Archives for Tag: "sitenews"
March 13, 2007 at 07:00 AM
Well, after an absense that was entirely too long to be called temporary, From Away is back in full swing. As you can tell from this post, I was a bit disillusioned with the whole web industry and decided that I needed to give myself a bit of a break from maintaining this website and extra-curricular web work in general. But, in light of the events of the last couple of months, I’m back and quite refreshed.
The New Gig
My biggest motivating factor for getting this website back up and running again has definitely been my new job.
Continue reading this post »
Tags: personal, sitenews, webdev
July 12, 2006 at 10:07 AM
I’m currently feeling very restless in my position of employment. I say currently, but I’ve had this feeling for quite a few months now. Mind you, I really like the people I work with (and I love developing websites and web apps - but every project in my current job is starting to feel the same), but I have this feeling that there are other, much more exciting projects out there that I’d love to be spending my working hours on.
Continue reading this post »
Tags: personal, sitenews
March 15, 2006 at 02:03 PM
A lot of progress has been made on my quest to reboot on May 1st. The image after the jump is a little glimpse as to the look for the new design, but I don’t want to give anything away just yet.
Continue reading this post »
Tags: sitenews
February 20, 2006 at 10:02 PM
Yes, there is a new design coming for this site as I have stated on a couple of previous occasions. But…the wait for it will be a little bit further in the future than I previously anticipated.
I decided that if I entered the CSS Reboot I would be able to give myself a bit more time to complete the design. And hopefully I’ll be able to give it that little extra touch that I wouldn’t have time for if the design was pushed out the door in a hurry.
So, keep an eye on my profile at CSS Reboot…Something good is coming on May 1st. In the meantime though, I plan to try to keep up the regular posting here. Even if it is these short little posts I’ve been tossing up the last week or so.
Tags: sitenews
January 08, 2006 at 12:01 AM
2005 was definitely a year to remember for me. There were so many great things happened this year that this post could end up being a bit longer than I had originally thought.
2005 started off with a new job for me. Making the switch from working freelance full time to working a 9 to 5 job was a huge change for me, especially considering the commuting time to get to and from the office changed from a walk to my home office (a couple of steps) to a daily bus ride (1.5 hours each way) with 3 transfers. Even so, with everything else that happened this year, it was probably a good thing that I was able to limit my working hours to Monday to Friday so I had time to fit everything else into my schedule.
The rest of the winter kept me very busy but were somewhat uneventful. The former design for this site was ripped on a couple of occasions. SXSW ‘05 came and went with tons of great information being posted to attendee’s blogs for the rest of us to read. Sadly, I wasn’t able to attend, and that trend seems like it will continue on again this year…
April was a very exciting month for us. Krista’s niece Casey was born on April 26th. Krista was lucky enough to be able to fly to Nova Scotia to be with her family for this very special time.
As May rolled around, this site took on a new look (the current design) for the CSS Reboot.
In June we travelled south to Calgary near the end of the month to attend my cousin’s wedding. A great time was had by everyone that attended and it was also great to do some catching up with some friends and family from PEI.
The remainder of the summer and into the fall I kept very busy with work (both the day job and a bit of freelance) and spending time with Krista and some of our friends.
Things really started to pick up for us in November. The month started off with Krista and I buying a new car, the first one we’ve had since we moved out here a year and a half ago. The new vehicle has been a joy and has made both our lives much, much easier, even though Krista hasn’t learned how to drive it just yet (it’s a manual). On the 10th, Krista and I took off for a much needed week of vacation. We flew into Halifax to attend her brother’s wedding and to visit with some friends we hadn’t seen in over a year. After 4 or 5 days in Halifax we moved on to PEI for a day or two to visit with my family before returning to Halifax to fly back to Edmonton. The trip was great and just what both of us needed, but like all vacations, it was just much too short. The rest of November and the first half of December were pretty much a blur between being very busy at work and preparing for the Christmas season.
The Event of the Year
The biggest news of the year came on Christmas day. On Christmas morning, I proposed to Krista. We haven’t set a date for the wedding yet, but it will probably be sometime in early 2007, and will be somewhere south of the equator. Both of our families were thrilled to hear the news and the congratulatory emails and cards have been flowing in since then.
To wrap up the year, on New Year’s Eve I launched a redesign for my portfolio website. This was one of the most successful designs I’ve launched in a long time. The site was featured on 3 or 4 design showcase sites, and my traffic has increased by more than ten times what it was before the relaunch. That’s all I’ll say on that for now as I plan to do a little more in depth post on the redesign on a later date.
Overall, this was a great year. Krista and I made lots of new friends here in St. Albert, and we’ve achieved all the goals we set for ourselves this year.
2006
2006 looks like it will be a great year as well. I’ve set a lot of lofty goals for myself this year, both professionally and personally. A few of these revolve around this site as well as my freelance work. So even though you’ve heard me say it before, I’m seriously planning to write more here this year. I’m also looking to pursue some new professional ventures to hopefully further my career and improve my knowledge and skills. Stay tuned.
Tags: sitenews
October 31, 2005 at 10:10 PM
I apologize to all of you that are arriving in via the CSS Reboot site. I had fully intended to have both this site as well as my portfolio ready to go for the reboot. But alas, once again, work and life have stolen my attention away. Rest assured, both sites are being worked on, and will be launched in the new future, both with a new look and powered by software built with my own two hands.
