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PHP port of Typogrify for WordPress
Hamish Macpherson has ported Christian’s awesome set of Django filters over to PHP for use as a WordPress plug-in. Nice.
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Steve Jobs and Bill Gates: Historic discussion live from D 2007
Engadget has a rough transcript of the conversation. Sounds like it was really thoughtful, fun, entertaining, and respectful. Hopefully they’ll be a video or audio released sometime.
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Widon’t and SmartyPants Helpers for Rails
After Typogrify for Django, the Rails camp wants good typography, too. :) The widon’t here won’t work on chunks of HTML like the Django variant will, but it’s still a lot better than nothing. Support good typography!
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Pixelmator
Cool-looking OS X app. Like most cool-looking things, it’s not available yet.
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KC Star: The legend of Bo
Twenty years ago, Bo Jackson was a rookie for the Kansas City Royals. Twenty years ago, I was 10 years old and living in Kansas City. Bo’s short career is still one of the most amazing and magical things I have ever been witness to. He was superhuman — the stuff myths are made out of. At that time, I was going to 25+ Royals games a year, and I remember seeing Bo make some of the most stunning catches, hitting some of the most gargantuan homeruns, and making some of the most unbelievably ridiculous throws imaginable. He’s the reason I wanted to play left field — and I played it all my life (hell, I still play left field in beer-league softball). Even when Bo was bad he was astonishing. Breaking his bat over his knee after a strikeout. Some people say he swung a bat so hard he broke it — even though he missed the ball. The short length of his career makes it all the more mythical.
That was a magical time in Kansas City, and Bo is a majorpart of my childhood memories. I met the guy twice, and both times he was as humble, nice, and considerate as any professional athlete I’ve ever met (and I’ve met my fair share).
All of that, and I haven’t even mentioned the fact that — for a short time, anyway — he was the greatest running back the NFL had ever seen.
Not even Michael Jordan touches him in my mind. For me, there is absolutely no question about it: Bo Jackson is the greatest athlete of all time. Bar none.
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Microsoft Surface: Behind the Scenes with video
Gotta hand it to Microsoft on this one — thing looks incredible.
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Google Maps: Street View
Holy shit. Google wins. This is freaking awesome.
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LOLCODE
Freaking awesome. Here’s hoping they add
VisitDO NOT WANTfor exception handling. -
Typogrify: easily produce web typography that doesn’t suck
Ever since I’ve worked at the Journal-World, I’ve lamented the fact that the typography on our sites left something to be desired. Straight quotes, widows all over the place, and so forth. And even though our programmers do care about typography (one of them is even quite the type nerd!), I had trouble getting the matter at the top of anyone’s (very long) priority list. I said I’d buy several beers for the first programmer to make John Gruber’s Smartypants a default piece of Ellington, the publishing system we develop and sell. Even that wasn’t enough of an incentive.
That is, until we hired Christian Metts, a designer who also happens to be quite a good programmer. Christian must have really wanted those beers, because he went way above and beyond my request and created a library of Django template filters that is almost certainly the best thing to happen to web typography since Matthew Carter crafted Georgia. It’s called Typogrify, and it’s available at Google Code.
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Rollin' down the street…
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Digital Web: Creative Use of PNG Transparency in Web Design
Digital Web Magazine has published my chapter from Web Standards Creativity, which is all about PNG images and interesting ways to take advantage of their unique alpha channel transparency. If you like this article, be sure to grab the book, which has similar types of content in each chapter, from a whose host of great web designers.
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LOST-Theories.com source code update
A year ago, I created LOST-Theories.com as one of my first Django projects and released the source code, with the idea that anyone interested in Django could use a full example from a working site to help them get off the ground.
Over the past week, I’ve completely revamped that code base with all the knowledge I’ve gained since the original release (which, frankly, is a lot). Again, I’m releasing the course code.
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How not to exit a parking Garage
Am I evil for thinking this guy deserved to die for being so unbelievably idiotic?
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Authors reveal their favorite fonts
This is a fun piece in Slate. Authors discuss their favorite fonts to compose in. Unsurpringly, the most commonly named typeface is Courier and it’s variants, with Times and Century Schoolbook also getting a few nods.
