Brian Fitzgerald

There is a lot of debate over whether HTML email should be used at all, but if you are going to do it, here are some templates to get you started.

I’ve always wanted to get better at creating a portfolio of good designs that I find. A friend that I used to work with had a file cabinet full of magazine clippings and other things that that they had stored away for inspiration. This was a great resource to spread out on the floor when getting started on a new project.

If you are looking for some inspiration, here is a page of business card examples. Even if you aren’t designing cards, it is a great thing to look through for fonts, colors, alignments, and everything else you need to get the creative juices flowing.

I thought that this reporter for USA Today (shown here on CNBC) looks a little too much like Steve Jobs himself.

I love these posters every time I see them

Apple today released a nearly 25 minute-long video about the iPhone demonstrating its use. There are two things that it confirmed to me. One, it seems be a great pocket-sized mac in the way that it handles email, the web and sms chatting. Second, I think that its going to be an awkward phone. The size and shape just don’t seem like something that I would want to carry everywhere.

I’m anxious to have one in my hand to make a better judgement on it. In the meantime, I’m super happy with sony ericsson phone I have (w810i) and imagine that I will probably upgrade it when the time comes with another sony phone.

People seem to get bored with technology. I know that I often do. It’s why I can’t wait for Apple to release Mac OS 10.5 even though 10.4 works great. It’s why I check macupdate.com throughout the day looking for something that’s new or improved. It’s also why I think that people seem to have forgotten what a great tool Manila is and are so ready to push it out the door.

It is true that Manila is not the best tool for creating sites that I refer to as “traditional” where you are presented a front page the site branches out from there. It is also true however that Manila was built to be a pretty easy blogging tool since before we were calling them blogs. Using Manila’s “news items” feature to manage a blog could hardly be easier than it is and it is periodically updated to take advantage of today’s blogging trends.

One update that Manila has received in the last couple of years is the ability to handle RSS enclosures. While this can be used in many ways, it’s most common application is podcasting. A podcast is nothing more than a RSS feed in which media files are referenced for downloading. In manila this is done by simply creating a news item and picking a file on your computer to associate with the item. When you hit the save button, your asset is uploaded to the server and the RSS is updated - you are podcasting!

I just said that I’d stop posting constant lists of links… but these are from somebody else, so it’s okay. Chris Pultz (trainer extraordinaire) sent me some great links through del.icio.us that would be useful to anybody getting started in designing with cascading style sheets

• Keep It Simple, Stupid showcases 49 site designs that are beautiful for what they did not do to their sites more than what they did do. The easiest thing you can always do to create a great looking site is create strong alignment and not litter the page with widgets, type and color. Many of these do it very well.
• Stripe Generator: Along with text/icons reflected off a surface, you can find a striped texture in many sites that could be considered a part of web 2.0. If you're looking to look cool and trendy, this site will help you get your stripes.
• Faux Column CSS Layouts: Columns in CSS tend to only be as long as the contents of that column dictate. This causes you to have columns of different lengths when you really want them to all be the same length. The easiest trick around this is to visually fake the columns by placing a columned image background behind the layout. This site provides many examples to help you get started.
• 25 Code Snippets for Web Designers: For the intermediate web developer, these are some useful code bits that will help you add some interactivity and pieces of flair to your web site. An AJAX contact form, sIFR and examples of CSS unordered lists are just some of the things that you will find here.
  

I really see my blog as the center of my life on the web. My blog is the first place I search when I want to recall something that I did months or years ago. For this reason, I have often muddied my posts with everything I have been bookmarking and more. Throwing all of this information in one pot can discouraging to those that are looking for some perspective.

One of my favorite sites to read these days is our local police chief’s blog and I’ve had to ask myself why I find it so interesting. I’m drawn to it in the same way that some may be drawn to shows that you see on Discovery and other like-channels where you get to see inside another profession. I don’t think that it would matter if it were the president of the united states or the guy that cleans the toilet of the president, it is fascinating to know what people are thinking, what challenges they face and what they find interesting each day when they go to work.

For this reason, I’m going to try (TRY) to change the nature of my blog a little bit. For those that are interested, I am going to post the exciting and the boring things that I have the opportunity to do as a part of my job as a web developer. If there are things that you are interested in knowing about, please let me know.

