Software Goodness
The first program I used in when I started to learn web design was TextEdit, followed quickly by Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver was great for a while because if you knew what you wanted to do you could find a button for it and let Dreamweaver do the rest. It’s easy but it creates a lot of code that I don’t understand, and as I’ve recently found in WordPress, that much Javascript doesn’t play nice with everything. So being a Mac Guy I’ve decided to try out some simpler things. I probably would’ve tried Coda first, but recently a couple of newcomers have been making noise, CSSEdit and Espresso. They are both made by MacRabbit, a Belgian Mac developer that loves focused simplicity.
Milliseconds Website Up
After several months of work on the Milliseconds Sports Timing website it is now up and running. Milliseconds Sports TIming is a company that offers chip timing services to race directors for their competitive events. I designed the website and laid it out in HTML and then Milliseconds’ developer plugged it into their PHP database. I also developed my first WordPress Template for their Blog section. I learned a lot, including CSS rollovers which I now have an itch to use to replace all my JS rollovers on this site. Check out the website here.
Chickens in Motion
My family recently pooled together to get my dad a nice DSLR for Christmas. He had mentioned to me last summer while we were on a canoe trip in the Boundary Waters how he would like to be able to take pictures of the beautiful things he saw around him. So, ever since he got the camera he’s been working on figuring it out. He frequently contacts me to ask questions about how things work and it has made me recall my photography classes from over a year ago. I’m no master photographer myself but it has made me reflect on how well I retain (or don’t retain) things that I’ve learned in my various classes. My dad has set a project for himself and it seems to be going well. He is going to photograph the alphabet. He has recently gone a shoot looking for the letter A, either literally, looking for the letterform, or shooting things that start with A. Already he has some pretty interesting shots from it. I’m very impressed about how he has set himself to learn something and hope to be able to follow his example in setting good projects for myself in the future. Look at his flickr feed to see how the project goes.
Continue Reading…