Tonight groups.drupal.org is hosting a two hour screen cast lesson about developing with Drupal. For those who don’t know, Drupal is an open source content management system and is the cms I am currently using for this site. I will be attending the “Drupal Dojo” tonight via IRC at Join #drupal-dojo on freenode. I’ll do a write up on the experience in the next day or so.
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Drupal Dojo
Asheville Highway Rental
I’ve just finished wrapping up my latest website, www.ashevillehwyrentals.com and I’m quite pleased with the way it turned out. Asheville Highway Rentals is located in Spartanburg SC and provides rentals for weddings, parties, events, birthdays, construction, household projects, and heavy equipment. The hard part about building a site that incorporates all these services is coming up with a design that isn’t too focused on any one aspect of their services. I knew that if I made a lavender and floral design that stressed their wedding services that I might scare away construction workers or if I made a site showcasing bulldozers and hammer drills that I’d scare away people planning their weddings.
Run Both IE6 and IE7 on a Single Computer
Finally, Microsoft has made steps to make testing IE6 and IE7 easier for Windows users. Previously, you had to pay for an additional Windows license to legally run both versions of IE for testing purposes. Now Microsoft is making available free Windows XP/IE6 images available for VirtualPC (also free as MS is competing with VMWare). This means that you can run IE6 in a virtual machine while running IE7 on your host machine. The drawback is that the download is set to expire April 2007 … although we are promised new versions will be released. What Microsoft doesn't mention is that Virtual PC also runs on Windows 2000 (and IE7 doesn't). Therefore it's possible to install this Windows XP VPC image on your Win2k machine. You can then update IE6 on the XP image to IE7, testing IE7 without upgrading from Win2k. This is all-around excellent news for web developers.
Color Jack: Color Generator
The JavaScript is only 2k with gZip on! (4.5k otherwise) The entire package is nearly 300% smaller than it's nearest competitor, ColourMod. And, unlike it's competitor, the ColorJack Plugin is free to use + modify. It is a very simple + effective.
Check it out here: www.colorjack.com/studio
Surfing with the boss's dog
This is Spot’s new summer pose for his upcoming calendar. Did I mention I love Photoshop?
A List Apart – Austin
Today I'm fortunate enough to be at the A List Apart conference here in Austin Texas. So far, there have been presentations from Eric Meyer, Jeffery Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria, and Molly Holzschlag. The conference is mainly aimed at the use of Cascading Style Sheets, but also has a large emphasis on usability and information architecture. I'm sitting here during the free lunch section, chicken quesadilla just in case you were wondering. Between lunch, a beer, and the book I won during a give-a-way, so far so good.
The event should wrap
Finally, an all in one Ubuntu Guide
I've been running Ubuntu for around a year now, since Breezy Badger, and while a lot of things are self explanatory, I have had troubles with seemingly simple tasks such as DVD playback, CD burning, and installing support for my dual monitors.
This wiki guide I found on Digg is meant to be an all in one guide for the newly released Ubuntu 6.10, Edgy Eft.
Displacement Mapping
A couple weeks ago I attended a Photoshop conference in Greenville which was lead by Will Hammond, one of the original creators of Photoshop 1.0. He had a good many usefull techniques, but I found displacement mapping to be the coolest by far. I’ve thrown together a couple examples based on his tutorial at www.pixelpond.com.
Web Server
I felt tempted to write a blog today and I'll even make it useful. After reading an article about setting up a Windows-based Apache server, I've decided that this will be a good starting point for hosting my own website. I have been aware of the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Python/Perl) for a while now, but I just found out that there is also a WAMP stack….basically this means that I don't have to wait to master Linux in order to run Apache. Apache is an open-source alternative to Windows IIS and will allow me to host a website for free. Seeing as I have an extra Windows box at my house, I hope to get my new web server installed within the next couple days courtesy of the Apache Friends Project and their XAMPP.
There goes that idea
Oh well, turns outs that www.burnloungeregistry.com isn't going to work out after all. Burnlounge prohibits its users from creating their own websites to promote their online stores. Too bad I found all this out after buying my domain space and domain names. But, on the brighter side, I now have a crapload of space to move this blog too. Hopefully I'll have some good content to put on their as well. If anyone would like me to host their website, just let me know.
In the meantime, I continue to mess around with CSS and ASP.NET 2.0. Both of which are turning out to be pretty impressive tools. I should have some more examples of these types of sites up shortly.