetica, Arial, Times, and Verdana -- however, I've checked browser support charts, and these two type faces seem to have widespread, if not virtually universal support.

According to my sources, today is one of those unusual mondays where classes are out, banks are closed, and a few lucky bastards are off of work. Of course, according to my watch, it is 7:35 in the AM, and let me check -- yep, I'm up and awake. Hmmm, this would seem to suggest that I get to work all day, like I worked yesterday, and the day before that, and so forth in to infinity. This is particularly sick, as I work typically work from home/coffeeshops. This is not as relaxed as a situation as one might imagine.

My egotistical and delusional side wants to think that the SXSW 2006 site snagged the look of this site's navbar. Not entirely unlikely, since this site ranks rather high for "css horizontal navigation". However, they used seperate unordered lists for each row -- so their technique isn't entirely inspiring. Nevertheless, I'm going to go ahead and pretend that I had influence on that site, so ya'll just play along.

Oh, which reminds me: registration for the 2006 conference has already started. Looks like Craig Newmark of Craig's list will be the keynote speaker. I actually got to speak to Newmark at last year's conference. It was an entirely odd occurance -- there was an interesting discussion going on about online communities, and being the cocky 22 year old I was, I decided to chime in. Midway through my second sentence, I suddenly realized who I was talking to, and that Dan Gillmor also happened to be listening -- I think I slighty faultered. It was at that moment that I realized my involement with the Internet would forever end my sex life.

If you're interested in web design and don't read A List Apart, are not familiar with it,  then give up -- you're hopeless. Few web publications have been as influential to the way web sites are designed, and built. This redesign signals nothing less than a new era. And its one I'm quite happy about, btw.

Notice anything special, or unusual about the design? Try this answer on: it's designed like a print magazine. This would make sense -- for um -- print design has been evolving for thousands of years. Its about bloody time web design caught on.

This weekend, I made a promise to myself. I was going to force myself to slack off and stop my work. In some ways, the plan worked out well, I put off a variety of telephone calls, and was largely unresponsive to e-mail. In addition, I made absolutely no progress on some contracts -- but unfortunately, my plan went to crap by friday evening. I began a full redesign on a site intended to connect public opinion with FCC policy makers. It uses drupal -- of course. The end result was one of the best designs I've ever pulled off -- though the site hasn't even left the "alpha stage". The site's organization and functionality that would make even the biggest drupal snob say, "a truly fine implementation -- robust, yet delicate and refined -- playful, and grave -- funky, yet institutional. A truly rich blend for the consuire with a taste for elegence." Yes, that is exactly how imagine them saying it.

This is by far the most twisted, and disturbing film I have ever watched. Not recommended for the emotional disturbed or those taking recreational psychotrophic substances for the first time.

Steve Balmer: The Remix

My professional forte is Drupal. For the uninitiated, drupal is an open source platform at making the lives of content producers easier by improving the process of

• creating new content
• organizing content
• ensuring that as few variables as possible will interfere with future improvement of the site

This blog is one example of how drupal can be used. However, today, I built the beginnings of what will end up being an entirely new use of drupal: modular design and development of websites by calling libraries of modular CSS and XHTML code through drupal's taxonomy system.

UPDATE: I've writing a multipart tutorial on how this was done, follow it in order:

• 1. A Practical Tutorial on Drupal's Menu System
• 2. Using CSS to Generate Expanding Horizontal Navigation Menus in Drupal
• 3. Horizontal Navigation Menus in Drupal Using CSS (Part Deux)

I've put together an example theme which impliments the top navigation menu that you see in this site. I'm very strapped for time at the moment, so I hope you'll forgive the lack of detailed instructions.

However, if you have any experience with creating new drupal themes, then you should have a very easy time figuring out how it works. It doesn't require any new database tables, or modules. All that is required is php-template. For the lovely categorization that you see in this site, you'll also need the taxonomy menu module, though.