Until then, make sure to have a look at all the great new designs that will be surfacing in the next few days over at the CSS Reboot.
Tags: sitenews
September 28, 2005 at 06:09 AM
Dreamhost has one of their excellent deals on once again in celebration of their 8th birthday.
If you’re interested in signing up for the hosting deal yourself, just head on over to Dreamhost and signup for the for any shared hosting package and during Step 5 of the signup process enter the promo code 888, you’ll save 80% off the annual price of any shared hosting account.
Tags: sitenews
September 17, 2005 at 07:09 AM
This comment from Steve Ballmer definitely raised my blood pressure to an unhealthy level:
“We won the desktop. We won the server. We will win the Web. We will move fast, we will get there. We will win the Web.”
and rather than rant about it, I recommend you read
Molly’s post. She has summarized my feelings perfectly.
Tags: sitenews
September 16, 2005 at 10:09 PM
I’ve got no other excuses for this long period of absence other than, I’ve been busy…Extremely busy. Let me just leave you with this: you may not hear from me on this site for a while, but exciting things are coming down the pipe. A redesign is in the works for both this site as well as my portfolio. I also have a couple of products in the works that I’m especially stoked about. They’re not necessarily anything revolutionary, but I’m quite proud of the progress that I’ve made on them both, and I hope to be able to reveal at least one of them to you before the turn of the year.
One last note, I’m a little late to the party, but do check out Mint if you’re looking for a great stat-tracking program. I’m currently using Mint on both of my sites, and I’m extremely happy with it.
That is all….
Tags: sitenews
July 12, 2005 at 03:07 PM
After reading Keegan’s post about the great deal to be had over at Dreamhost on their Crazy Domain Insane package, I decided it was time to move this site to it’s own domain.
If you’re interested in signing up for the hosting deal yourself, just head on over to Dreamhost and signup for the Crazy Domain Insane package and during Step 5 of the signup process enter the promo code 777, you’ll get a years worth of hosting (including Ruby on Rails support) for only $9.24. It’s an amazing deal.
Having said that, before too long, From Away will be moving over to Dreamhost’s servers and will be residing on a new domain. My portfolio website will still remain hosted at A Small Orange for the time being. This is something I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time and this deal finally got me moving.
By the time the site is settled in it’s new home, the design also will have received a little bit of a tweaking, so stay tuned. There are exciting things to come!
On a side note, I want to wish a congratulations to Jeremy, who is getting married next month. Stop on over and leave your best wishes if you get a chance.
Tags: sitenews
July 06, 2005 at 08:07 PM
Over the past week, I’ve received an insane number of emails from people asking me where they can buy one of my skateboards. I haven’t actually had any of my designs printed since I started dabbling in skateboard design, but this steady flow of emails has got me seriously considering start to have some of them printed up.
Skate Or Die
Skateboarding seems to be still going extremely strong and isn’t showing any signs of slowing up. I think that there is definitely potential in the market for my board designs to be (at the risk of sounding a bit egotistical) a big hit. So the question is: If I do a run of boards (1 design) would there be demand enough from the people out there that I wouldn’t end up with a ton of extra boards kicking around my house? Also, if I do get a bunch printed, which design is the most popular amongst
those that I’ve published?
I’d really appreciate as much feedback as possible from those that visit this site, especially those of you that are arriving here after checking out my board designs, or those that Google has directed here. If you have any questions you’d like answered privately, please don’t hesitate to use the contact form for this site, or over at Jeff Smith Designs, or even send a good ol’ fashioned email to skate@jeffsmithdesigns.com.
FYI: All of my board designs are located here.
Tags: sitenews
July 01, 2005 at 05:07 PM
I was sitting here this afternoon listening to iTunes and wishing that there were more alternatives to posting what I’m listening to on this site. Then, coincidentally, reading through my RSS feeds I found this post by Jeremy regarding the same subject.
If anyone has any less memory hogging alternatives (Mac based, of course) for posting currently playing iTunes tracks to a website (other than iTunes Watcher, KungTunes, etc.), please leave a note in the comments…
Tags: sitenews
June 20, 2005 at 09:06 PM
Wow, nearly a month later, and here I am once again to play the catch-up game. I know some of you may be thinking that I’m really slacking on this blogging thing, but to be honest, I’ve got so many little side projects in the chute right now that blogging has just needed to be pushed to the back burner.
Ajax
I’ve been playing around with Ajax (namely
SAJAX, a simple Ajax toolkit) and I must say I’m quite impressed with the ease I was able to pick this new technology up. A simple understanding of JavaScript and the programming language of your choice (
PHP in my case, and you can do some pretty cool, and powerful things.
My only bone to pick with Ajax is the fact that I’m sure it will be (and already has been) overused and abused. One of my coworkers and I were drawing some similarities to the way that animated GIF’s and Flash were overused back in the day. I can definitely see the same thing happening with Ajax. Although, it is such a cool technology, I’m extremely inclined to make use of it in any appropriate way that I can. Which leads me to my next point.
