News Archives
Closing Comments For a Bit
August 01, 2006 | Comments Closed
I’ve been having some problems with MT, namely spam and some sort of rebuild problem, so I’m going to be closing comments here until I can get it sorted. My goal is to hopefully get a new CMS running sometime soon. Unfortunatley, I’ve just not had the time to work on it (more on that later) and with all that’s going on right now with Blue Flavor it may be a little while.
I’m feel a bit bad about it, as the community/commenting aspect of my site is really important to me, but it’s got to be done. Post should continue, if sparingly, until I can get it resolved.
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WebVisions This Week
July 18, 2006 | 
5 Comments
Just a quick note that I’ll be in Portland this tomorrow through Saturday for WebVisions 2006. I’ll be joined by my pals and partners from Blue Flavor as well as lots of great Web professionals.
Here’s the scoop:
Thursday, Brian will be pulling double duty. First giving a 1/2 day workshop called Designing for Mobile: Bringing Design Down to Size, and then he is also going to be moderating and participating in the Mobile Development Panel with Kelly Goto, Gavin Lew, and David Adams.
Friday I’ll will be having fun with Dan Cederholm, Mike Davidson, and Bryan Veloso at our “Web Design” panel. We’re hoping the panel is better than the title…
If you’re going to be down there and want to say hello, please do!
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Holiday Update and Random Thoughts
December 05, 2005 | 17 Comments
I’ve got little time or energy to put down indepth thoughts, so here are some random bits from my world. ;0)
- Blue Flavor is looking for freelancers to help us out with some projects starting after the first of the year. We’re looking for developers and designers. If you’re interested, contact us with your rates, availibility and any related portfolio work.
- I just became an offical home owner! For the second time.
- If you’re in Seattle and want to get crazy we’re having an Idea Day/Blue Flavor holiday party on Dec 13th.
- Am I the only one who is worried about the terms ‘Web 2.0 Design” and “Ajax Application”?
- We’re getting ready for SXSW with 3 of the 4 Blue Favor guys on the bill (at this point in time) and a potential party in the works.
- I’ve decided that IM is the devil. If you have been looking for me there all I can say is “sorry” and “send me an e-mail.”
Have a very happy holiday everyone!
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Blue Flavor Flav!
September 27, 2005 | 33 Comments
As some of you may know by now I’ve been working on getting a small business off the ground. This business, which goes by the quirky name “Blue Flavor”, hit a pretty major milestone last night: Our Web site launched!
So, I imagine you’ve got some burning questions? What’s Blue Flavor? Who’s involved? Why would I care?
Well, here’s the cliff notes:
Blue Flavor is an experience and Web design company formed by Brian Fling (Strategy, Mobile, Design), Matt May (Technology, Accessibility, Programming), Nick Finck (IA, User Experience, Analytics) and myself (Creative, Content, Development).
We’ve all got a similar philosophy towards work and technology. We’d talked off and on for a while about doing something and about a month or so ago, when the timing was just right, we decided to take a shot.
So far, so good. There is lots of work out there and we’ve already lined up a few small clients. Not too bad for not even having business cards yet, eh? That’s the next thing on the list.
We’re still working on sorting everything out and so far it’s been pretty fun, as well as educational and quite a bit of hard work. It’ll be interesting to see how it all works out and I’ll be sure and share along the way. Also be sure and check out the blog. I promise it’s not going to be a bunch of rehash from our other sites.
Want to know more? Check out blueflavor.com
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More Site Weirdness
September 25, 2005 | 12 Comments
Thanks to my new friend Glen at Dreamhost (have I mentioned how great those guys are?) I’ve been able to dig myself mostly out of the mess I created trying to get my site in order yesterday.
There are a few lingering issues, so please pardon the weirdness as I work them out. If you find anything really broken, please let me know. Sorry for the inconvenience — I realized this week that I had some pretty funky things going on with my domains. I felt it better to just take care of ‘em now.
All should be fixed soon.
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Site Tweaks -- Footer Bad?
September 23, 2005 | 18 Comments
Some very interesting things have happened since my redesign earlier this week. The most notable of which is that my daily traffic was cut by about 70%.
