Hover.com – Simple Domain Name’s
Wed, June 9th 2010 at 12:20am
For a long time now I have been a GoDaddy user, simply because of the low price and advertising blitz. When I was looking for a Domain name they always just popped to mind. I suffered through using their appallingly complex user interface, and getting nickel and dimmed for essential services.
Then recently on twit.tv I saw an ad for Hover.com and from the screenshots of the site I could see right away that they are doing things better. The site is very Web 2.0, clean efficient and just there to help you get your work done. more »
The Google Wave is Here?!
Sat, August 8th 2009 at 10:32pm
I was just listening to This Week in Google episode two and they were discussing PubSubHubBub which is a Google Code project implementing push notifications on the web. The basic idea is that instead of having multiple clients poll your website feeds for new posts you site will push the content out immediately when you post it. So for example if I have this enable on my site when I hit the publish button my post is stored on the server, and simultaneously a ping is sent to Pubsubhubbub (terrible name fyi) with the new content. That is then pushed to anyone who is subscribed to the feed.
With Google Wave everyone is focused on the application, and will it replace e-mail. But for me the Google Wave application is more of a technical demo than the whole architecture. If the Google Wave application fails it does not mean that Google Wave the architecture fails. The Pubsubhubbub project is a perfect example of this, we are already getting Wave functionality today without even having the Wave application. If you use Feedburner you can already enable “PingShot” which use push notifications to instantly push your posts to compatible sites. Right now very few sites support it, I believe Friend Feed is one of them. But when this sort of technology catches on it will already implement one of the biggest features of Wave which is the instantaneous updates from the web.
When this is made two-way then people will be able to instantly post comments on your posts from their consuming applications, and even collaborate on Wiki style pages from Within Wave applications.
So in short Google Wave is more of a way of doing things than one application, or even one protocol. And while it will not replace e-mail anytime soon, it will certainly change the way we do things on the web.
WordPress For the Win?
Wed, August 5th 2009 at 03:03am
Well after giving Drupal 6 a quick shot I decided that it is no longer for me. Drupal has always been a kitchen sink kind of system, and that’s what it’s meant to be. After looking at all the configuration options, and how many issues I ran into during a simple upgrade and updating a theme I decided it was time to look for something a little more polished. Drupal is still great for creating a large community site, but if you are just looking for a blog or a central place for all your online stuff then it’s just overkill.
So with that I decided to give WordPress a try, and initial impressions are good. I have a blog up and running, and I am currently working on getting my old posts out of Drupal (much much harder than it should be) and importing into WordPress. I found a few tutorials for the move from Drupal, but most involve direct manupulation of the database, which in my eyes is a bad idea. So instead I am writing a small script that exports some basic Drupal post data into an XML file, then use the WordPress Import modules to import the data. So far it’s working well.
WordPress just seems much more focused on what I need right now, which is basically a blog. But it also seems to offer a lot of extensibility via modules and themes. I am about 60% of the way through creating a custom theme and it all seems quite well though out. Hopefully everything will be all back together by Monday. This will teach me to stop being lazy and just make a Linux server for testing next time, I was sure I could get everything upgraded in a day or two. 
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CodeMonkeyX.net: Version 6
Wed, July 29th 2009 at 03:21am
Been working on a new design for the site over the weekend and I am really happy with what I have so far. I took a few cues from twitter, after using it for a week or so I really love the simplicity of how everything works. It really motivated me to try and think of simpler ways to do and display things.
As part of the design I felt a little nostalgic and wanted to put a version number or founded on date on the new design. So I went to the Wayback Machine on the Internet Archive to view past versions of my site. It’s was really fun reading some of the old posts, what I thought was important then and the terrible design.
When you look back at things from several years ago you wonder if you will be looking at the stuff you are doing now and laughing at it ten years in the future.
The design is just a starting point right now, and the main thing I need to do is figure out how to get rails to do everything I want.
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Drupal or SquareSpace
Thu, June 18th 2009 at 10:08pm
As you have probably noticed I have been more active in the past week on the site. Maybe it’s the sunny weather?, maybe it’s the fact I have stopped playing WoW every night? Who knows. But either way I am working on the site again and after coming back after an extended time this older version of Drupal seems inadequate. It’s time again to upgrade, but to what. There are a few new options around so I have been looking into a couple of them.
Revision3 and Twit.tv are two of my favorite sites to visit, and as any fan of those site will know they bombard you with SquareSpace ads. So know that I am looking into options I decided the give them a look first. After signing up for their free trial I was quite impressed with the WYSIWYG editing features. I quickly had a decent looking blog site up and running in a few hours.
The thing I like the most is just that they take care of all the little things for you, like layout CSS, blockquote formatting, and story entry. These little details always seem to end up taking the most time.
The post entry system is also nice.
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Zimian Design Studio
Mon, February 19th 2007 at 03:02am
It’s been quite awhile since my last post, and that’s because things have been pretty busy around here. For the past few years I have been working as a Graphic Designer/Color Print Technician for a whole sale print company. The job started off as a temporary thing while I was looking for a software development job, but the more I worked with graphic designs the more I liked doing it.
So after working and learning about graphic design, and using my previous knowledge of web design and programming I decided to start my own little business, Zimian Design Studio. At the moment I am mainly focused on print designs, but I am also planning on doing web designs once I get settled in. I think my experience with Drupal module and theme development might be a good place to start.
Anyway, that’s what’s been going on and why the site has been pretty barren for the past several weeks. The new site is for my tiny company is up at Zimian Design Studio, not much there at the moment, but I hope to add more content later. Right now most of the important stuff is there. Keep me in mind if you need some design work done.
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SimpleBits.com a little too Simple.
Fri, December 1st 2006 at 03:43am
UPDATE 12/4/06: It looks like the site was just updated. And the new design looks great. I still do not see why the site had to go down for several days, but atleast it was not weeks.
One of the web designer blogs I have always admired the most has been Simplebits.com. Recently however the site has been coming up as unformatted html. At first I thought it was a problem with my browser cache, but after clearing the cache nothing. Then I assumed it must be the server and it will be fixed in short order. I was wrong.
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