New Portfolio Design On The Way
I’m currently working on a new design for my
portfolio website (finally…). I’ve got about three designs sitting in various states of completion, one almost done in Photoshop, and two sketched out on paper (hopefully to be entered in my new
Mockup Maker when I get around to ordering one).
I’ve got some really great ideas for the redesign this time around, and I’m going to take my time and do it right. Now this could take until the fall, or possibly even next spring. The design I have up now is definitely serving its purpose, and I’m still getting lots of great comments on it, so I’m not feeling too rushed about getting this design out the door.
Webjillion
Our good buddy
B. Adam Howell (of
CSS Reboot fame) has released his latest creation upon the world.
Webjillion is definitely one of those “why didn’t I think of that first?” projects. Webjillion sells “Cool Stuff for Web Professionals” and has a couple of great satirical comics on display as well.
Adam has done an excellent job with not only the design, but his first product “The Mockup Maker” is pure genious. I’ve been forever using a crude template that I mocked up in Illustrator. It never even crossed my mind to make a notebook of mockup templates to keep all of my papers organized.
So if you’re a web professional, and like to be organized (as I think most of us are), shoot on over to Webjillion and have a look around.
New Digicam
We’ve also recently acquired a new digital camera. This has definitely been a long time coming, I’ve been using a 1.3MP Fuji Finepix for the last 3 or so years, so it was definitely time for an upgrade. We picked out a Sony Cybershot DSC-W5, which is definitely not a top of the line camera, but suits our casual use just fine. It has proven to produce some great quality shots, even in my shaky hands. Now, I just have to get myself a
Flickr Pro account to upload this backup of pictures I’ve not got (if anyone has any of those free pro account dealies to give away, I’d be forever grateful…)
Calgary
This weekend we’ll be heading down to Calgary for some wedding shenanigans. My cousin is getting married this Saturday afternoon, so we’ve decided to make the trek down for the weekend. I’m very much looking forward to seeing some of the family and some friends from good ole PEI. Should definitely prove to be a good time.
So I think that pretty much catches us up to date. I’d like to say that posts will become more regular around here, but with summer and all of its impending fun and activities, I’m not sure that it’ll be a promise I could keep. I’ve still got a lot of posts sitting in purgatory that I haven’t finished yet, rest assured, they will see the light of day at some point. Until next time…
Tags: sitenews
May 28, 2005 at 04:05 PM
Since I received a request from someone for the Automator Backup Workflow that I mentioned a few posts ago I decided that I would post the Workflow here because I’m sure that there are many others that can benefit from it.
A Few Notes
A few points before I begin explaining the workflow:
- This is in no way a complete backup solution. I’m not even sure that the workflow copies fork files, etc.
- However it is a good solution for backing up music purchased through the iTunes Music Store, as well as backing up documents and whatnot.
- Do not rely on this workflow for backing up applications or even application settings.
- Also, if anything bad happens to any files that you are copying using this workflow, please do not send an email blaming me for screwing up your files. I’m providing this workflow as-is in hopes that it will help a few of you out.
The Directions
And now on to the directions (each step below corresponds to the respective step in the workflow):
- Select the network volume that you want to backup your files to in this step. If you’re backing up to a Samba volume (Windows, Linux, etc.) enter the the path as follows in the dialog: smb://computername/volumename. If you are backing up to an Apple Share enter the path as afp://computername/volumename. You may also specify multiple volumes in this step if needed.
- This step will connect the volumes specified in step 1.
- Select the files/folders that you wish to back up. Add as many as you like.
- Select the destination folder to copy the items to for backup. You will need to mount your backup volumes in order to accomplish this.Note:You will need to repeat steps 3 and 4 for each backup volume that you selected in step 1.
- Select the backup volumes that you have mounted in step 1 to be passed to step 6.
- This step will eject all of your mounted backup volumes that you specified in step 5
I hope this will be of some help to at least a few of you. I use this workflow on a weekly basis to backup my purchased music from iTMS, however for my daily incremental backup needs, I still rely on Deja Vu. Also, if there are any improvements that anyone can suggest, please feel free to leave them in the comments and I’ll try to keep up with them and post the revised workflows.
The Goods
Download the Network Backup Workflow for Tiger Automator
Tags: apple, automator, backup, sitenews
May 17, 2005 at 01:05 PM
Mr. Grimes has passed along the musical baton to me, and to avoid being beaten with it, I decided I should get my act together and do my part.
Total Volume of Music Files on My Computer
My Powerbook currently contains 35.09GB of music files (368 artists, 6707 songs, 19.2 days) which only includes full albums and doesn’t include The Girlfriend’s music as well. My complete library is on my local fileserver and is ~40GB.
The Last CD I Bought
It’s been an extremely long time since I bought any music that wasn’t in digital form. The latest one would probably be an album from a friend’s band: BulletProof & Ignorant by The Danny Mainstreet Band.
Song Playing Right Now
Little Sister by Queens of the Stone Age
Five Songs I Listen To A Lot, or Mean A Lot to Me
- Doctor Rock by Motorhead
- Like Suicide by Soundgarden
- Colorblind by Counting Crows
- Change by Blind Melon
- Forever by Kiss
I could list so many more here, but I guess I have to limit myself to five.
