My first mobile blog from my new wordpress iphone app, very sick and very slick. I like phones that make me productive, but I definitely am enjoying using this gadget. Hopefully I’ll start blogging a little more now…

Did you know that item is a freakin’ reserved word in IE? Me either, but the last well spent 45 minutes helped me learn that fantastic piece of information.  Yeah, I probably should be using something more descriptive than item, or prepending it with a single character to describe its data type (sItem), or a million other possibilities.  But getting an untelligible error, and a script debugger that looks at the right line in the wrong file just seems a little asinine to me. Why would I ever go back to using IE?

By the way, I do greatly appreciate the fact that thanks to Scriptaculous the rest of my code works perfectly in IE7, which was forcefully installed on my computer.

As Microsoft has always had painful products to work with, Apple is starting to become evil in the name of the bottom line, Ubuntu or any other flavor of UNIX is starting to seem much more appealing.

I’m about to buy a new laptop and I’m going to keep Windows so I can DJ, but I likely will do a majority of my dev work in Ubuntu so I’ll just have a 2 OSs on there so I can do something of use, like have a local development server that isn’t a pain in the ass to install, configure, and maintain. And does not at all represent the final host of the application. Unless there is an extremely good reason, I won’t be using any Windows boxes as web servers ever again.

Rant is complete, I feel better.

This thing is badass fo sho.  It is built on Eclipse, but nicely packaged with some useful extras meant for HTML/PHP/JS/CSS development. It has syntax highlighting, auto-complete, plenty of code assistance, outline view (standard eclipse stuff), but then for those of us still using FTP for sites, it has a pretty decent built in FTP client that gets the job done.  You might have to supplement with a standard FTP client as well, because unfortunately, everytime I create a new file on my host I have to chmod from 644 to 755. Damn thing leaves every file without execution access to world. Don’t quite get that, but this software otherwise kicks ass.  Does all you need it to except PHP debugging, but I can live without that for these more straight-forward sites.

As a note, you have add the PHP plug-in to get PHP syntax highlighting and code assistance…

It is still in its early releases, but still is very functional.  I definitely have been a happy camper with it.  Next step for me is to get a dev server and just start using SVN to protect myself a little. In the meantime, check out Aptana:  www.aptana.com

This is really a useful tool.  It will generate an animated gif spinner / loading animation based on your background.  But even better, it has a bunch of different animations that are all pretty standard, but who wants to save all these spinners… Nice work yo!

http://www.ajaxload.info

Finally, its time to move into 2007, and its almost 2008. I have been neglecting my blog for some time now and mostly because I was using an old and unexciting platform. And because I was getting ridonculous amounts of spam comments. I have decided finally to move to WordPress, a serious and badass platform for blogging.

I often have thoughts and ideas that I would love to put in a public place and see what other people think, and that is exactly what a blog qualifies as. Very exciting… Stay tuned…

A few weeks ago, I was sitting down preparing to do another site, as I have done many times before. As I was awaiting some sort of inspiration on how to get started, and what direction I should take. My mind was overflowed with other thoughts of discomfort with my current skills. The difficulty was simply that I was not pleased with much of the previous work that I have done, though my clients have been…

Typically I will get started on a project, then at some point into it, I will look back and realize how I could have better done many aspects of the project. I am somewhat of a perfectionist, but more unfortunately, I am one that does not have the patience for doing, then re-doing. Prototyping / creating rough drafts. I typically will delve in, and mold what I have done along the way. But, and to keep the analogy, much of what I do drys to a rough and undesirable shape before the end of the project.

Solutions: planning to create drafts before actually implementing the project, for a useful amount of time. As well, knowing that I will throw out most of what I am doing and start over.

More time spent researching types of design. Note taking. Testing and trying. Reading.

By not following this more thoughtful approach, it has taken me longer to realize design aspects that are more useful, and desirable by end-users.

But now I am putting my effort toward these different and better ways of designing. And not surprisingly, but reassuringly, people have immediately noticed and appreciated these ways of designing.

I am doing my best to be proactive.

So I am doing my best to do good for the people that come to me for work. Obviously this has always been my intent, but now more then ever, I am making stronger efforts to move the quality of my design forward through learning, trying, experimenting, and playing.

Where much of the inspiration / information has come from:
  37 Signals - Web Usability Experts (self proclaimed)
  Jeffrey Zeldman
  Ze Frank
  A List Apart

I have ordered books on CSS and web usability today too in my quest for information. Please pass the Courvoisier.

So a little cheesy to get started…. I know, but one must start somewhere. My effort is simply to use this blog in order to post ideas and thoughts. Random ones. In time, I, or someone more psycho-analytical, may be able to see some sort of coherence among these ideas and thoughts.

Hopefully the psycho-ward won’t be a subsequent final destination. Please, read and enjoy. Though if you are reading this, and there are already many other posts on my blog, you have reached the end. Turn around my friend.