The most insightful answer (well, in my opinion, goes to Caleb Crain, who noted that “obsessing about fonts is a form of procrastination, so of course I have indulged in it ever since I graduated from a TRS-80 Model III to a Macintosh.” Hah. He goes on to select Hoefler Text as his favorite current typeface to compose in — which is a brilliant choice, if I do say so myself.
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Engadget: Is buyshifting the future of television? (part 2)
Long story short: Engadget concludes that, for all but the most couch-potato of homes, buyshifting (i.e. getting your TV from iTunes, Joost, or even on DVD) is a much better value than a typical cable plus DVR package.
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Elgato’s H.264 encoder
I convert a ton of video to H.264 these days for my Apple TV, and while I really don’t have many complaints about the speed, and external hardware-based encoder that would reduce the encoding time by two-thirds for $100 is pretty damn appealing. Thanks, Joseph.
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Mindy Kaling: Things I’ve Bought that I Love
Continuing the theme of celebrities that have regular-old blogs, Mindy (Kelly from The Office) writes simply about stuff she likes. Love it.
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Alyssa Milano: *touch* ‘em all
Alyssa Milano runs a blog about the L.A. Dodgers. It’s a totally typical crazed sports fan blog, only Alyssa is the crazed sports fan. How freaking cool is that? I love the Internet.
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An EPpy, a few LOST-Theories.com updates, tons of Django apps, and some dissapointing news about serestandar.es
It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog entry. The reason isn’t because I’ve had nothing to say about the web. Rather, I’ve been working on a couple of web-related articles for other publications that should see the light of day pretty soon. I’m promise I’ll get back to my regular blogging schedule soon. In the meantime, here’s a handful of updates on various things.
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ESPN.com collects pair of online media awards
ESPN.com won the high-traffic counterpart to KUSports.com’s EPpy award today. I link this mostly because of the KUSports.com mention. :)
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2007 EPpy Winners Announced: BoomerGirl.com wins!
The EPpy awards were presented today, and our BoomerGirl.com (which I designed) won for Best Newspaper-Affiliated Web Site. Congrats to Cathy and the rest of the people involved in BoomerGirl.com. I’m pretty excited about this — gotta admit, having an EPpy award winner on the resume can’t hurt! :)
KUSports.com also won for Best Sports Web Site, a category which it has taken several times. I didn’t design the current iteration of it, but I’m set to redesign it later this year. Big shoes to fill.
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There’s a hole in your Twitter
Twitter’s API doesn’t subscribe to its own privacy mechanisims. In other words, all those for-friend-only tweets you’ve been sending are viewable by anyone using an API app. Whoops.
Am I the only person who has been generally unimpressed by twitter as a web service? Nevermind the fact that I just don’t get very interested in the purpose of the site, but the service itself has largely sucked. The site is sometimes painfully slow, the API is constantly unresponse (I use it myself to collect friends’ twitter status, and I get error e-mails all the time from my script saying the API URL wasn’t responding), they’ve public aired out their dirty laundry with Rails and it’s scalability (or lack thereof), and now they didn’t even bother to make the API care about privacy?
I respect Evan Williams and always thought Blogger and Odeo were quite well-done — but Twitter just seems like it’s made by the same bunch of amateurs that are responsible for MySpace. I’m sure they’re great people, but it sure seems like they have a lot of trouble with their application.
Update: It appears this report was incorrect. Rather, the lack of privacy exhibited in some Twitter API apps have been the fault of those apps, not Twitter itself. I still stand by most of what I said, though. Twitter just seems to have more problems than it’s worth, to me.
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A Wet-Wipe Manifesto
Oh man, I’ve been saying this for years. My analogy has always been: if you slipped and fell in the mud, you wouldn’t wipe off with a dry paper towel and consider yourself clean — so why do you consider your ass clean when you wipe it with dry toilet paper? This guy uses a similar analogy in his brilliant manifesto. Awesome.
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LJWorld.com / Multimedia
A page we’ve always wanted to have on the site but never had taken the time to build. Christian threw it together quite nicely early this week. I think it’s a fun, exploratory view into the various types of content we publish.