5 People to Whom I’m Passing the Baton
Tags: sitenews
May 15, 2005 at 09:05 AM
Dashboard has definitely been one of the most useful features of Tiger for me this far. It is also one of the features that has caused the most controversy since it’s announcement last summer. At that time, many parallels had been drawn between Dashboard and Konfabulator. While there are many similarities between the two, and after having used both, I can definitely say that Dashboard is my favorite.
Dashboard
There have been an huge amount of useful widgets released the Dashboard already, even after Tiger only being in the public’s hands for a few weeks.
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ShortStat Widget
Although this one hasn’t been released just yet, I was lucky enough to be a beta tester for this great widget while the guys over at The Big Noob were developing it. ShortStat Widget integrates with Shaun Inman’sShortStat website stats tracking program. After being a ShortStat-aholic (compulsive website stats checker) for quite a while, this widget is definitely a godsend. It displays the current day’s amount of hits (along with uniques) as well as a short list of recent referrers. Definitely saves me a lot of time during the run of a day.
Along with the ShortStat Widget, there are so many other widgets that I use that save me a tremendous amount of time:
- Apple’s Weather Widget - One of the widgets included with the default installation of Tiger, but this is one I use on a very regular basis. It saves me from opening up Safari and heading to The Weather Network every time I want to see the current forecast, or what’s in store for the coming days.
- Air Traffic Control - displays all of the active wireless networks in the vicinity. Definitely a great tool for those of us that have an Airport-equipped Powerbook or iBook and use public wireless networks on a regular basis.
- TV Tracker - I don’t watch a ton of television, but I hate waiting for the blasted cable listings to scroll through on the cable provider’s listing channel.
- IMDB Widget - For any of you movie fans out there who are forever going to IMDB to look up an actor’s name, director, release date, etc. this widget is definitely for you.
- Flidget - created by Rob Mientjes and Anatoly Papirovsky this widget is a must have for any Flickr user.
There are so many more great widgets that have been released and as time goes on, I’ll continue to add to this list. Think of this post as my personal “Widget Repository”.
Next Up
Next on the agenda, will be a look at Spotlight and Smart Folders.
Tags: sitenews
May 01, 2005 at 12:05 PM
This redesign has been a long time coming. CSS Reboot was just the thing I needed to get off my ass and get started on it. Although, I didn’t really begin this design in earnest until this past friday afternoon, and just completed it moments ago.
Not Quite Finished
Although the redesign may look completed, there are still a lot of things that I want to add to the design. Not to mention the fact that my portfolio got ignored during the redesign process. I’ve stripped down my use of plugins throughtout the site, but as I make revisions to the design, a few might creep back.
Down the road, my portfolio will be redesigned, and possibly this blog could be integrated back into the portfolio site, to give both of my sites a more consistent feel. You can tell by the use of colors that I had fully intended for this to happen this time ‘round, but again, that time thing got the best of me.
But I Thought You Were Switching To Symphony
All in due time…I had planned to switch to
Symphony but the development team’s timeline has changed somewhat, and version 1.0 is not quite ready to go. I could have used the beta version of Symphony, but my knowledge of Wordpress is a lot stronger, and with the time constraints I’ve been working under for this design, I needed to go with the more familiar product for the time being.
Symphony is shaping up to be one excellent product, and I can’t wait to begin to use it. I encourage everyone who hasn’t taken a look at the demo site, to pay 21 Degrees a visit and give Symphony a test drive.
Thanks
Just wanted to say a little thank you to
Steve P. Sharpe for all of his testing, troubleshooting, and words of encouragement this morning. Also, kudos to him for the work he did on his
SPS-Archives plugin. The plugin isn’t released just yet, but he was gracious enough to allow me to use it for my
archives section.
Finally Done
Thank goodness this site is finally done, now I can begin to refine all of the things that I ignored during the redesign. They may not be too obvious to most, but there are a few things bugging me that need to be seen to.
Expect to see more frequent posting from me now that this design is completed. I’ve got a lot of posts sitting in “Drafts” that will be finished off and posted here before too long. The first one in the pipe is a little review on Tiger since I picked up my copy at Compusmart yesterday.
Tags: sitenews
April 24, 2005 at 09:04 AM
Update: I apologize to those of you that have been having trouble posting comments here today. It seems that Spam Karma has been misbehaving so I’ve disabled it to prevent any lost comments. I’m not really sure how long this has been an issue, so if you have tried to post a comment here in the last 3 or 4 weeks and have fallen victim to Spam Karma, please let me know. Things should be all sorted out now and once again I apologize, and thanks to those that brought this matter to my attention.
Wow, a month has passed since my last post. I can assure you all that I am alive and well, but extremely busy. The number of hours that I’m at work during the week has grown in the last month which is the main reason that you’ve not heard from me. Added to the fact that it has been a beautiful spring so far here in St. Albert, and I’m trying to be outside as much as possible to enjoy the weather since I spend the majority of my day inside, in front of computer screen for the rest of the week.
Now, on to the question that has been asked of me by so many people: how is the redesign for jeffsmithdesigns.com going? I can answer that with one word: slow. To be honest, I haven’t been paying that much attention to the redesign, and there is a good chance that I won’t have it completed by the CSS Reboot date of May 1st. I’m waiting for Symphony to be upgraded to its next version as well, which is another stumbling block that I’ve run into. That being said, I have a bit of time on my hands today, and over the next week, as The Girlfriend is away for the week visiting family; so, there is a possibility that there could be an upated look around here before too long, but no promises.
