Design 19
It’s up. Well, it’s not entirely done, but it’s the last day of my holidays, and I’m about to start Year 11.
- 12PM 27 Jan
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- 12PM 26 Jan
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Design concepts and Photoshop
Previously, when doing design concepts, I did them through my imagination and minimal work with Paint.NET/Photoshop, and just jumping into the HTML side.
At my work experience at Net Starter, I talked to one of the designers about using Photoshop to create designs.
I said I liked doing concepts/etc in HTML because it was more flexible and accurate, something along the lines of that.
I recently decided to start trying out designing in Photoshop first. I’m quite liking this method so far now.
And actually yes I can spell “genius” properly
- 2PM 21 Jan
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JavaScript/DISQUS forum experiment
No server-side code at all. Here’s an example.
Since DISQUS’ API doesn’t have read-only API keys and whatnot and they don’t have thread list widgets the index right now is comments, I’ll probably write up some script that tries to extract topics out of it
- 12PM 19 Jan
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Folder layouts
There are some web scripts out there that, for the purpose they serve, allow for users of different privilege levels, and need to let users register and login. Any administration tools are shown with a nice link to anyone with the proper privileges.
Thing is, mintypublish. Along with other CMSes. CMSes are aimed at doing things like static websites without the hassle of dealing with things like HTML.
But if you’re going to show an admin link or a login area in a supposedly static site edited by only a very small group of people, where everyone else can only read the website, that’s just not going to look good, especially as most users don’t need such access.
So say something like WordPress, which I’m using right now. To login, you have to add /wp-admin/ to the end of the root URL of your WordPress installation. For mintypublish (I recently released 0.5.0 by the way, if you’d like to check it out, go here), I apply the same idea. You have /mintypublish/ at the end of the root URL of the mintypublish installation. Are either methods convenient? Not particularly, unless you have a bookmark or have a good typing speed (which I do, but nevertheless…)
So what could you do other than that? Have an even shorter access method? Let’s take WordPress. Let’s chop off the -admin bit, and for mintypublish, make it mp. There. Short and easy to access! Only two letters! It seems to make sense somewhat.
But I still don’t like that.
- 10AM 14 Jan
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The cutting edge
A few months back, I made a promise to myself. As a person who liked web design and development and new, shiny things, I should be staying on the cutting edge. That’s what I’ve always been doing these past few years. I jumped to try out the leaked pre-beta of Windows 7, and kept using each of the public betas until release. Things like Ubuntu, web scripts, programs, if I see the term “beta” next to “stable”, I practically always go for beta. Giving back feedback is something I have time for, as well.
Thing is, it’s all and well until things start to break. The recently released jQuery 1.4 rc1 when dropped into some of my projects immediately broke a few of the plugins I depended on. Brilliant!
This applies to other things such as Firefox as well. Add-on developers usually don’t tend to begin adding compatibility to point releases until they’re finalised.
It makes me think.