That’s right, folks, step right up to Internet ’96 and witness the horror that was the World Wide Web in the year 1996. Even corporate sites stunk to high heaven! Best[sic] Buy’s website looked like something I cranked out my sophomore year of college in my spare time.
Careful when viewing those designs, though, brother, especially after eating. The McDonald’s one just might make you sick to your stomach.
In The Works: Literal Barrage v. 3.04.0
My posting has been a bit, well, limited as of late due to a variety of factors: work pressures and overtime, additional church commitments and a host of other things, including a redesign of the site.
It’s by no means a completed work yet, but I plan on releasing a version of it to the public once I’m finished and I’m pretty excited about the possibilities. Here’s a little taste of the theme, tentatively titled “Elbee Elgee”:
More details to come.
Friday Link Dump, July 7th, 2006
I’m thinking I may make this a regular feature, as it helps me get the links on the virtual page and off my tab bar.
Links
- The 10 Commandments of Cell Phone Etiquette. Sounds like a good start to me.
- Top 20 Blog Designs, plus Part Two of the series, making it the Top 40, I guess…
- Alt fuels/kicking our dependence on hydrocarbons – no silver bullet, but is one really necessary?
- The breakdown of modern webdesign – with handy pie charts!
- Nuke tests in the Nevada desert apparently were so intense that they illuminated Los Angeles’ skyline at points. Wild.
- The Logos of Web 2.0 – for all you graphic design geeks out there.
- Web 2.0 design tutorials – ’nuff said.
Apps
- Launchy, like Quicksilver, only for Windows.
Vids
- You Are A Pirate. That’s the stuff of nightmares right there, kiddies.
Products
- USB-powered Nerf missile launcher.
- Mini radio-controlled helicopter.
- Radio-controlled flying boat. You simply have to watch the demonstration video.
- The Mug of vi References. I need one of those for those early morning config file edits, I tell you whut.
Curse You, Co-Workers!
I could have gone an entire lifetime without ever thinking of Captain EO again, but noooooooo, you just had to bring up “that Michael Jackson ride at Disneyland” and I just had to go and look it up, lest not knowing the title of an ultimately forgettable 3D theme park attraction starring bleedin’ Michael Jackson drive me insane.
Gah.
Somebody REALLY Wants Me To Visit Some Dirty Sites…
I cleaned out my Akismet queue last night at around 10pm or so, meaning that I had zero (0) spam comments in my spam/moderation screen. I loaded up the WP admin interface this morning and was greeted with the following:
Yowsers. Somebody hit me with a massive spam attack last night, mostly with comments trying to direct me to sites proferring dirty cartoons and even dirtier Japanese cartoons, the genre of which I shall not name but which anime afficionados will most likely be able to guess.
Thank goodness for Akismet. Without it, I’d have spent the next week tracking down that many comments.
The Beginnings Of A K2 Mod
I’ve been running my blog on the excellent K2 theme/mod for quite a little while and, while K2 is a very nice, very slick theme, I have long wanted the option of having a third column for content and/or extra navigational content. There are at least two mods to K2 that allow for 3 columns that I know of: Ayadin’s 3k2 and Bharath Kumar’s 3ColumnK2. While these two implementations are nice, I wanted a bit more flexibility in my design.
Enter Layout Gala, which I discovered a couple of months ago. Alessandro Fulciniti put together a spate of 40 simplistic 3-column designs, all using the exact same base HTML and using CSS to style the columns in such a way as to make multiple complex layouts possible. The base HTML is remarkably similar to the code at the base of K2, so I mused for a long time about attempting to integrate the two. I’ve finally decided to muse no more and put my code where my mouth is.
Thus, I’m officially announcing development of K3x40, a mod to K2 that will allow for users to choose between around 40 different iterations of 3 column variants of K2, all based on Layout Gala’s CSS hacks. I’m rather excited about it and am looking to get things cranking along very soon now.
There’s nothing to download as of yet, and the code is sure to change quite dramatically as I start to get a feel for this whole thing, but you can see it in (very basic) form over at my test blog and even check out a copy from the Subversion repo if you’re feeling particularly brave.
Your comments, questions, suggestions and offers of coding help are always welcome. *grin*
WhatTheFont: A Very Useful Graphics Design Tool
I stumbled (courtesy of digg) across WhatTheFont today and thought it worth sharing. WhatTheFont is a tool that will take any image that you feed it and spit out the font used to create the image in the first place, a very useful tool for graphic artists and web designers looking for just. the. right. font.
Very cool.
Visualize Your Google PageRank
This is pretty sweet. Visual PageRank View is a tool that crawls your site and visually displays the Google PageRank for each of the links on your site, giving you an idea of just how “popular” Google thinks each of your links is. Too cool.
Ding Dong, The Width Is Dead! Which Old Width? The Wicked Width!
Jeff Harrell notes the official passing of a long-held web design “rule”: the 800 pixel max width constraint. Web designers have had it drilled into their brains for years that any design operating at wider than 800px is simply asking for horizontal window sliders and endless user frustrations. Now that CNN.com has breached that “rule” and gone to a 1000 pixel fixed-width design, we mere mortals may safely begin to expand our designs out from a paltry 800 (well, 790, really) pixels.
Huzzah!
WordPress Tutorial: Your First WP Plugin
For those of you interested in developing plugins for WordPress, Mark Jaquith has whipped up a screencast (ala RoR) that does a great job of providing prospective WP developers a leg up in writing WP plugins. Very cool.
For those of you further along the developer pathway, be sure to check out Mark’s nigh-comprehensive list of WordPress plugin hooks. There’s a lot of stuff there that I never would have known about, shy of that very handy list.