Now, it’s time for me to be off, have a coffee and catch up on reading and commenting on blog posts elsewhere that I’ve missed out on over the last month…
Tags: sitenews
March 21, 2005 at 06:03 PM
After spending the past week reading countless blog posts regarding SWSW Interactive as well as viewing many Flickr photo galleries of the festivities, I almost felt almost as if I was in Austin with everyone; well, not quite. I felt like a kid with the flu who had to stay inside while he watched all of his friends playing outside in the beautiful weather. I am extremely envious of each and every one of you that were able to make the pilgrimage to Austin, Texas for this gathering of web minds. There appeared to have been a huge amount of excellent panels this year, and I think I would have benefited greatly from attending a lot of them, but sadly, a lack of funds, as well as time off work, prevented me from attending.
It appears that I’m also going to miss out on @media 2005. If I had gotten my act together a little sooner, I might have been able to find myself a bit of a sponsorship, so that I could attend, but I don’t think that it’s really feasible at this point. It’s a shame too, I’d love to meet The Brit Pack (Andy Clarke, Andy Budd, Simon Collison, Patrick Griffiths, Gordon Mackay, Jon Hicks, Jeremy Keith, Drew McLellan, Dunstan Orchard, John Oxton, and Richard Rutter). Not to mention the fact that Jeffrey Zeldman is giving the keynote address.
So, to avoid this happening next year, I’m going to start doing a bit of planning now.
Catching up on a few other things, my redesign for CSS Reboot has taken a very different direction. Instead of just redesigning my portfolio site, there is a major restructure in order for both jeffsmithdesigns.com as well as this site. I’m definitely making considerable progress, but with all of the custom components, etc. that I’m working on, I think I’ll be pushing it to complete the redesign for May 1st. But, I’m definitely going to try my damnedest to meet that deadline.
I recently joined the ranks of iPod owners by acquiring my own silver iPod mini. I must say, I couldn’t be happier with this little gadget, I don’t leave home without it anymore. Not only does it allow me to carry the perfect amount of music with me, but I can also keep up to date on all my iCal calendars, to do lists, and any other little notes that I want to pack in there. It’s extremely handy, and is making my one hour commute to and from work much more enjoyable.
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Tags: sitenews
March 07, 2005 at 12:03 PM
CSS Reboot is a standards-centric project that is a spin off of the May 1st Reboot which brings together the community of web designers and encourages them to launch a new design on the 1st of May.
I’ve decided to participate in CSS Reboot as I’ve been wanting to redesign Jeff Smith Designs for the last little bit. The deadline will definitely be a great help to me, as the creative juices seem to flow a lot better when I’m under the gun.
Tags: sitenews
February 17, 2005 at 12:02 PM
Why do people feel the need to rip off other website’s stylesheets, contact forms, layouts, icons….
Take a look at this: http://www.livingproof.us. Have a close look at the navigation, contact form, comments layout, comments and permalinks icons, etc. Not to mention in this post he takes credit for my work.
Damn, stuff like this frustrates the hell outta me…
(I couldn’t find an email address on his site, and the contact form didn’t work because of the PHP error checking I had built in, so if anyone could find me an email address for this guy so I could contact him directly, I’d appreciate it.)
Update: The offending site has been taken down, and I’ve received an email apology from the owner. I guess the matter is resolved, but this still bugs me. I wish that people would see that stealing another’s work is still wrong regardless of the intentions. And not only stealing it, but claiming it as your own…
Tags: sitenews
February 05, 2005 at 02:02 PM
Site Changes:
- The new layout is continually changing. I’ve revamped the navigation and have some changes planned for the way comments are presented. If anyone has any suggestions for the layout, don’t hesitate to drop me a line. I’m always open to new ideas.
- I’m going to put up a blogroll again, this was something I unintentionally overlooked in the last design. I’ll definitely be returning the favor to all of you that have linked to this site.
- Even though BlogAid is over (I didn’t make that much off of the ads, but did donate some money out of my own pocket), I’ve decided to keep the ads around, however, I’ve changed how they’re displayed. I realize that many people don’t like ads, but I’ve decided that if I can make a little bit of money from this site (which I can put toward hosting costs, etc.), then why shouldn’t I keep them around?
Projects and Learning:
- I’m continuing work on my CMS. Progress is pretty slow, I’m still working through the planning stages using UML. Currently I’m working on some process diagrams to establish user workflow. Those software engineering courses that I took in university are definitely coming in handy.
- I’m still exploring Ruby on Rails when I get the chance. It seems to be a pretty populartopic around the community. The only drawback is hosting support. Apparently, TextDrive is the only host that is currently supporting RoR.
- This afternoon I downloaded Mambo, which is a pretty powerful GNU licensed CMS. I plan on messing about with it a bit as it seems like a pretty decent piece of software.
Personal Stuff:
- Work is going along really well, we’re pretty busy these days. At the moment, I’m working on some system documentation for a project that we’re rolling out. Most of the design work that I’m doing consists of updates to existing projects, however, I have one new design that I’m working on that is coming along really well.
