I was sick of my old Myspace profile so I did an update tonight. It is very simple, but it works. Visit my profile, but don’t expect me to start using Myspace.

I don’t believe I ever posted this.

February CSS Zen Garden Submission

That was a design I did for CSS Zen Garden a while back, I have not heard back whether the garden is still alive or not as it has been about 3 months since I submitted it. I was contacted by an individual from Dubai and I was just curious what the pay was like and ended up giving him some URLs to work I was doing. He said he was not convinced of my work. I do not consider myself a front end person and I try not to have criticism make me feel bad, but when I see a lot of work that really is crap and while I dislike some of my work I know that some of it is also not bad. And in the end the wanker still didn’t tell me what the average pay for design/development jobs in Dubai is.

So I spent a lot of the day redoing the design for this site. This one is tableless and I need to change a few things to get the XHTML to validate, but it is pretty clean. It is based on the previous design so I set it at version 2.5, but it has many improvements over the other version. I do still have some work to do adding some of the old plugins and adding in more new ones. I also plan on making a user choice of 1024 or 800 since the width makes some posts short. I hope you like it.

Recently I have been involved with some individuals that failed to meet my expectations and I have let it bother me a little too much. The situation is that someone was hired to do a job, did not finish the work I was informed they would finish and the work they did complete was lacking in my ways.

I don’t blog about my personal life much, but in past years I have had some tough times, and some of that was financially and it really really makes me upset when I see people making 250% of what I do and they can’t even do the job. I have had to fix most of the problems that have been introduced or the parts that were not completed. I am making enough that a lot of people would be happy with their take home, but the individual I speak of has made a lot more and from what I have seen does not deserve it.

There have been a number of amateur mistakes made and I just don’t understand how someone can get by with some of the things I have seen and still make as much as they informed me they were making. True, it could have been a lie, but I somehow doubt it. I am not trying to broadcast that I am a genius in the design world, or ever close to what some of talent that is out there, but I have been doing it for a long time and there are just certain things you do and don’t do.

The whole point of this is that just because someone charges less than another does not make them any less quality, and just because someone is more expensive does not mean they are worth it.

I just finished the site for Shenandoah Valley Inn., which I am very happy with. The menu bugs me a little, but the client really liked all of it so it stayed. There are some minor tweaks here and there, but anything that needs to be changed is going to be minimal. Let me know if you find something wrong. This site was with the local company I work for so I was sub contracted to do it under their name. I hope everyone likes it.

Inspired by the 37signals post and the post on Falling bullets I share my toolkit.

Programming

• Zend Studio for PHP
• Aptana for Javascript/HTML
• Topstyle Lite for CSS
• Ultraedit for various code and those listed above
• vi when working from shell

Firefox Extensions

• Web Developer
• Add N Edit Cookies
• Firebug
• Hackbar
• HTML Validator
• Professor X
• no-referrer
• Remove Cookies for Site
• UrlParams
• User Agent Switcher
• View Source Chart
• MeasureIt

Browsers

• Firefox 2.0.0.2
• Internet Explorer 7
• Internet Explorer 6
• MultipleIE (IE 3, 4, 5, 5.5)

Various other tools

• Subversion and TortoiseSVN for version control
• Photoshop/Imageready for graphics, what else would I use?
• Email and contact management powered by Outlook.
• Calendar powered by Google Calendar and Calgoo
• Bug and Project tracking Trac and Eventum.
• Blogs run on Wordpress.
• RSS feeds are powered by Feedburner.
• PunBB for forums.
• Windows desktop, Windows/Linux laptop, Linux server (considering a MacBook).
• Scribus for document design right now.
• GAIM for chatting on ICQ, Gmail, AIM, Yahoo and MSN.
• FTP client is FlashFXP, still evaluating, but definitely buying.
• FSColor and ColorMatch Remix for color picking

Behind the scenes

• Python v2.4, v2.5
• PHP v5.2.0
• MySQl v5.0.27
• 1&1 and GoDaddy for domain registration
• Apache v2.0.59
• IIS v6

Looking Into

• Eclipse with
• PyDev
• Aptana
• Subclipse
• PHPeclipse
• EPIC
• What’s accounting? I am still evaluating packages.
• DbVisualizer
• Smarty Templates
• Hosting will be decided soon

Websites

• Google Sitemaps
• Google Analytics
• W3 Schools (great reference)
• Tada List

I will of course edit this when I make a final decision on a couple choices. I also need to post my huge list of Firefox extensions I use.

I am working on a design for a company I work through and I am going with a right-side navigation. One of the individuals in the company mentioned ditching the right-side and going left and it made me think, why? does usability change at all? It is a valid question and suggestions because most sites have navigation at the top, or left and sometimes bottom. This lead to a search on the usability views on right-side navigation. What I came up with is that there is a German study that shows users being more productive with right sided navigation than with left or top. Part of the reason being that the scroll bar is closer to the navigation and from what others are saying most of the time their mouse is hanging around the right side of the screen anyway. I obviously use right sided navigation on this site and part of the reason is that the content is ultimately the important part of my site. Who really cares what links I have on the right? I want users to see my content first instead of seeing something on the navigation that catches their eye and then losing them on that page.

It appears some people do not like the right side navigation, why I am not really sure. One thing I like about right side navigation is the space below it is not very important or will contain ads and really doesn’t interest me when I visit a website. If if you are using left side navigation there is always this white space next to the content or full of ads that I don’t want to see. This leads me to believe it is more visually appealing to the user.

I would be interested to hear from some of you about your opinions of RSN (right-side navigation)

but really I’m just a jerk.

A visitor named Hans posted a comment on an old post I had about a redesign, and I considered it to be more spam than anything and it bothered me in some ways that I was getting pitched a theme and help for it. I was being very childish and when I originally posted this I talked about how I was somewhat insulted. I know now Hans is not a spammer and I feel horrible, he was really just trying to help me and I appreciate that.

So I am publicly letting the world know I am a jerk and I am sorry Hans. If you are looking for a good theme and a creator that isn’t as big a jerk as I am here ya go, ColorFull Wall

There are now a lot more people that wish they could hack so they could rip apart my website for saying it, but I love em. I wish I could have a shit load of them on my website, but that would be just awful. I guess what I love is how informative they are for such a tiny object, the fonts are clear and the colors and tiny designs can tell you a lot. In a short block I could tell you a lot about my website with just a couple buttons, but using just the text would not give you the same information. I might just make a page with all the pixel buttons that apply and leave it at that.

I had submitted my portfolio site, Canvas the Web to a number of CSS sites and none of them added it. I know my design is not the best in the world, but I have been doing this for a while and I know it is a good design. The code is also 100% valid, both XHTML and CSS so it is just sad and annoying it was not listed. Maybe that will change. I am now going to work on a design for CSS Zen Garden.