The beginning of this summer has been hectic as I have launched a couple of sites already including the new Lincoln Public Schools web site. The new site is a little wider than the old site, now being 990px wide. We had quite a bit of discussion about this before we went live wondering if it was the right decision to do this. Interestingly, since then Apple has launched their new site and CNN has released the beta of their new site. Both are the same width as the new LPS site. This was some appreciated validation of the width and certainly a sign that this new size is becoming a standard size for current sites.

Interested in what a month of traffic at the LPS web site looks like in terms of screen resolution? Here it is.

It may not be often that you give your mouse a lot of thought, but I just had one of those moments where I thought “Wow! What a great mouse."

I use a Logitech VX when I’m portable and a Logitech MX at my desktop. These are basically the same mouse with some small differences that make each better for the environment they were designed to be used in. The key feature on both is a scroll wheel that is able to work (as many scroll wheels do) in a mode that sort of clicks as you scroll, and a mode that is unique where it is free to spin like the Price-is-right Big Wheel. This last mode is by far my favorite. When you are on a long document of any sort it is really nice to be able to give the wheel a little flick and have the page scroll along until you stop the wheel. The wheel is weighted to keep it moving and has a good-enough build quality that it doesn’t feel like a cheap feature as one might expect that it would.

Thanks again to those of you that attended my workshop in Columbus on Tuesday. Here are some of the resources that I told you I would post here:

Firefox Add-ons

• Firebug (Firebox-based CSS Inspector)
• Firefox Web Development Toolbar
• MeasureIt (screen ruler)
• ColorZilla (Color grabber)

Browser Testing

• Evolt.org (Browser Archives)
• Install multiple version of IE on Windows XP

Web Sites

• CSS Zen Garden
• CSS Beauty: CSS Design Showcase
• CSS Vault: Inspiring Creativity
• CSS Hack
• Glish: CSS Layout Techniques
• Layout-o-matic
• A List Apart
• Digital-Web Magazine
• Stylegala
• The Web Standards Project

Useful books

• Designing with Web Standards — Jeffrey Zeldman
• Bulletproof Web Design — Dan Cederholm
• Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability — Steve Krug
• CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions — Andy Budd, Simon Collison, and Cameron Moll
• Access by Design : A Guide to Universal Usability for Web Designers — Sarah Horton
• CSS Pocket Reference — Eric Meyer
• HTML Pocket Reference — Jennifer Niederst

Workshop Files

• America — Finish
• America — Start

Digital-Web Magazine offers an educational article about PNGs and how to use them in ways that no other web image format can be used.

I have really enjoyed reading the blog recently started by our city’s police chief. It gives, what I think, is a rare and honest look at the inside of law enforcement. Yesterday he provided his response to the many complaints he hears about there not being enough police around schools in the morning to prevent accidents such as those that happened last week at Prescott Elementary.

Of course Intel doesn’t make laptops, but they often put out demonstration technology that they hope hardware manufacturers will draw inspiration from and run with. Here is a new ultra-thin laptop with an e-ink display in the lid to allow checking of calendar, email etc without opening the computer.

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I visit more coffee houses and drink more java than I’m prepared to fully disclose, but here are some of my favorites in Lincoln.

• The Mill: This is, along with 'the coffee house', the classic coffee house. I love the wood and brick. I love the dock. I enjoy the atmosphere that all of the international students that hang out there provide. The tables are a little small and the chairs too uncomfortable to do more than an hour of work there.
• Scooters: While we're at 8th and P (The Mill), I'd might as well cover Scooters too, which is right across the street. Scooters has bigger chairs, bigger tables and fast internet. They also have very comfortable arm chairs if you are just looking to relax. I enjoy the big windows. Like anyplace in the Haymarket, the thing that often keeps me from going there is metered parking and parking garages.
• Meadowlark: This coffee house sits in the old Godfather's Pizza spot at 17th and South. If I'm looking to go work for hours on a project, this is probably where you'll find me. I don't think there is a coffee shop in town with such a diverse audience and it is not uncommon for people to camp here all day talking, smoking and drinking. They usually have some sort of entertainment in the evening and the drinks are very good.
• Perfect Cup: We suffer from a severe coffee house shortage on the east side of town where I work. Perfect Cup resides inside of the Good Neighbor pharmacy near the Hy-Vee at 70th and O. The staff is friendly, The drinks are fine, the atmosphere is okay and the internet is slow.
• Panera: I only go here because it is near work, but there are free refills on coffee and the internet is stable and an okay speed. I'm here now and getting 1.3 mbps down and .3 mbps up. The staff is not real friendly and the prices are kind of expensive.
  

