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I was chatting with Josh the other day about our prototyping process at work, lamenting that forms and tables are more trouble than they're worth to prototype in photoshop and that I was thinking of just jumping straight to HTML on the next project*. He said, why stop there, let's just prototype in ruby on rails and build actual working forms for people to play with. This makes a lot of sense, to acknowledge that the first version is going to be a throwaway anyway, and just build something that is guaranteed to be tossed out (since the production version will be on webwork).

I've got a side project coming up, a book trade that's run prior to a conference in March, but I've already coded it before (in ColdFusion of all improbable languages), so I'm not all that excited about building it again. I'm more interested in front-end stuff, recoding the back-end of something in another language doesn't sound that thrilling. Unless it was to learn a whole new environment that could have practical work application. So I've signed up for my free account. Now I need to get a local dev environment setup on my laptop. Josh…

*I did jump straight to HTML on the project I'm working on now, but I'm finding that once the foundation is set I have to pull a screenshot into photoshop to adjust the colors and decorations (and it still has a little ways to go). But it does save a whole lot of time.

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web | Bloglines | Preview Feed

Google Alerts are really cool sometimes. Here is further evidence of this project that I caught wind of earlier. The staging address for the project appears to be http://webtype.clearleft.com/. The preview feed does not appear on the website, at least not linked from anywhere yet. The posts themselves have titles corrisponding to on of the appendixes in the book (which sits right here on my desk next to me) which summerizes each section of each chapter. I am curious to see how much of this project will be original content and how much will be a plug for the book. I am hoping for the former, and that Bringhurst himself might be involved. Regardless, it is clearly time to read the book again.

JavaScript Text Highlighting

Between the two, Google and MSN probably comprise about 80% of all search engine traffic, and that's being pessamistic. Basically, people either use the search engine that ships with their operating system, or they get a fucking clue and use Google. Anyway, the reason I point this out is that they both use the variable "q" in the query string, and this here text highlighting function is set up to read that variable.

Now if I were to add this feature to I site I'd be a little more subtle/devious about it. Instead of aweful yellow highlighting I'd do something like make the text bold, or maybe increase the contrast a little. My aim would be to make the visitor's keywords more obvious without screaming, "hey, look here, I know what you're searching for!"

css Zen Garden Archives

The Zen Garden archives have at long last been overhauled with kick-ass thumbnails! And the Category Index is very also thorough, with broad categories like Official and Conceptual, specific categories like Blue and Food, layout structure categories like 3 Column, and abstract categories like Sinester. It's so easy to browse now, I'm finding cool designs I've never seen. Check out Killer Style (using Firefox of course, don't bother if you're using Internet Explorer)

Negative Margins: the other way around

cool take on a 3 column floating layout. the next version of my personal site (in very early conceptual stages at the moment) is probably going to be 4 columns (blog, link log, mtg blog and a flickr). i've got a scheme for a way to combine multiple blogger main pages into one page, while retaining independent archives (and not using frames of course). testing out the scheme on some defunct side-project blogs.

Update: while tracking down the appropriate template tags to pull off seperate HTML for the main page than the archives i found a blogger help page on including multiple blogs in a single page. so it can be done, and exactly how i was plannig on doing it, just need to work out out maintaining seperate archives, and then of course there's the minor problem of the design and CSS for a 4 column layout.