- Other than that, things are pretty quiet. I’ve recently purchased a new 27” flatscreen TV for the living room. Next on the list is a new home theatre system.
- Still working toward that Mac mini from AppleStuff4Free.com.
Tags: sitenews
February 02, 2005 at 07:02 PM
I decided to upgrade to the latest nightly of Wordpress 1.5, and in doing so, decided to upload a design that I’ve been working on for some time. It’s a lot less graphic intensive than the last design, as well as being a bit more accessible. I’m still tweaking things here and there, so expect a few changes over the next week or so.
Tags: sitenews
January 17, 2005 at 10:01 PM
Back on the 10th of December I thought I had nipped spam on this blog when I installed
Spam Karma (read:
Spam, Spam, and More Spam). Boy, was I wrong, I neglected to pay any attention to referrer spam. Now, when I look at my
ShortStat logs every few days, a big portion of my hits yield a link that leads to a site saying “This account has been terminated”.
Thankfully, there are a lot of people that are more on top of this issue than I am, and have offered up some tips for those of us that are suffering from referrer spam:
I definitely recommend that you all have a read of these articles, as we need to put an end to this type of spam, just as we have with comment spam. It’s just getting out of control. Not to mention the fact that these spammers are hurting us all when it comes to search engine results (I’ve been doing a substantial amount of SEO (search engine optimization) at the new job, so I’m quite a bit more conscious of issues that promote, or hurt search engine ratings.
Also, if anyone has any other handy hints, or links to get rid of referrer spam, please leave them in the comments, not just for my benefit, but for everyone else’s as well. I’m hoping to get a bit of time this coming weekend to put a few of these practices into action and get a handle on this issue.
Tags: sitenews
December 28, 2004 at 12:12 AM
I’m in the process of upgrading to the latest nightly build of Wordpress, so if things seem a little out of whack here for a while, please bear with me. It will be fixed soon.
Update: I’ve upgraded to the latest nightly build of Wordpress (1.5-alpha-6 2004-12-28). Everything seems to be working fine. I realize that the search form at the top of the page is still a little skewed, I’ll try to work that out tomorrow. If anything seems out of sorts, please post in the comments. Thanks.
Tags: sitenews
December 27, 2004 at 05:12 PM
I currently have 3 more invites to give away. I’ve also added a counter to the sidebar that shows how many invites I have remaining. Clicking on the number of invites will take you to the contact page.I’ve just got another lot of GMail invites dumped into my account and still have 9 left. If anyone still wants one, just send me a message from the contact page being sure to include your email address.
Tags: sitenews
December 23, 2004 at 02:12 PM
I wanted to take this opportunity to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. I hope that it is an enjoyable and restful break for everyone.
This Christmas will be a very different one for me. This will be the first time in my 23 years that I will not be spending Christmas on Prince Edward Island with my family and friends. Krista and I will be staying in St. Albert and spending some time with some new friends here. I’m going to be cooking a turkey dinner as well (yes, I’m the cook of the house), with all the fixin’s. The only thing that will be missing will be some good PEI potatoes, I’ll have to settle for ones from BC.
So, everyone enjoy this time away from work and take the opportunity to spend lots of time with family and friends. Make sure to eat and drink lots so you’ll be recharged with you return to work. All the best in 2005 to everyone as well. Cheers!
Tags: sitenews
December 18, 2004 at 10:12 AM
Now that “Prairie Skies” is pretty much tweaked to my liking, I’m trying to come up with some new projects to work on, but seem to be drawing a blank. I like to keep myself constantly working away on web design projects in order to keep my skills honed and sharp.
So if anyone has any ideas for me, or possibly has an idea for a collaborative project, please leave a note in the comments or drop me a line from the contact page.
Tags: sitenews
December 18, 2004 at 12:12 AM
After seeing Jeremy’s post regarding posting to del.icio.us from NetNewsWire I decided to ditch my Recent Links plugin in favor of a combination of del.icio.us and the del.icio.us cached Wordpress plugin.
So for those of you that subscribe to my Diversions RSS feed, make sure to update the links in your news aggregator to: http://del.icio.us/rss/fromaway.
I’ve also added my Amazon Wishlist to the sidebar of the contact and about pages. So if any of you are feeling overly generous this holiday season, or have some extra money that’s burning a hole in your pocket, now you have something to spend it on.
Tags: sitenews
December 14, 2004 at 12:12 PM
Welcome to Version 2 of From Away titled “Prairie Skies”. I’m quite proud of this design, I was getting kind of tired of the old layout, “Antique”. The structure of the site has remained pretty much the same but there are many major improvements, even besides the new graphics.
One of the major issues I wanted to address this time around was the archival system of the site. I didn’t feel that “Antique” had an adequate method of finding old posts other than the search feature. This time around there should be no problem finding archived entries as you can browse through them by year, month, as well as category. I’ve also added archiving to my “Diversions” so that you may poke around in them since there is a lot of interesting little tidbits of information included there as well. I’ve also made use of a lot of the excellent WordPress plugins that are available. You can see a listing of the plugins I’ve used as well as links to their respective homepages in the sidebar on the “About” page.
