Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

I hate tag clouds, there were obviously must have been created by a programmer (no offense). The default offering completely lack any sort of hierarchy or organization. While increasing the size of the tags does convey which tags are the most popular, it certainly is not the most elegant or clean solution. Up until a couple of weeks ago I had no solution other than to remove the tag cloud, or just give a simple list of tags which is more of a copout than a solution. That was until now, or before I conceived the idea for the tag grid, which I will share with you in a step-by-step how to.

One of the reasons that I love twitter other than its addictive properites and ease of integration with other services is the ability to design your own templates or themes. Part of the reason I love this feature is because it is so easy to use. Instead of flooding users with numerous features you are supplied with an easy to use and simple system that allows for almost endless customization. Part of the creativity involved in twitter themes is actually exploiting the system in order to create a beautiful result. That being said, I have decided to share some of the themes I have used recently with my readers. Also, depending on the success of these themes, I will be adding more in the future.

Maybe like me, you are forced to live with a Comcast digital receiver box or digital video recorder. According to the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, Comcast currently is the largest US cable provider with roughly 24,156,000 subscribers. With this large of a user base Comcast has a responsibility to offer a streamlined and efficient user experience if they hope to keep customers happily using their services. Luckily for them, I cannot choose another cable provider or I already would have, damn oligopolies! This lack of competition is exactly why I think that Comcast has done nothing to make the user experience on its DVR boxes more enjoyable.

Ever since the iPhone originally came out industry experts have been buzzing about he future of the mobile web. If you are reading this blog, you are probably very aware of the face that Apple announced the iPhone SDK, and other new features that will be launching this July. With this announcement (read the details on Engadget and the roundup on gizmodo) I finally decided to make the plunge, and not because of the new features. But why would I decide to buy a $400 phone if I wasn’t really that interested in the release of the new features and I hadn’t already made the move?

Today I was thinking about what is referred to as the “digg effect” and how awesome it would be if my blog finally made that jump to the digg homepage. Like most people who have came close to making the front page of dig know, as some point fear takes over. “Will I run out of bandwidth, Will my host turn off my account?” Then for some reason I recalled an article I recently read about Denial of Service Attacks, and how your server can be crashed by hackers utilizing these attacks. Where this gets interesting though, is when you think about how a web server could be attacked at the same time that an article of page is pushed to the front of dig or a similar social bookmarking site.

Another tip of the hat to Elliot Jay Stocks, he has release quite possibly to most useful download I have come across in months. With the release of the “Starkers” theme Elliot has created the foundation that we designers need to quickly develop custom Wordpress themes. By removing all of the unnecessary code found within the basic Wordpress theme the process of starting from scratch is now infinitely easier. In addition our code will be extremely cleaner, and much easier to debug. I applaud Elliot for releasing the very thing that every Wordpress designer has dreamed of since they first time they touched a style.css file.

Earlier today I came dangerously close to going over my monthly bandwidth limit on my old host. Because of this, and the rapid growth this site has received over the last month I have decided to purchase a domain and hosting package. There are a still few bugs to iron out from the move, but the site should be almost completely functional. This site has grown so fast in fact that I think I may have to design a new theme for positive space, possibly in more of a magazine format to accommodate all the new features I am planning.

So welcome to positivespaceblog.com, and make sure to update your bookmarks!

I recently ran across the article Do not download WordPress themes distributed by 3rd party sites on the 5thiryone blog. Apparently there are a number of 3rdparty free wordpress theme sites that are popping up all over the net that are including malicious code in the themes. What does this mean? Basically, the sites are placing small snippets of code in the themes that could potentially open up your server for their Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. This is very bad for your as a webmaster because not only does it waste your precious bandwidth, but it can also get your ip banned and cause numerous problems with your hosting possibly even getting your hosting canceled.

Jason Fried has been giving a great presentation regarding project management, and productivity which I will be posting a summary of later tonight. However I wanted to step away from the presentation to let you know that he just announced that Campfire is now available on the iphone. So point your mobile safari browsers to the site to see.

update:
Well the SEED Conference was just amazing, however it has left me just utterly exhausted and with soo much information that I could never make any sense of it tonight. However I guarantee that I will be posting some of my thoughts on the event tomorrow (All of them extremely positive). As a side note, I was randomly drawn to receive a free tshirt designed by Segura Inc. and a free blank DVD from 5inch.com, you gotta love free swag!

Earlier on this month I posted about the IE6 Deathblow (Link to my old blogger.com blog) and how we should stop supporting older non standards compliant browsers in an effort to motivate users to upgrade their browsers. While the idea was to relaunch your sites on May 1st along with the CSS reboot. Since I am currently on schedule for a January 1st release of my new blog, I will be using it as an opportunity to perform a study. I will study the amount of users visiting my site and the overall traffic using google analytics and see how the the results change over time