XyzzyB - design

BMW Gina

2008-06-11T15:59:00Z

The BMW Gina concept car with a fabric, instead of metal, skin looks amazing.

Switching to Qwlim

2008-05-24T01:03:00Z

My old theme was fun and all, but if was pretty hackish and didn’t play nicely with the iPod Touch. While designing a new theme in Mephisto is pretty straightforward I don’t really have a solid chunk of time in which to do it, what with the preparations for baby and all. But I do have enough bits of time to switch to a new theme. So I did, and it’s awesome.

I’m using Qwlim, which has most recently been written by Matt Skorina. As you can see (unless you are in a feed reader) it has a great color scheme, nice layout, and check it what happens when you resize your browser window.

No really, go ahead.

Awesome yeah? The various site boxes nicely reposition themselves depending on the available space. It’s a great technique, I will have to steal it.

You may notice that the article tags don’t really factor into this page. They are still around of course, just not utilized. I may bring in a tag cloud into one of the boxes (or a new tag cloud box) when I have the time, but I really dig the layout as is.

In place of tags, this theme more heavily uses the article categories. Up to now I really only lightly used the categories, but I’ll probably try using them more in the future.

Some bits of the theme aren’t up and running yet (e.g. the theme expects a /contact page), but they should be coming up soon. I’ll also be modifying that rss icon on the left to link to the feed of the current category, not just a hard link to the main blog feed.

Replacementing MSPaint

2008-03-28T03:45:00Z

Paint.NET is a free replacement to MSPaint that actually looks pretty decent

New Look

2008-03-08T03:57:00Z

Now you see where all my blogging time has been going. Yes, it was time to work on design instead of content. I really like this new color scheme, but I’m not totally sold on this crowded three column layout. I was really hitting the limits of what I could cram into one sidebar.

unique

2008-03-06T22:55:00Z

cute avatar creater

Social Wallpaper

2008-02-18T18:00:00Z

social wallpaper

jaanix is pretty cool

2008-02-14T14:36:00Z

jaanix is a new reddit-like site that has some great features

Rails vs Django

2008-01-27T18:36:00Z

After getting more into the depths of Django I was all set to write a comparison article, then I found one made by two guys who made the same website with both frameworks. Nicely written, lots of detail, objectively puts forward the strengths and weaknesses of both. Unfortunately the documents are not presented on a nicely written website, but in a subversion repository. I’ll put the links to the external resource first, but if those go away feel free to use the mirrored copy of the article below.

Rails vs. Django:

Docs directory
- Rails vs. Django article [pdf, 132 KB]
- Rails vs. Django presentation [pdf, 6.7 MB]

Local mirror:

Rails vs. Django article

While both frameworks do a great job of producing databases from their corresponding language code, my biggest complaint with Django is that it lacks a counterpart to Rails’ migrations. Migrations enable a Rails projec to incrementally develop the database model. Essentially it’s subversion for the database structure. You build up changes (adding/removing/altering tables, columns, etc.) using ‘migrations’ and can apply them or roll back at your whim. Django, on the other hand, really wants a fully formed database structure to start off the project. Any changes after the initial creation have to be shoehorned in by: 1) adding the stuctures to the database directly, then 2) updating the database model within Django…bleh!

Django is clearly designed to get sites with simple models up and running fast. Using it you can definitely feel its lineage as a rapid news story development framework. Rails feels more methodical, a framework for building many types of applications but with a corresponding increase in development time. But that’s just me. I’m much more familiar with the Ruby language and (as the Rails vs. Django article concludes) both frameworks are essentially equally capable, so go with the one that uses the language you know. There is a lot of awesome (and not so awesome) in Django and Rails.

Comments!

2008-01-03T17:37:00Z

Comments comments everywhere! You can now add a comment to any of my recent events (books read, videogames played, etc.) or any of the quicklinks. The quicklinks page doesn’t display comments in any manner, and the quicklink individual pages aren’t customized, and the events page isn’t customized, and the events individual pages aren’t customized…but soon!

Read: The Principles of Beautiful Web Design

2007-12-28T00:27:00Z

Read: The Principles of Beautiful Web Design

Review: 4/5

A great book on the theory of design for webpages. The book covers key design principles for layout, color choice, textures, typography, and imagery.

Designing a Report Discussion Wiki

2007-12-10T19:30:00Z

I was recently tasked with converted a large document into an easily commentable wiki using mediawiki. Here’s how I did it:

Start an article using one or more headers to organize content.

  (article)
  == Header 1 ==
  Content content content.
  == Header 2 ==
  More content.

Mirror the headers in the discussion page

  (discussion)
  == Header 1 ==
  == Header 2 ==

Now, notice that each header in the discussion page has its own edit button. We are going to use this to add an ‘add comment’ link to each header in the article. To do this we’ll have to go pass two arguments to a full weblink: action=edit, and section=(the appropriate section number). The section numbers start with 1 for the first header and increment up. To make this link as generic as possible we’ll use mediawiki variables to construct the link:

Add an ‘Add Comment’ link from the article to the corresponding section of the discussion page

[{{fullurl:Talk:{{PAGENAME}}|action=edit&section=1}} Add Comment]

Add this text wherever you’d like the ‘Add Comment’ link on the article page. I found that after the content of each article works well. So we end up with this:

  (article)
  == Header 1 ==
  Content content content.
[{{fullurl:Talk:{{PAGENAME}}|action=edit&section=1}} Add Comment]
  == Header 2 ==
  More content.
[{{fullurl:Talk:{{PAGENAME}}|action=edit&section=2}} Add Comment]

Now when users click ‘Add Comment’ on the article, they are taken straight to an editing view of the corresponding section of discussion page. Easy!

Instructional Design Resources: Museums do it Better

2007-11-30T17:40:00Z

Instructional Design Resources

Library web design: museums do it better

Site changes: quicklinks, recently

2007-11-28T03:53:00Z

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been tweaking the site a bit. Why don’t you look around and see what you can find. … Done? Good.

I’ve gotten what seems to be a good solution for a ‘quicklinks’ list (over there on the right, under ‘quicklinks’). It’s a sub-section blog that until tonight actually used the same layout as the main blog. If you move your mouse over and click that More… button after the quicklinks shortlist then you’ll see the new link oriented design I’ve quickly whipped up. For now you’ll still see the “full” article for a quicklink while you’re browsing through tags but that’s on the list to fix. For the small list on the main page I simply tell my layout to grab the six most recent articles in that section and display the body text for each. If you see a new tag in the cloud without a blog post to go with it then it’s almost certainly coming from a qucklink.

I also added a ‘Recently’ category to keep a running list of things that I’ve done recently. I’m not doing as good a job of keeping up with that one but I like it. It gives me a space to do quick reviews and talk about movies, videogames, books, etc. without devoting a full blog post to them. I haven’t created a custom layout for this section yet, but that’s coming as well.

I’ve also tweaked the tagcloud yet more. I squashed a couple bugs and think I’ve got it about to where I like it.

Lastly, I fixed a glaring error in the CSS that prevented the site from rendering properly at small widths. Now Wii compatible!

CSS Tools

2007-11-19T15:44:00Z

good collection of online CSS tools

Car of the future

2007-11-05T14:15:00Z

Aptera – a plugin electric hybrid car. For short distances the car will be driven off of the stored energy in its batteries and essentially get a huge number for miles per gallon (think 1000+). The further the car is driven the batteries deplete and it gradually switches over to gasoline power and eventually reaches 130 miles per gallon after 300 miles per gallon.