Officially testing the new wordpress iPhone app. If you are reading this, all is well on the mobile front.
The interface is clean, and account creation was painless. But seriously, what is up with none of these apps supporting landscape-mode typing. Maybe I just have big fingers, but this thing has an accelerometer for a reason, dammit!
update aaand it crashed while in preview mode. Thankfully the post was saved. Ps. Writing HTML on the iphone suuuuucks.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is, in my opinion, one of the best shows on television. The writing is fresh, nothing is held sacred, and oh yea, it’s set in Philly. Obviously, if you’ve never lived there, some of the jokes they drop will be lost. But to me, it is solid gold. Check out this short video tribute to LL Cool J. Seriously has me hyped up for the new season.
Check out some of their older stuff for free on Hulu.com.
I came across a link to a high definition video of one my favorite MGMT songs, “Electric Feel.” I’m not sure if it resides on a commercial server, or just some fan’s site, so I won’t guarantee its availability.
Beautiful cinematography, whimsical theme, overall, a slam dunk of a music video.
That said, get it while the getting’s good: MGMT - Electric Feel.
Etsy has some beautiful new motivational artwork from OrangeBeautiful for your office or thinkspace.
Yesterday we refreshed the Food Network website with a new header, sponsored links area, and footer. Similar to HG-Lite, we didn’t touch the interior of the site, and opted for the face-life approach instead.
Since the design was very similar to the previous iteration, I didn’t alter much of the code. Instead, I renamed a couple ID’s and classes so that I could override styles and drill down into the sub-containers.
Like HG-Lite, there was no DOCTYPE, but we had the advantage of existing markup to work with. One of the more interesting and challenging parts of this project is that the Food Network site has no “true” width. Instead, it relies on JavaScript to determine the width of the individual page, and then resizes the header and footer accordingly. Sometimes it’s very wide, and sometimes it is very narrow. Most of the late night pre-launch was spent reviewing some of the width extremes, and making sure that everything rendered correctly.
This project would not have been possible without the help of Sam who tightened up the styles and JS while I was in San Francisco for WWDC. Thanks to the project managers, Ops team, backend guys, and everyone behind the scenes that made this launch go smoothly.
On Friday, I cut all my ties to RIM and its Blackberry product line. Despite their complete disregard for the Mac population, and the fact that they wasted their significant lead by stagnating instead of innovating, they definitely changed the market. RIM made email a killer app, and provided me with a viable alternative to the suck-fest that was Palm (talk about wasting an advantage).
I sat in line at the 14th St. Apple store for roughly 5 hours on launch day with Tom, and am now the proud owner of a white 16gb iPhone. I could go on about why I waited for the 3g model, or why I don’t buy rev. A Apple products, but that’s not what this post is about.
Here’s how to wipe or erase your Blackberry handset.
One of Blackberry’s strong suits is its attention to security. Enterprise customers have a “remote wipe” feature where if a handset is lost, the mothership can send out a “burn notice” on all sensitive data the handheld might contain.
What this does is trigger a function that every single Blackberry, including the consumer devices, has. There are two ways to do it. The first is to lock the handset, and then try to login using incorrect credentials 10 times, followed by entering “blackberry” at the final prompt. The second, less annoying way is like this:
Go to Options, then Security Options, then General Settings. Once you are on this screen, hit the menu button, often referred to as the “Blackberry button.” On my phone, it’s the key with the “dot cluster” logo, left of the scroll ball. Hit that, and now select “Wipe Handheld.” Check the “include third party applications” box if you want a complete wipe, and then hit continue. You will be prompted to enter “blackberry” just like with the first option. Jump through that hoop, and you’ll initiate a 20-minute full system wipe including contacts, passwords, and everything that doesn’t ship with the handset. Make sure not to take out the battery while this is happening, or the sky will fall. I recommend plugging it in during this process.
Now your phone is ready to sell!
This morning at 6:30am we launched the latest flavor of HGTV.com, internally referenced as HG-Lite. Technically we had been working on it up until a week ago, and finished the final prep work at 11pm last night.
It was fascinating to sit in on the conference calls between New Yor, our other office in Knoxville, TN. and a system guru from Minnesota. All of these pieces, strung across the country, able to work together seamlessly thanks to the internet. Being Front End, I know very little about the stuff that happens server side, although I’m admittedly fascinated by it. Caches were flushed, CDN’s were notified, and hundreds of file exchanges took place all so we could bring you something new at dawn today.