It was a huge drop off. The biggest I’ve ever had.
Since most of that traffic comes from search engines like Google, it’s a bit hard to tell what exactly caused this. My guess is it’s a combination of things, one of which could have to do with how Google has last reindexed my site.
I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that it might have something to do with the fact that I removed the navigation at the top of my pages. That nav led to my archives, among other things. Now, I’m not an expert at how Google indexes pages, but I do know that it usually takes about 3 days to get a new page indexed. It was exactly 3 days after my redesign went live that I noticed the drop.
Could be coincidence, but I doubt it. Again, I’ve had dips in traffic before but this was off the charts and it effected every bit of my site. It was almost like the site was down for most of the day.
In any case, I’m doing a bit of tweaking to see if I can have any effect on it. I’m not sure any of you will notice but I thought it’d be a good idea to clue you in. Most of what I plan to do shouldn’t hinder anyone’s use of the site. If anything it should help.
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Redesign In Progress
September 19, 2005 | 51 Comments
So I’m working on a minor redesign. I’m going to be pushing it through the site in increments as well as making minor changes while I go, so things might be a tad wonky for the next week or so. Feel free to comment away.
(But please keep it on topic, I just had to delete six comments on my last post because they were all off-topic, trollish, or spam.)
The goal of my redesign here is to strip away things that aren’t getting used (by either me or y’all) either enough or as they should. I’m trying to boil down the site, yet again, to what’s most important. It’s actually been quite a bit of thinking that’s gone into what I’ve got so far, even if it might not look that way.
I’ve taken some ideas from a few other sites I’ve been enjoying. So thanks for inspiration goes to Gene Smith, Derek Powazek, and Rundle. I’m glad that people experiment with Web design and report on what works and doesn’t work. And why. It helps a designer is snowed under keep up with things.
Anyway, hope it works a bit better for y’all. So far everyone who’s seen it is very happy. Feel free to comment or ask question in the comments here.
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Interview With JK Rowling
July 18, 2005 | 0 Comments
Over at CBCNewsround they’ve put up and extensive and entertaining interview with JK Rowling to coincide with the release of Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince.
A short excerpt:
Edward Hollet representing W H Smith - If Voldemort ever encountered a boggart what would he see?
JK Rowling: The thing that Voldemort fears more than anything else is his own death. It its the quest of his life to cheat death, so we would have to see himself lying dead on the floor.
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Future of Content @ WebVisions
July 11, 2005 | 3 Comments
Just a quick reminder that I’ll be down in Portland towards the end of this week for WebVisions 2005. It’s a great event and I’m looking forward to the visit.
I’ll be speaking on a panel with Molly Holzschlag, Kevin Smokler, and Nick Finck. We’re going to be talking about content and how technology is still changing the way we create, display, access and consume content. I feel there is going to be a major change in the way Web professionals work with content and it should make for an interesting topic.
In order to get myself into a “Future of Content” mind set, I’ll be posting on that topic all week. I’m looking forward to that.
I’m also looking forward to riding the train down to Portland. It’s been years since I’ve been on a train. That and spending a few nights there. Last year I had to jump ship before the conference was even over. Hopefully I’ll be able to see a bit more of the city and have some time to relax a bit.
If you’re in Portland and you’re reading this, I think there is still time to register but I’d do it quick if you want to attend.
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DreamHost On Rails
July 06, 2005 | 20 Comments
One of the things that’s cool about DreamHost is the ability to suggest something and then have other users vote on it. Well one of the things I voted on was recently implemented and I’m sure many are glad it was.
DreamHost now supports Ruby on Rails. The one thing I kept hearing about from people who were interested in DreamHost but were reluctant. It’s cool news! Especially for me because I’ve been learning how to program (a bit) with Ruby on Rails recently.
From the newsletter:
If I wasn’t making myself clear, DreamHost now supports Ruby on Rails right out of the box (so no further need to follow the crazy instructions for doing it yourself like people were posting at wiki.dreamhost.com), along with FastCGI (which you pretty much need - unless you prefer Ruby on Snails).