Since I’ve began working on this layout, my knowledge of PHP has grown a significant amount due to a lot of reading I’ve been doing. As such, I’ve made use of quite a bit of PHP throughout the site, mostly with the sidebar, as well as the site header which changes according to the time of day it is here in St. Albert, Alberta, or anywhere else in the Mountain time zone for that matter.
I’ve tried to make this design very usable and stable in many browsers. One that I have not checked yet for compatibility is Opera, but that will come in time. I have a lot more improvements I intend to make. There are a number of usability issues that I still have not dealt with. Anyway, I hope that you all enjoy the new look, I know it’s a fresh change for me. Cheers.
Tags: sitenews
December 10, 2004 at 02:12 PM
This site has been inundated with spam for the past 3 hours, so I’ve had to turn on comment moderation. If you happen to post a comment on any of the articles, it may be a few hours before it appears as I’ll have to approve it before it actually gets posted.
I’m holding off installing any spam filters until Version 2 is ready to go out the door, as I have a number of plugins that I plan to install at that time.
Also, regarding Version 2. I’m slowly making progress. I’ve added a few trick little features to it that have been slowing down the progress a bit. So it’s on the way, but no definitely launch day just yet.
Update: I was forced to install a spam plugin seeing as there have been over 500 comments end up in moderation since yesterday. Hopefully this will solve my problems.
Tags: sitenews
December 03, 2004 at 01:12 AM
My prospects for employment are still a bit on the slim side, so in order to take my mind off that and financial matters, I’ve been working very diligently on the new design for this site. It will still be most likely a week or so before I have the new design completed, although I don’t want to hint at any target dates, because who knows what the next few days will bring. Things regarding this site could get pushed to the back burner at a moment’s notice if some work should happen upon my desk.
The reason this re-design is taking somewhat longer is the fact that I’m concentrating much more this time on information organization and structure. The number of posts here at the site have been starting to pile up, and I’ve realized that my current archival system is suitable for minimal amounts of data, but is utterly useless for larger amounts. So I’ve been concentrating on that as well as making use of a lot of the great plugins that are available out there for Wordpress.
So here’s to great things coming in the near future, stay tuned!
Tags: sitenews
November 18, 2004 at 01:11 PM
If you’re reading this, the DNS has resolved to my new server. I decided to go with A Small Orange and I definitely think I’ve made the right choice.
I signed up this morning around 11AM and by noon, all of my data had been mirrored to the ASO servers. This is absolutely incredible service in my opinion. Support tickets are also responded to extremely quickly as well. Within minutes of submitting a ticket I had a response from tech support as well as one of the owners. You don’t find service like that just anywhere.
So if anyone is looking for a very reasonably priced host that offers amazing customer service, definitely check out A Small Orange, you won’t be sorry.
Update: There’s going to be a few broken links, etc. around here, especially with the archives until the DNS resolves completely. So please, bear with me.
Update #2: Everything appears to be back to normal again.
Tags: sitenews
November 17, 2004 at 08:11 PM
I found out today that the host I’m presently using is closing their doors in the coming weeks, so I’m in the market for a new hosting solution. This isn’t exactly what I need right now as funds are short enough around here as it is, but after a little searching, I think I can get some pretty decent hosting for about $5/month that comes with excellent technical support, from what I can tell. They’ll even move all of my data from my current host to their servers, so I won’t have to deal with that headache. This is a huge plus for me, because I just don’t feel like dealing with those issues right at the present time, I’ve got enough on my plate as it is.
The company that I’m looking is is A Small Orange. Shawn hosts his site there and server response seems to be pretty fast with next to no server downtime. I haven’t been that pleased with the speed of my host for the past few months, but I mean I can’t really complain as the server space and bandwidth was being donated to me; can’t really complain about something that is free.
So, on that note, if anyone has any other suggestions for hosting solutions, I’m all ears. I want to make the move before the weekend so that there is no chance of my sites being down because of server moves and DNS resolution. So, comment away, or use my contact form and send me any suggestions you may have. Thanks!
Update: I should have added to this post, but I kind of forgot about it. I have changed hosts to A Small Orange. They have provided me with everything I needed at a very reasonable price ($5 US/month). Thanks for all your suggestions folks!
Tags: sitenews
November 15, 2004 at 02:11 PM
Over the weekend I added author highlighting to the comments of this site. This is something that I’ve been meaning to do for a while, but just got around to it. I realize that I don’t have a huge number of readers that leave comments at the site, but it’s a pretty neat feature and fairly simple to implement with a little bit of PHP and some CSS modifications. So now, when I leave a comment you will see the image to the right appear next to my name in the comments along with a different colored background.
Added also to the comments, comment numbering. Definitely not a very profound feature, but something that I wanted to bring back to the way comments were laid out after modifying the default Wordpress templates when I designed the site.
Update: I was going to summarize the method I used to implement author highlighting, but tiredness has gotten the better of me, so I’ll just post a link to the method instead. The method described uses Wordpress to implement the example, but could definitely be adapted to any publishing system. Basically, you use an if statement to check the email field on the comment form for a password. If true a certain CSS style is applied, else the default comment style is applied. Read the article linked below and you’ll understand exactly what I mean.