Although not a complete design refresh, we introduced completely rewritten headers and footers, brought to life by yours truly. Working without a DOCTYPE (because the current system can’t output one), and without my trusty reset.css (because it has to play nice with hundreds of older existing content) was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do. I wrote about some of these quirks as I encountered them, and learned more about Quirksmode than I ever expected to know. You might recognize the demo images now.
The header features an almost JavaScript-free dropdown menu called “Son of Suckerfish,” which utilizes CSS and absolute positioning based on the :hover pseudo class to hide and reveal the menus. I say almost because as you probably know, IE6 doesn’t support :hover on anything other than an anchor, and we were using the list item. With a couple lines of JS, IE6 users get an extra class on hover, making it “hookable.”
This was my first major launch while with Scripps Networks, and it was a complete roller-coaster. I’d be totally rude if I didn’t thank the amazing people that worked on this with me including the designer team, Sam, Scott, and my boss, Jay.
So, what are you waiting for? Head of to HGTV.com and check out the face lift. We are of course continuing to develop and polish the site, so expect more posts of this type.
For now, I’m exhausted. I’m going to reply to some emails, and then crawl into bed for some much needed rest. Hang tough out there.
A couple days ago I was giving Gonzo a sneak peek of the redesign that is about to go live here, and in the process, earned myself an information architecture critique of the current design, titled “IKEA.”
He explained that, while he really likes the current design, the tagging system located on the left of each post wasn’t very efficient. This is something I’ve been telling myself for a while. It becomes painfully obvious when you look at the analytics generated during this current design’s tenure, and realize that most visitors click around to a maximum of three posts, and then leave. I blame this on the fact that the primary, most enticing, navigation element is the tag collection on the left. The more you click on it, the more narrow your focus gets, leaving you no option but to click back to the top level, or leave the site completely. The “leaving” option becomes extra attractive when you don’t find more posts related to what you are in interested in, mostly because I haven’t been very consistent with my tagging conventions. A single misspelling or a missing plural “s” leaves you unable to get to a post you’d probably be interested in. And the searchbar is hidden on the 404 page. Yea, so this wasn’t entirely thought out.
I’m the first to admit the tags aren’t consistent. Half the time, I tag posts with words to serve more for comedic value than topic titles. I run very few categories (2, actually) on this site, and the tag system was a great way to suggest structure without letting dedicated categories run amok. But now it is very very large, and tough to manage. If I had the energy, I’d retag each of them. Or ideally, WordPress would provide suggestions for consolidation. Hey, that’s a great idea for a plugin, hint hint.
After this analysis, I went back to the redesign and had what I equate to a small breakthrough. It may not be obvious when it goes live, but it is moments like that that make redesigning such a useful and educational experience. It forces you to push past your known limits and reach for a new level. I often find myself becoming comfortable within a groove I’ve made for myself. Where I don’t take risks, and instead rely on something that I know “get’s the job done.” If you aren’t constantly re-evaluating your approach to tasks and projects, you aren’t making progress. So get your work slammed. It makes you stronger (and rage makes you work faster!).
In case you hadn’t guessed, I’m insanely slammed at work. With any luck I’ll have something to cool to show by 9/1. Until then, expect intermittent posting. Rather than give you tripe (see: twitter digests, LOL cats, etc), I’m going for quality over quantity.
If you get really lonely, you can find quick updates and commentary from me on twitter and brightkite. Just saying.
See you on the other side.
Today, Gonzo gave me a skateboard deck. So I had it built up. Honestly, I haven’t skated in over 3 years, and even then, I’m not sure it can be considered “skating.” I mustered up the courage to take on the mini-ramp in the basement of EXIT PHILADELPHIA, and after eating it hard roughly 4 times, managed to successfully descend the treacherous 1.5 ft curve exactly 3 times. Prior to that, I’d had a skateboard in middleschool that I used for transportation. That disclosed, I thought this deck was pretty rad:
Amazingly, in the few short hours that I’ve had the board, I’ve made several discoveries. I considered not sharing some of these as they are pretty embarrassing, but in my defense, I was entirely self-taught, in a community completely devoid of other skaters.
Things I’ve learned so far:
Over the next couple weeks, I plan to master the whole “jumping” thing, plus “grinding” thing. With a little coordination, maybe even a ramp. Thank god for health insurance.