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31Three Redesigned
Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain redesigns his tiny agency’s site, and it’s freaking great. Beautiful grid work (looks like a 12-unit grid to me, but I haven’t done the math), awesome colors, great typography, elegant navigation, and a sweet portfolio of work. Great job, Jesse.
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Northwestern University offers journalism scholarships to programmer/developers
This is really awesome news. It’s about time some school acknowledged the need for these types of people. Way to go, Medill!
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Google pays $100 million for Feedburner
The real implications of this probably have to do with advertising in feeds, but I’m personally more interested in the fact that this probably means I’ll be able to track my feed stats in Analytics. Sweet.
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Adrian Holovaty: Leaving The Post to start EveryBlock
Adrian on his big grant, and what he’ll be doing with it. The project is called EveryBlock, and he will be leaving The Washington Post in order to make it happen. Awesome news. Congrats, Adrian!
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Knight News Challenge Winners: Adrian Holovaty
Django creator and web-based journalist Adrian Holovaty won a $1.1 million grant to “create, test and release open-source software that links databases to allow citizens of a large city to learn (and act on) civic information about their neighborhood or block.” If you’ve seen Adrian’s chicagocrime.org, you know the power of this sort of thing. I expect great things. Congrats, Adrian!
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Wikis aren’t for everything…
…and this page proves it.
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TIME: The Last Temptation of Al Gore
TIME says: “Al Gore has fallen out of love with politics. But friends, moneymen and an army of green activists are begging him to run.” A really compelling piece on the former Vice President who both won and lost the election in 2000. Good stuff.
By the way, TIME is one of the few news websites whose design makes me really enjoy reading it. Clean, crisp, bright, simple, elegant. I like it. Of course, I would like to get in and put “Helvetica Neue” before Arial in their stylesheets… :)
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Jacob highlights some recent cool Django apps
I was actually in the process of writing almost this exact same blog entry when Jacob’s post showed up in my feed reader. Frustrating! Not entirely unexpected, though, as he and I were just talking at lunch yesterday about how rich the pool of pluggable apps for DJango is becoming.
Jacob mentions django-openid, django-voting, django-tagging, and django-registration. I’d add django-discussion to the list. And don’t forget that Django already includes app for admin interfaces, comments, feeds, and more. It’s becoming a “just bring your own data model” situation.
Seriously, if you can write a model for some type of data (which takes a max of like 30 minutes for things likes blog posts, bookmarks, photos, recipes, reviews, whatever), and then pull in third party apps to let users register and sign in via OpenID, and then more third-party app to tag, vote on, and discuss your data — haven’t you pretty much covered what 90% of the web apps in the world do?
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BBC: British Timeline
Wow, this is a beautiful visual information display. I love timelines, and this one is about as well-done as I’ve ever seen.
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Kurt Noble redesign
I really like the new KNI site. Parts of it have the richness of a Flash site without actually being one, and the whole thing has a clean, elegant aesthetic that really feels good to me. Not to mention, they have some incredible work in their portfolio.
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Slate: You cannot resist lolcats.
Im in ur mainstream media. I can has world domination?
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Apple releases LOST video game for iPod
Yes, I’ve already bought it. No, I haven’t played it yet. I’ll let you know. The preview looks great.
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LJWorld.com / 24 hours in Lawrence
Another LJWorld.com special section. Visual stylings courtesy of Nathan. I especially love the downtown Lawrence time lapse by Thad Allender.
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Leevi Graham on Virb.com
Another great Virb profile design here. I especially love the mouseover treatment on the friends and group thumbnails. Very good stuff.
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Presentations: RailsConf 2007
A bunch of great presentation slides from this year’s conferences are available at the RailsConf website. Even though I’m not a Rails guy, per se, most of this stuff is equally applicable to development with other LAMP-ish agile development frameworks.
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LJWorld.com: Alcohol violations: Minors in possession
Yet another data-oriented interactive journalism project from our crew. Credit for this one goes to Matt Croydon on the data modeling, importing, and JavaScript, Christian Metts on the visual design, and Christine Metz on the reporting (yes, I said Christian Metts and Christine Metz). Good stuff.
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Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with Simply Measured, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my past clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, Django, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
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