I went through my current content and chose a handful of postings, from various
categories, that I believe are noteworthy and above average. I hope to add more
content that is more informative and beneficial while making it ever easier
for readers to find, or just stumble upon, the available information.

Is this a helpful addition to the sites usability? Is the icon appropriate
or ambiguous?

Things I Have Accomplished and/or Enjoyed In 2004

• The Tampa Bay Lightning won the Stanley Cup. The only year that I end up
  going to a home game, during mid-season, is the year my hometown team wins
  the big cup. It was fun, exciting, and memorable.
• I visited Lake Tahoe this past spring. What a fantastic place, especially
  if you are an outdoors type person and/or like photography. I will venture
  to say it’s one of the most beautiful places in the contiguous US. Oh,
  and the food was superb as well. Next time I visit will be in the winter,
  hopefully.
• I got back into reading. I started with Cory Doctorow’s Down And Out
  In The Magic Kingdom and that was a great help to spark my interest in reading.
  It is also helpful to read to assist in improving writing skills. I hope that’s
  happening for me.
• My blog and portfolio sites were redesigned and I implemented CSS table-less
  markup, self taught, I might add.
• I learned to grasp the power of RSS and my time spent visiting bogs has
  been greatly reduced. I do miss seeing the design of the pages, though.
• I proved to myself that freeipods.com was not a scam and I’m currently
  enjoying the melodious sound.
• I was out of console gaming until just recently (thus my lack of posting)
  and I really like most of the games I have played so far. Paper Mario for
  the Gamecube is superbly done. It really has a unique story line, and, yes,
  I, Mario, rescued Princess Peach.

Things Look Forward To In 2005

• Obtain my B.F.A. in Graphic Design. Finally.
• Get a Powerbook G5. I really think it is going to happen at MWSF in January.
  I’ll have more on my reasoning next time.
• Improve my business skills.
• See Cars and buy The Incredibles on DVD.
• Write and post an article on Illustrator (vector) basics. It will happen,
  I promise.
• Take more photographs and post them on Flickr. I have a fantastic and extremely
  portable digital camera but I don’t take it with me unless I’m
  on vacation and that’s got to change.
• Decorate my new home office.
• And so much more.

Comment Header

Each comment has a colored header that flip-flops with every other comment.
I thought the comment area needed some hierarchy without changing the text size
or placement. Something that also fit well into this revision is a comment number,
so I did it.

I was going to use MTFlipFlop,
like Hicks,
but on the first and second try it didn’t work. I’m not sure what was wrong,
but I didn’t feel like debugging the problem. I made a simple PHP script
that counts the number of comments, figures out if the comment is even or odd,
and finally applies the appropriate style. It’s about the most I delve into
PHP, but it is not hard to do.

sIFR

A healthy amount of blogs have been using IFR for some of the content. I was
not to sure how much was involved in the whole “conversion”, but I wanted to
just jump right in. Mike
Davidson’s article on sIFR 2.0 made it seem quite easy. The instructions
are as follows:

1. Download 2.0 Release
   Candidate. sIFR is licensed free of charge under the standard CC-GNU LGPL.
2. Get familiar with index.html. That’s really the only file which contains
   the things you’ll need to adapt. It contains the replace statements at
   the bottom and the CSS at the top.
3. To make your own .swf files, simply open up the .fla file in Flash, doubleclick
   the textbox which is on stage (it takes up the whole stage), and choose your
   own font from the Properties palette. Then, choose File > Export and you’re
   done!

The parameters to use in your replacement functions are explained in the
html file. Plug in your parameters and you’re good to go! Not too hard,
I thought to myself. In reality it was not hard, it took me about an hour
to download, customize, and debug my customizations. It was well worth the
time. I think the typography change makes a big difference.

Sticky Navigation

For the sake of usability I have always been meaning to make my navigation sticky,
meaning the link shows the user if you are on one of the main pages. That used
a bit o’ PHP too. A little PHP goes a long way.

Is it an improvement?

