Read Between The Leading

I stumbled upon this podcast the other day and it is awesome. Read Between The Leading is a wonderful podcast about Graphic Design and is hosted by Aaron Heth and Matt McInerney both are students at the Savannah College of Art & Design. They discus logo design, re branding, typography, web design, and just about anything else design related.

After listening to the 8 episodes they have out my mind has started to shift back into Graphic Design mode. I felt like I have been slowly drifting away from this mind set over the last few months. Lately I have been concentrating more on expanding my knowledge of jQuery and PHP but its nice to take a break from programing and just think about why I was doing what I was in relation to my design work.

I guess that was a really long way of saying that this podcast is great and gets you thinking about design. So if you haven’t heard about Read Between The Leading you should check it out.

Keep up the good work Aaron and Matt.

Best WordPress Design Award

WPWebHost is having a WordPress Design Contest. They will pick the top 10 in each category and let you the people vote for your favorite. The winners in each category will get $200 and a life-time hosting sponsorship offer, which I think is a pretty great deal. If you would like to enter for yourself just head over to WPWebHost and check out the contest. And feel free to vote for me in the Best Clean & Minimalist category if my site gets selected as one of the top 10.

Padding My Analytic Stats

Ok well the numbers aren’t super impressive but I’m happy about it. Since I put up the new site my analytic stats have gone up, I’m getting around 25 visitors a day which is up from only 10 so I doubled the amount of people visiting my site. The time of the average page view doubled as well and my bounce rate is starting to drop. I would like to think this is due to the sheer awesomeness of myself but I really think it is because my portfolio is no longer one page. But whatever I can pretend its because I’m awesome so thanks.

Safari 4 Beta Review

I’ve been using Safari 4 for a few days now and there are a few things I like and some that just drive me mad. I’m not sure if the changes and new features in Safari are enough to make me switch back from Firefox but overall I think it’s a step in the right direction.

What I Like

Web Inspector - This is great for troubleshooting HTML and CSS. If you are familiar with the Firebug extension for Firefox then you have a pretty good idea of what Safari’s Web Inspector is all about. You can inspect any element and see what CSS is being applied to it. Under the Resources Tab you can get a nice chart showing how long it took for Safari to get all the images and linked files. In addition you can see the size of each file, which is nice when optimizing your site.

User Agent - You can choose what User Agent Safari uses, this gives you the ability to test what your website looks like in different browsers without having to actually use a different browser. It has a pretty impressive list to choose from IE6 and 7, different versions of Firefox, Opera, and Safari for Mac and Windows, Mobile Safari, it even has IE 5.2.3 for Mac.

Address Bar - While not as good as Firefox’s Awesome Bar the improvements to Safari’s address bar are nice. When you start typing in the address bar you will get a list of suggestions such as Hop Hits and a search of your browser history as well as your bookmarks.

What I Don’t Care For

Cover Flow - You can now view your bookmarks and history in Cover Flow. I guess I fail to see the need for this but others might find it useful.

Top Sites - The nice thing about this is it shows a star next to sites with new content since your last your visit. But I think the presentation is a little over the top and it is slow in loading the thumbnails, this could be due to it still being in beta.

What I Hate

The New Tabs - I absolutely hate that the tabs are now on top. I think it makes more sense to have the tabs closer to the content. You can move the tabs back though, just open terminal and type in this command.

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool FALSE

This only works on Macs I’m not sure how to move the tabs back for Windows, I couldn’t find anything when I did a search. The other thing that I don’t like is that you have to grab the right corner to move the tab you should be able to move them by clicking anywhere on the tab.

Conclusion

Well that’s my thoughts on the Safari 4 Beta somethings are nice and some like that tabs should be fix or at least rethought. For now I think I’ll stick with Firefox.

Welcome To My New Website

Well finally the new website is done. My plan was to have a new design for the beginning of 2009 but that obviously didn’t happen. Heres the story, I redesigned the site probably 3 times. Each time just when I was tying up some loose ends with the code I began to hate the new design, so I would end up redesign it. But I am happy to say I think this one is a winner, or I have just giving up and don’t care anymore. Well anyway welcome to the new site I hope you like it.

If you come across any errors or find a problem with the site let me know in the comments below. There are a few minor issues that I know of and will be fixing when I have the time.