Renderize Launched

As a personal project I started designing a website this April. Until then I had been using open source designs as the basis for all of my websites. Don’t get me wrong, I am fluent with XHTML/CSS/JS its just I lack the image editing skills and creative juices to design websites that are up to my caliber and liking.

That is up until this week, when I released –>Renderize<-. Some may remember that I designed the layout and style one weekend a few months ago and that I posted about it. Well I spent a number of weekends developing a custom backend so that I can manipulate nearly every portion of the site... your basic content management system. So Renderize is fully capable of being a "blog" and I have decided to commit myself to weekly postings on it.

Oh, and I don't bother with supporting IE on a website that I am going to use almost exclusively. The site should work in IE7, but I know there will be problems in IE6. I should point out that Safari and Firefox render the site perfectly, and that makes me more then happy.

However the posts contained at Renderize are not going to be web development content. Any suggestions of that will soon be removed from Renderize's content, as I have decided to keep my programming and developer posts on this blog because I have already built up a number of links and content at this blog, it would be a shame to duplicate or move the blog elsewhere. Not to mention the completeness of WordPress is pretty nice. Renderize will host my more personal blogging articles, for instance my weekly activities and personal events. Less likely to interest the techies that hopefully subscribe/visit this site.

Renderize does give me a chance to practice implementing many website features, and thus giving me an opportunity to blog about them. For instance I developed the RSS generator for Renderize, and I may very well discuss that in one of my programming blogs here. I have a sandbox to play and experiment with and some pride in having actually sitting up straight and making something happen.

Some final comments:

• Developing on a Mac (in TextMate) is awesome
• Building a framework for your own personal website is super cool
• Turning a Concept into a Reality is way more impressive then just suggesting the Concept

So thanks for reading, check out the blog and leave a comment here if you like it!

My MacBook Pro

This post is just letting some steam out, so there is a lot of text and a lot of links, all because I recently made a very worthwhile purchase. I bought a brand new MacBook Pro laptop and I am more then happy. I didn’t really know what to expect, I was really looking forward to it… however it has exceeded all of my expectations.

The quick specs are that its a Silver MBP with a 15.4in glossy widescreen display with the newest LED back-lightning. It houses a 2GB of RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo that knock the socks of my previous 512/1.6 laptop. The software takes a larger explanation.

I had originally planned on holding out on buying a Mac until Leopard was released. My plans were pushing forward when I won a bundle of applications valued at more then $500 from MacUpdate and MacHeist. However I had been looking at software to download for weeks before my purchase and the list of free, high quality software is nearly endless. Still, there are always programs you have to splurge on.

I splurged on TextMate, a programming editor that translates into about $55. Its the single tool that I have heard the most about from web developers all around the world. I have to agree with the masses, its a fantastic editor that is grows more and more useful as I get acquainted with the Mac.

On the free end of things I have to mention QuickSilver. I might argue that every Mac user has at least heard of QS as its popularity is nearly as high as that of TextMate. I really appreciate this little app as it really does just make my life easier. It took a few minutes to setup these global triggers for iTunes: ?P to pause/play and ??? to go to the next song. That means from nearly anywhere those key combinations will trigger iTunes. I’m learning more as I go but QS is useful in more ways than one.

For Instant Messaging I thought I would like iChat. I thought it was okay, it certainly was easy to setup and worked great, however it just wasn’t up to my standards. I had heard about a Adium and decided to give it a try. That is an amazing IM program. There are plenty of great themes and almost everything is customizable. Its and incredible chat client that easily synced with my Google Talk account (the only Windows chat client I am willing to use).

However my favorite application so far has been Linkinus. That program has completely revolutionized IRC for me. Chatting in Linkinus is just fun. Its a work in progress and I plan to help out with the development. I am working on scripts, which require me to learn AppleScript, but it is worth it.

A worthy app to mention is Growl. You don’t realize how useful a standard messaging system is until you have used one. Almost every application I have can interface into Growl and therefore I have awesome standard notifications. Just typing this I got a notification that someone logged on Adium!! brb.

Looking for a really nice free RSS reader? Check out NetNewsWire Lite! RSS is fundamental when you are as busy as I am (which I expect you are). Have your news come to you, and link yourself back if you deem the article worthy of a visit. Most of the time I read it all in the RSS reader to save even more time. I sift through about 100 RSS articles each day, some are duplicates and many are short but I’d say that there are at least 5 full articles that I will read. They come from blogs and news sources alike, I currently subscribe to over 70 different feeds.