Do you think I could make any other changes, not necessarily just design wise?
Are the changes for the better?

I need to find a better way to manage this mess. If you have any recommendations, please e-mail me.

Update

Changes have been made and comments are now open for all postings. That’s right, I haven’t set up a time limit to when comments can be given. I hope that most of the content in this site is still relevant today.

So would you please dig up one of the old fossils (a.k.a. articles) and comment on that particular topic. I’ll get you started, check out the Vault and browse by date or category. Go on! I don’t bite…very hard.

And it rained — and it rained — and it rained.
– Narrator,
The Living Seas Pre-Show Movie, Epcot

Natural forces can benefit mankind. Hurricanes have always proved menacing,
however. Flooding and wind damage batter those in their path.

Hurricane
Charlie is on a crash course for the Tampa Bay area, where live, work, and
play. The good news is I’m batting down the hatches. The bad news is I live
a mile from the coast of the Gulf of Mexico and just 7 feet above sea level.
So there will likely be quite a bit of damage from the water. I’ve got a place
to evacuate to and will be doing so in a couple of hours, taking valuables and
essentials along.

Business in the area are rushing to prepare for the storm. Those that have
yet to backup their drives are doing so now, in a hurry. It is, fortunately,
a situation where one has time to prepare. Those that choose not to will fare
badly.

If anyone is in Charlie’s path, stay safe. See you after
the storm.

After pondering Paul Scrivens’ article Fear of RSS. I decided to get the default RSS templates back into Movable Type, after all it was easy enough. Now to find a RSS reader; Downloads.com found FeedDemon when I searched for RSS reader. With a 30 day trial, I thought I would give it a try. I proceeded to test my newly formed feeds. Regular RSS: looks alright, but it’s only a brief excerpt from each posting without pictures. Atom: looking good, the entire article and pictures are included.

I don’t really find this web syndication personally useful at this time, I just enjoy the design of good blogs, but who knows what the future holds. I’m willing to give it a shot, but, most importantly, I want my readers to have the latest of conveniences. (Besides that refrigerator beneath the workstation.)

I am pleased to announce three syndication feeds for Graphically Speaking; RSS, Atom, and Short Clip RSS. Enjoy, and be sure to let me know that this is the best thing that has happened all day.

Same Great Content, New Package

I do redesigns when I’m utterly board with my look. My tastes have changed,
skills improved, and inspiration flourished. I hope the change is for the better.
I think it is. Fine tuning is still in progress, and, in fact, is never really
done.

This might be a good entry for the CSS Vault
(hint, hint). Maybe.

The solution was to put a div in after both the main content and sidebar, essentially a footer, which did not necessary have to contain anything. The important style was

.footer{ clear: both;}

Shortly there after, the sandwich is complete. It was also a good addition for usability’s sake.

For more ideas on what to do with a footer read Footers by Scrivs.

III.

The 3.0 update brings along Authors, Contact, and Colophon pages. I utilized Movable Type’s module templates (fancy for include files that can be updated with MT tags) to streamline any future updates, or just to simplify changing a link.

You may be wondering about the colors.

Since this blog is aimed towards graphic artists, or digital designers (as I call myself), I have gone with a minimalist look. Shades of gray, and spots of bold color will assist in defining the content, as opposed to milling the presentation and content layers together. So content is the next big step. There will be much more of it.

Want to give back to the community? Comment, suggest a discussion, or become an author for Graphically Speaking.

Moving To Where

That’s right. i broke down and got myself a real host (no offense Tripod). Oh, and i got a domain too. DesignByMK.com, check it out. So, allong with that i just decided to make Graphically Speaking all that much greater. You can find, well not for a couple days at least, Graphically Speaking at GS.DesignByMK.com.

Make a note of it! and ill see you around.

By the way, i’m converting this whole blog over to be useful in Movable Type. With my hosting i can do all of this cool server side scripting useing CGi. it really is great. BUT, i have to create many more templates, and to do ‘em right, i gotta do ‘em by hand. So gimme at least a week, if not two.