Did I also mention that their newsletter is one of the best I get. It’s just funny enough to get me to read it every time. If you were waiting on this to check DreamHost out, you’ve got no excuses now.
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@ Lifehacker
May 31, 2005 | 3 Comments
For the next week I’ll be guest hosting Lifehacker along with Matt Haughey.
I’m really looking forward to that. It’s a bit of a different type of writing than I’m used to, much more “bloggy” (more on that later) but I hope to have some fun with it, bring my own style and learn some things as well.
I hope to keep fires burning as brightly here and on my other projects, but I can’t promise the usual. My hope is that this whole experience leaves me with all sorts of great ideas though, and maybe a new perspective on Web content that I can share with y’all.
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Speaking at WebVisons 2005
May 25, 2005 | 1 Comments
I write quite often about the value, opportunities and challanges of Web content. It seems like content is the hardest part, and most rewarding part of much of my work. I deal with it, in some way, on a day-to-day basis and I honestly think it’s something that will only grow in importance as time goes on.
I think we’re heading toward a time when we’ll really begin to have Web professionals who are totally focused on content. Right now many designers are expected to not only design, but information architect, produce, manage and program. While I’d agree that writing can be part of design, the issue of content is much more.
To that end, I’m going to be part of a panel on Web content at WebVisions 2005. The event will be held at the Oregon Convention Center on Friday, July 15 from 8:30am to 5:00pm.
I’ll be joined by Molly Holzschlag, Kevin Smokler, and Nick Finck and we’ll be talking about the future of content on the Web, convergence and where we’re all headed.
Nick has a bit more in his post, Content is King, But Where’s The Proof?
WebVisions is a great event and a really good value. I hope to see some of you there.
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Introducing Sweetdex
May 17, 2005 | 20 Comments
I want to tell y’all about a little site I started up a month or so ago. It’s called Sweetdex. I’ve had it up for a bit, just to see how it was going, and since I like it and it’s a fun site to do, I’m going to keep it going.
It was born from a few ideas that I’ve since found, taken individually anyway, aren’t all that unique. The first was an idea to have a community site for recommendations, and that is the core idea behind Sweetdex.
I find that some of the most useful, most fun and most worthwhile (insert nouns here) come from recommendations. I thought it’d be great to have a site where people recommend stuff…or something. I mean people do this all the time, but there aren’t many central places for recommendations.
As well, a huge pet-peeve of mine with blogs and blogrolls (which is where this stuff is usually linked from and archived) is their lack of permanence.
So I had an idea, for a long time now, about a centralized place to put and share cool stuff. Now, I’ve luckily not had to do much there as there are all sorts of online services popping up to help me tackle that. Kinda. Still I’ve a hard time keeping track of things on the web, so I wanted to make a site that indexes things I’ve a hard time finding. I was thinking, “Hmm, it’d be sweet to have an index of all the cool, hard-to-find stuff.
Throw in some other ideas and…you’ve got Sweetdex.
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Digital Programmer Needed
April 18, 2005 | Comments Closed
Jim Amos from Campbell Ewald is looking for some front-end programming help.
They “really need someone who can traverse the DOM, seperate behaviour from content and style, and is adept at learning new methods and has a passion for web standards. Also, they’d need to be able to relocate to Michigan since that’s where we’re at, in Warren, which is right on the doorstep of Detroit.”
Contact them for more information or view the job description.
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Asterisk 2
April 15, 2005 | 67 Comments (Closed)
Well, here goes nuthin’!
Welcome to Asterisk 2. It’s a redesign and more. I’ve changed the whole structure of the site, which might not mean a lot to you, but for me it should make the site a bit more flexible and easier to update. I still have quite a few kinks to work out and I think it may take some time to get the devil outta the details, but in the end I think it’ll be a worthwhile change.
Right now my biggest issues are getting my RSS feeds all working and updated and making sure the search, archives and “odd” pages are working and looking correctly. Because I wasn’t happy with the organization of my archives, I made a big change there and it’ll take some sorting to get back to normal. My hope is to eventually pull them in, but for now they are separated.
Anyway, bear with me and feel free to let me know what you think or any issues you think I might not know about.
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