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Brian Christopherson of Lincoln’s Journal Star took on the burden of visiting some of downtown’s larger coffee joints to compare the vibe and prices.

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First, Congratulations to Kirk Langer for his semi-annual posting. They are rare, but good.

Concerning Sun’s committing a couple people to the aqua port of Open Office, I am not impressed. Sun makes me yawn almost as much as Microsoft. First, I know that Star/OpenOffice has been around for quite a few years now, but here’s some problems I have with it…

• What does Sun know about client applications? They make servers, an operating system and Java. In many ways, they are like Apple in that they do a bit of everything but where Apple excels at creating user experiences, Sun does not. Sun shines (sorry) when they are providing the technology and tools to let others deliver great experiences. When Sun tries to do it themselves it generally strikes me as nothing more than a technology demonstration to encourage developers to take those ideas further.

• Star/OpenOffice has always felt like a “me too” application that tries hard to mimic Microsoft Office without delivering ways that people can act better/smarter. I guess simply providing a knock-off of MS Office without the enormous price-tag is a noble-enough goal, but I would much prefer that they show some innovation and publish a product that is a joy to use.

So what would I do? I’m not sure, and I’m glad that I don’t have to be the one to decide but here are some thoughts.

• I would analyze/list the “word processing” needs of our community. This would certainly include note-taking, outlining and report/research paper writing among others. What features do these tasks require?

• Tabs?
• Indenting?
• Margin control?
• Headers, Footers?

I would match these feature needs with grade levels and subject areas, then against available products to see 1) how we can deliver applications that best suit the needs of those using them and 2) how we can do this with as few applications as possible.

Developers have long realized that word processors can be evil. Why do I want my text formatted before the text has been finalized? When people send me word documents to put online, the first step is always unformatting all of that text so that I can then format it to match the site. Text-editors are much cheaper and easier to use than word processors and often do the required job just as well.

Office users feel the need, to the detriment of their document, to use strange features that have been packed into the program. Random bits of clip art get dropped in, text gets wrapped, warped and justified in unnatural ways and typefaces that have no business knowing each other are thrown together.

Many people with real layout needs use Office that would be able to better use their time in an application that was actually designed to do layout.

I don't think there is a perfect solution right now. If one is looking for something that is cross-platform and does what is needed there really is no solution outside of OpenOffice and it is good news that the Macintosh platform may finally get a version of it that doesn't require X11 to run. I would prefer to see something like Google Docs used, but at this point there are many things that it does not have, such as tabbing, margin control or headers and footers. There's hardly anything simpler than an MLA formatted document, and I'm not sure if Docs could even do that.

I'm very interested to see where we go as a district regarding this. I think that between a potential OpenOffice port, improvements to Google Docs/Spreadsheets and new web-based apps that will undoubtedly appear, it is clear that Redmond should definitely not be counting any checks before they are cashed.

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I like going to Perfect Cup on East O Street in Lincoln. Good coffee, close to work, big windows and CNN running on an overhead TV. It makes it hard to work there however when they have by far one of the slowest internet connections I have seen.

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It’s hard to say anything about this without sounding insensitive, but unfortunately Wikipedia sometimes shines when there are terrible events. Here is Wikipedia’s coverage of today’s shootings at Virginia Tech University.

I’m not sure how long Contribute 4 has been out, but it has not been a long time. Six months? I was surprised to see, during the Adobe CS3 launch event yesterday, that a new version of Contribute (Contribute CS3) was being bundled with the web studios. I wanted to give Adobe the benefit of the doubt and assume that they were just renaming the product, but after a visit to their web site it is clear that this is considered a full upgrade and an owner of version 4 has to pay the same to upgrade to this new version as an owner of any previous version. While, neither I or Lincoln Public Schools (where I work) purchased any version 4 licenses, I can’t help but feel bad for those that have.

I’m sitting at Braeda this morning having coffee while I catch up on some things and as always, the internet connection is pitiful. I wanted to know how pitiful, so I fired up one of my new favorite sites: speedtest.net

Here is what my results were:

To get a comparison, run this same test from nearly ANYWHERE and I’m sure you will get a much better speed. I only wonder if they do this on purpose to keep people from camping on it. Considering that there is nobody here, I’d say it’s working.

I guess this is Apollo day. Learn more about Apollo from these videos created at Adobe’s ApolloCamp.

See ‘em here