Author Comment Highlighting
Tags: sitenews
November 12, 2004 at 09:11 PM
Just a quick entry from me today. Just wanted to let everyone know that this site was featured on
unmatched style (a CSS showcase site) a day or two ago. The only criticism Ryan offered in the review was that he didn’t feel that the background color of the site matched any of the other elements. I tend to disagree and I feel that the background gives the site an aged photograph type feel, which was my aim in the beginning. But of course he is entitled to his opinions and I thank him for the feature and the review.
(The site is no longer on the main page, you can view the review in the right-hand sidebar under “recent entries”.)
Tags: sitenews
October 14, 2004 at 11:10 PM
I’ve finally taken the leap and not only separated my blog from my portfolio, but as you can see, I’ve also switched from Movable Type 2.661 to Wordpress. This was an extremely easy transition, the Wordpress setup is amazingly easy, and getting the templates set up to your liking aren’t that hard if you have a little bit of programming savvy and don’t mind reading a little bit of documentation. Another huge bonus I find is the fact that their is no rebuild time. I hated have to wait for MT to rebuild every time that I made even a small change to an entry on my blog, it’s ridiculous and completely unnecessary as far as I’m concerned. I guess my next challenge will be to switch my portfolio over to Wordpress, that’s going to have to wait a while though, I hear some freelance projects calling my name. So to Matt and everyone else at Wordpress, keep up the excellent work.
As per usual with sites that I design for myself, I’m still not happy with this design. The typography didn’t quite run out how I had wanted. I wanted to make a really clean, easy to read layout. I still feel like things are a little crowded. But, I guess I’ll work through that with some tweaking of the design. I really started to notice it after Jon revealed his new layout. He’s done an amazing job of mixing an excellent and creative design with really great usability and readability. I think part of my problem is the fact that some of the sites that I’ve been designing lately don’t have the amount of content that I want to include here on From Away. This makes it substantially easier to minimize the clutter and make for a much more usable design.
Tags: sitenews
September 13, 2004 at 11:09 PM
I know that pretty near everyone has a GMail account already, but if there are some of you that don’t, I may be able to help you out. I’m always looking for links to helpful graphic/web design hints, and insightful articles regarding design. The first 6 people that provide me with a link to a good article that I haven’t read yet will be awarded with a GMail invite. So start digging!
Links should be posted in the comments, so make sure to fill in a valid email address that you check regularly, should you happen to win.Winners:
1. David Lee
2. Sam Fee?
Tags: sitenews
July 26, 2004 at 10:07 AM
It’s been quite some time since I’ve posted, but as you can see I’ve been quite busy. I’m proud to present the second version of Jeff Smith Designs Online. I’m really happy with this design, so I think it’ll hang around for quite a bit longer than the previous one did. It took me quite a bit of time to get everything as I want it with regards to the layout, and I’m not quite done yet. I’m still not happy with the loading times and have a few more optimizations that I hope to make over the next few days to improve that. I’m always open to feedback regarding bugs, errors, etc. so feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of this post or send me an email and I’ll look in to the problems. For all of you visitors that are using Internet Explorer, you won’t have the benefit of seeing the new fancy roll-over buttons in the nav bar at the top of the page. If you’d like to have a look, you could always give Mozilla Firefox a try as it’s a more standards compliant browser and a lot of web pages, especially personal ones will look a lot better.
I’m also pleased to announce that the site validates as XHTML 1.1 Strict and CSS2 (aside from the comment pop-ups which are XHTML 1.0 Transitional). I’ve also added two news feeds near the bottom of the right hand column, one for the main news entries, such as this, and one for the little sidebar entries in my “Worth A Read” section to the right. I’ve also added a spiffy iTunes tracker (iTunes Watcher 2.51 courtesy of Micheal Simmons). Also as of right now, the downloads section is just a placeholder, I plan to add some of my wallpapers and such to that section, but haven’t had the time just yet to come up with a layout for those pages.
Aside from that, a lot has been going on the last few days for me. Krista has a prospective job offer out in the prairies and we’ll be flying out there in a couple of weeks to check out the area and meet with her new employer. We’ll be in St. Albert, Alberta (a suburb to the northwest of Edmonton) around the 14th of August and be staying there for a few days. We’re also hoping to possibly get out to Vancouver to visit with her sister, but it’s still remains to be seen if that can be arranged or not.
I’m really excited about the prospect of moving to a new area. Not that I don’t love Fredericton, it’s a beautiful city, probably the cleanest I’ve ever seen, but I’ve been here for the last 5 years and I feel that it’s definitely time for a welcome change. I’m hoping to pursue a design job out there, however I haven’t sent out any applications as of yet because we’re not sure if we’ll be moving out there for good at least, not until after our upcoming trip. I fully plan to find just about any job I can when we get moved out there just to get a little money flow and then pursue design jobs during my time off and hopefully get some freelance work to make a little extra cash. I had been hoping to rely solely on freelance work, but at this point I don’t believe that it’s a realistic plan for me until I get myself settled in to a new area and get my name and reputation established.
I hope to be making very regular blog entries from now on (well there will be a gap while I’m away, and when I move, but other than that I plan to be completely faithful), so definitely keep checking back for more news, articles, and artworks. Until then…
Tags: sitenews