Common apps like iTunes and Firefox are obvious must haves. Although I will admit that I am interested in safari and I will likely give it a try for just common browsing (as it lacks many of the web development plugins that I have in Firefox). Photo Booth makes excellent use of the built in web cam aptly named the iSight that comes equipped on every MacBook Pro laptop. My recently engaged sister and said counter-part were kind enough to sit in front of my Mac for some pictures in Photo Booth. Half an hour later I was able to find a few serious pictures and I sifted thru another 30 or so pictures with various effects to get a group of pictures to put on my family website.

Now the beta apps. I am excited to try out Flow and I was able to sign up for the private beta, however I have not gotten any response yet. I did meet a nice contact chatting on Linkinus and got ahold of a the Skitch beta. Now Skitch is a really cool tool. I can take a picture of a section on my screen, add some quick features like (text, arrows, etc.) in seconds. That is impressive coming from the mspaint.exe experience, however it is not nearly Skitch’s coolest point. There is a drag and drop portion on the bottom of the app to allow you to quickly make a file in the most common picture formats (png, jpg, gif…). To top things off when you sign up for a Skitch account you are given a profile online. A single button on Skitch uploads the image to your Skitch site storage. That same button can then take you directly to the online image, some more single click buttons will copy the image location or xhtml compatible code and allow you to share the image with anyone in the world. You will be able to do all of this just by watching the 3 minute video included with the download. Skitch is a fantastic app! I’ve got some invites if anyone is really interested I might give one away.

Being a web developer its useful to have a local web server to test your work on. Although I manually installed everything I need to do Ruby on Rails development (ruby, rubygems, mysql, mongrel, and svn) I also downloaded a nice app to make things easy for myself. MAMP stands for Macintosh, Apache, Mysql and PHP and it is just plain simple. MAMP (like Easy PHP for Windows) is a completely isolated webserver with php and mysql. You can be sure that nothing else on your computer will be affected, for instance if you have another mysql database running. A great dashboard that even has phpMyAdmin. I made a few modifications to the default pages to add a quicklink to quickly accesses my web directories, but MAMP’s ease of use is much appreciated. A simple click to turn on/off… what more would I want?

SRS iWoW is an iTunes plugin that adds Three-Dimensional sound. I got it with the plugin but it a very cool plugin. Its enhancements to iTunes’ sound are immediately noticeable and gratifying. Simple to setup and customize you can have some real high quality sound. To be honest you won’t notice the difference until you try it, but once you do you will gasp at the difference.

I have a bunch more that I can write but I am going to finish now and hopefully finish working on my other website so that I can launch it! Goodbye for now.

Renderize Design – First Look

I have always wanted to really design a website from scratch for myself. That is exactly what I decided to do last weekend. I mapped out a design in my head (and a little on paper) and started to work. In just two days I produced the front page design. I am beyond happy with the results, and before I open the website as my own, it can be seen here.

For those that are interested I’ll give a quick explanation of how I created the end result. It will not be a tutorial on design, but more of a story that leads up to the final product.

If you are familiar with any of my other websites, they all originated from open source designs. The layout was there and I would put my own twist of styles and customizations onto the original design. For my family website I completely translated the strict table design to a more flexible design, then added numerous tweaks and additions. The Powers Farm Market website was another open source design. I made plenty of changes and additions but the overall layout was so excellent that the core design remained for the most part unchanged. To both of these I have placed a full framework with extensive admin privileges each more powerful then the last.

To say the least I was comfortable with designing, but my creative was often lacking. However, inspiration is never far. Websites like CSS Remix, CSS Tux, and the numerous other showcase websites gave me ideas. I knew I had the skills with markup and CSS to reproduce any design I wanted, especially when using a tool as remarkable as Firefox. My biggest fear was creating the graphics to infuse in the design.

I took the plunge, I came up with an idea that challenged me and I worked for hours in photoshop following tutorials and getting myself familiar with the program. Of the final 5 graphics, I made 4 and got help with 2. To say the least I am proud of them. The tab design, although not original, was a huge leap. The CSS/XHTML worked perfectly with the exception of a single flaw in IE that was eventually fixed by adding a single line to the CSS.

