A List Apart has released the survey results from their first annual Web Design Survey.
There’s a ton of data in the report, but I think it will be very interesting to peruse. It gives a pretty decent look at the skill levels and such in the industry today.
Findings from the ALA Web Design Survey
Comments: 0 (view/add your own)Prior to my switch to Simplelog as my blogging platform, I had built up a decent readership at this site. After the switch, a my feed URL changed, so naturally I popped on over to Feedburner and updated my URL. In the following weeks, I noticed that the number of readers of my feed had been almost cut in half. I was pretty sure I hadn’t written anything that would have offended that many people, so I started investigating a little further.
Then it hit me, there were probably a lot of people that were still subscribed to my (very old) feed URL from my Wordpress days that was being redirected toward my Feedburner URL. I just needed to find a way to graceful 301 redirect this URL to Feedburner. Since there was no way to do this (currently) in Simplelog interface, I wrote my own plugin to suit my needs.
Comments: 0 (view/add your own)I just finished taking the First Annual A List Apart Web Design Survey.
The survey took me less than five minutes to complete, and because I offered my name and email address at the end of the survey, I’ve been entered to win a free ticket to An Event Apart event, an Apple 30GB video iPod, an Event Apart jump drive, or an A List Apart T-shirt.
Personally, I’m very curious to see the results of this survey, especially with all of the recent discussion surrounding gender diversity at web conferences, and the industry in general.
So, if you’ve got 5 spare minutes and would like the chance to win some cool prizes, make sure to take the survey.
Comments: 3 (view/add your own)After following the conversation surrounding the Contact Mailer plugin offered by Harold Emsheimer at the Simplelog Forums, I decided to download and install it on my own site.
I found the plugin easy enough to install and after playing around with it for a bit, I decided to hack it apart a bit and make it even easier to install, and clean up the URL’s the plugin uses.
Comments: 0 (view/add your own)Having recently installed Simplelog on my A Small Orange hosting account, I thought I’d go through the install process here for the benefit of those that might be running into problems getting it set up. I’ll also throw in a few other general tips and tricks for those that may be setting it up on a similar setup.
First things first, you’ll need to download the latest version of Simplelog from the Simplelog website: or, if you’re feeling adventurous you can download the latest development version from Simplelog SVN: using the username and password ‘anonymous’.
Comments: 6 (view/add your own)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.
My biggest motivating factor for getting this website back up and running again has definitely been my new job.
Comments: 16 (view/add your own)I’m sure this has been posted more than a million times on other sites, but I just ran across it today. This is a very handy widget, and you can either point it at the Rails API or the Ruby RDoc sites.
Comments: 0 (comments closed)My freelance work has slowed down a bit as of late, I just finished up a project and I wanted to find something to occupy some time until the next job rolls in. After writing about my predictions for 2005 in the web design/development world, and reading other’s posts about the same subject, web apps and dynamic websites are going to be the way that clients will be heading in 2005. So, in this vain I’ve begun work on a CMS that I can customize on a per client basis.
I think this will definitely be a great selling point for my services (when I get it completed), as well as making designing sites a lot easier. Now, for the hard part: getting to the point where I can begin actually using the system…
To some, this may not seem to be a huge task, but for me, who finds coding to be quite painful at times, this is a pretty large project. I’m trying to follow the software engineering processes that I learned while in university to make the whole ordeal as painless as possible.
All things considered, I think this is definitely going to be a very worthwhile project, and I’m looking forward to working on it and watching it develop. Do any of you that have developed your own blogging/CMS’s in the past have any tips, pitfalls, or suggestions for me that might aid me in my progress?
Comments: 6 (comments closed)
I wanted to stray away from the traditional “blog-like” layout this time. I realize that the site still sports a two column layout, but I believe that the addition of a large amount of whitespace has given the site a very new perspective. I also think that the full page width header and footer tend to have the user focus on the content of the site (which is the main idea) rather than the design of the site. The design is extremely simple, but I feel that it is very effective.
My logo has also taken a bit of change of shape. I’ve used the logo that has been appearing on my business cards and letter head since early last spring. I figured that I needed to have a bit of parallel in design between my online and offline work. I think this logo is a lot smoother and more eye catching that what was featured previously on the site.
I urge you all to have a look at the new design and drop me a note to let me know what you think. I always welcome constructive criticism regarding my work.
Comments: 2 (comments closed)
The first aspect that I started with was to take Scriv’s stylesheet and customize the colors to my liking, added new border colors, a new background texture, centered the layout, adjusted the widths to suit my control panel, etc. After that, I created a new header logo (which you can see in the images to the right) for the login page, as well as the masthead for the control panel. The last thing to do was to edit the main menu to move the last two menu items to the top of the layout. This was just a matter of removing them from the menu.php file in wp-admin and adding a new div to the admin-header.php file in the appropriate place (right below the body tag.
My name is Jeff Smith and I'm a web developer and graphic designer living in St. Albert, Alberta, Canada. That being said, I'm not originally from the prairies, I'm a maritimer, born and bred, namely an Islander (Prince Edward Island).