With the header and tab menu all set, the rest was just trying out different ideas. I decided to throw in some more new stuff and add sIFR headlines. Essentially, sIFR replaces specified text headlines with flash versions, using any font I wish. It degrades very gracefully, displaying the original text versions if the visitor does not happen to have the required technologies. Therefore I have rich, beautiful fonts that the visitor does not even need to have installed on their computer.

I am in the process of building a framework for the website. I already have the databases setup, most of the templates, and what some would call a small API. I will spend some more time improving the admin interface so that I can customize the website without directly modifying the database tables. For the most part it is coming along nicely. I feel this is my best work yet, I raised the bar for myself and I am going to continue push the barrier and work on implementing even more new features.

I hope you like the design. Feel free to offer advice but be sure to at least leave a comment. Thank you.

!phil

In my Internet experiences there have been few people that I have met on the Internet and continue to communicate with regularly. Of that select group one stands out. He goes by the alias of !phil. I had to look up a word to describe him and eventually found it:

fulgurant – amazingly impressive brilliance or skill

That would be the word to describe !phil. He seems to be good at whatever he does and that is something I admire. He is a fellow Web Developer and programmer, dare I say a hacker, with a strong personality and vast knowledge.

In my pursuit to build my first web pages he would break them and show me how to fix them. Any question I could throw his way he could answer and educate. His experience with programming, linux, and general curiosity have allowed him to accumulate a wealth of knowledge on all aspects of computers and technology. He was willing to help me despite his own schedule and surely busy life.

!phil has a gift with humor. He can make simple things funny, as evident from the articles on his website, quakephil. One of my daily reads that have made it to my blogroll.

However I did not meet !phil though forums, but rather through games. I played (and occasionally revisit) the ever famous Quakeworld (QW). It is in that arena that the name BogoJoker was born and also where I met !phil. He is a world famous QW player and supporter. He continues to support and represent the QW community in tournaments, websites, and development.

In the words of an old 06′ chat:

me: I should quote that in my blog
      maybe i will ;P.
      i’ll put u under “family” category. hehe

phil: if you want to confuse all 3 of your readers :)

So true… So true… ;)

Pete is Back

Pete returned from Djibouti Africa on Saturday March 17, 2007. He is a member of the Marines and was stationed in Djibouti for the past 6 months. Everyone is glad that he is safe and back in the states.

My Desktops

I have always enjoyed customizing my desktop since the original wallpapers in Windows 98 and onward were so bland. I hope you enjoy this Widget view of the past year’s themes which involved WindowBlinds, CursorXP, and some deviant art browsing for wallpapers.

If you have any questions about any of the settings you see above feel free to ask me. I have close to a hundred vector wallpapers that will forever remain in my picture folder! Got a picture of your desktop? Drop me a link.

uberlook launched

As I previously mentioned, I have been anticipating the launch of Uberlook for months and the day has come! I am pleased already with the service. The resources are growing and so far they look great. It seems as though überlook is going to do everything they have set out to do, and looking good doing it.

If you have not already clicked the above link then I will just have to repeat myself! Check it out now!

They state their goals in their blog that they want you to “enjoy” using the site. I have and I think everyone will. Its simple, fast, usable, the design is modern and fresh, and it really is a central resource web developers should know about. With a tag powered search they have made it easier to find the resources you want quickly and easily.

Also fully functional features like the tag cloud, popular tags, and advanced search show the work that was put into the site to make it work, and work for you.

[UPDATE: They now have a great looking favicon!, this section is from my original post]
There are a few things I want to see come soon. A favicon! I will only temporarily put a website on my elite list of “one click away” websites. For the moment I have had to construct my own. I do not believe that I have any graphical talent, in fact I used to colors found on their website! I do feel that it will keep me happy until they come out with their own or if any readers send me their versions.

A tiny note, their form text fields and textarea expand far beyond the limits of the page in Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7. I tracked down the problem and it appears to be that the textfields have a size attribute set to 30 (<input type=”text” size=”30″ … />) making them unusually large for whatever reason. I have a quick CSS clip that I may turn into a Greasemonkey script to correct the website’s single blemish. Here is the single line of code to give the textfields and textarea a sufficient, controlled width:

input[type^=text], textarea { width: 50%; }

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