I've been developing my own websites for over 20 years, and doing the odd website work for a few clients lately, and so I keep up with that scene as best as I can.
The amount of stuff you need to know to be a solo web developer in 2021 is kind of mind boggling though, and I concentrate mostly on the design side, along with rudimentary things like HTML, PHP, CSS, and some Javascript.
I aspire to be able to be better at Javascript, and I'd like to learn Ajax properly someday. And get good at making things with three.js.
I like that we can have websites that do all this stuff - it's crazy compared to the rinky-dink sites I learned how to make back in the Geocities days. But I also sort of lament how complicated everything is, too.
I don't want to compile a website before deploying it. I don't want to have to worry about SEO, and compromise (or worse, homogenize) my designs because Google wants things to be a certain way. I don't want to add special code to my websites so Facebook understands the content flow better.
I hate that this stuff is common. It makes the web feel less like a tool for free expression. But if you don't learn it, and don't do it, others will - and then you won't get work.
I haven't been able to keep my blog up as often as I've wanted lately because I've been busy with lots of different things in both personal and professional capacities.
Home Buying
My girlfriend and I are looking at buying a house soon, and as you'd expect, it's a complicated process. We've been spending months combing through home listings online and going to view them in person at open houses or with our Realtor. We've been spending the rest of the time sorting through the details of lenders, the finances, taxes, and so on. My girlfriend has done much more than I have, and I still find it extremely exhausting.
It'll be great, at the end of all this, to go home to a house instead of an apartment, however, and that keeps me going through all the extra work.
Site Crafting
I've also been busy with website jobs. I've been contracted to work on a site for a friend of my girlfriend's uncle's son, and it is in the second revision now. Unfortunately, my laptop hard drive broke (again!) and my working files are all lost, until I have time to plug the drive into my desktop computer to see if I can recover any of it. Normally this wouldn't be much of an issue for a website, because I've usually got an online copy floating around somewhere, but this site needed a Flash element built in, and I never upload FLA files, so I'm probably going to have to rebuild it. Not fun.
I'm also working on a revision to the look of my buddy Andrew's website, noLove Skateboarding. It's coming along really nicely, but because of the increased activity in the aforementioned house hunt, I haven't been able to put as much time into it lately as I would like. "Not enough time in the day" seems to be a recurring theme for me these days.
By the way, the new site isn't live yet, so if you visit the link above, brace yourself for our original janky design.
Marty Decks
On the upside, one of the other projects I've been involved with for noLove (putting my tree painting onto a skateboard), has finally come to fruition - and I even have one of them in my possession now! All things considered, the final product looks pretty nice, and after taking an impromptu trip to one of the local skate shops, I think the art stands out a lot more than a lot of the generic crap out there.
You can buy a noLove tree deck from my buddy Andrew. Drop him a line on Facebook or Twitter.
A list of four things in the world of tech that I find annoying, submitted for your approval in no particular order.
Unboxing videos
I've ranted about this elsewhere, but it's worth repeating; unboxing videos are awful. If there's anything more pathetic to me than sitting around wishing you had some piece of technology, it's doing so while also seeking out and watching other people open up boxes with the desired tech inside.I understand doing research on products you're thinking about buying, but I don't see where the unboxing video fits in with all that. If you want to find out what's actually inside the box, you can find that info on websites or in stores. If you want to see little bits of molded Styrofoam, you've probably got some in boxes you already own sitting around in your house or apartment somewhere.
If you want some new thing that badly, watching someone open up its box isn't going to get you any closer to that goal. Spoiler alert: it's going to be boxed up the same as everything else you've bought. Lots of tape, lots of Styrofoam, lots of plastic. Whoopdy doo.
Purposefully misspelled website/service names
I know that this is probably something that can't really be helped, considering the ever-decreasing amount of URL's available, but there's something that really annoys me about every new website being named in some "edgy" or "cute" misspelling of a simple word.
Flickr. Digg. Pownce. Blippr. Tumblr. Mixx. The lyst goes on.
Have we completely exhausted our reserve of real words for domain names? Has the well of creativity run dry? Seriously annoying.
And you can add to this all the various websites with the words "pop", "crunch", and "mash" in their domain names. Not necessarily misspelled words, but still awful. I don't think I've ever found any site with any of those words in their URL useful in any way whatsoever.
Network searches with Finder
I work in a creative field, and have for years. Unfortunately, this means that most of the time, my employers equip me with a Mac and by extension OS X, which you probably know, is not my preferred operating system.
I don't hate OS X, and actually wish one or two of its features would creep into Windows someday, but there are many quirks and problems with it that nobody ever talks about when they're in the middle of trying to convince you it's worth buying over-priced Apple hardware for. One of those things is the fact that, if you're planning on using it over any type of network, you could be in for some frustration, especially where search is concerned.
The other day I tried searching for a file on our network at work, both of which use OS X. No results were returned, and the spinning "beach ball" appeared, signaling network wait time. So I let it run its course and got back to my work. 10 minutes later, the pinwheel was still showing, and Finder wasn't responding. I forced Finder to quit and then tried to re-open it, but no dice; OS X informed me that Finder can't re-open. And since Finder handles the file saving functions for all the programs I was running, I couldn't save any of my work for a restart. Gah.
And this isn't an isolated incident. In all my years of using OS X, the most problems I've had with it have involved network problems. The only advice I can give, if you absolutely have to work on a Mac, is that if you're planning on doing any major network activity, save your work first.
Organizing media files with Win 7
I've been happy with Windows 7 since I picked it up last year on launch day. It does just about everything better than XP did, and it's nice and snappy to boot. But one thing that absolutely annoys me to no end is the problems I've had trying to organize my music files.
Like many people out there, I've been collecting digital music files for years. A good portion of my music consists of files I ripped myself from CD's I've bought, and most of the rest is digital music I've purchased from Amazon. Over time, as I've bounced between two iPods and about four computers, all with varying amounts of storage, my music has become a bit disorganized. With big hard drives being pretty cheap these days, I've managed to consolidate most of the recent additions to my collection onto one drive, and now I've begun trying to organize it.
Problem is, about 75% of the time I try to move around my music folders, Windows 7 is telling me that there is a file in use and prevents the operation from happening.
After an hour of pure frustration, disabling all music sharing, disabling the folder from being read by Windows 7's music library, disabling Windows Media Player from scanning the folder, and disabling all folder thumbnailing the OS does, it's gotten better. But I still get this error now and then, and it still hurts every time it happens. The file is in use by the OS that is trying to move it.
Isn't it reasonable to suspend the OS from reading the file if a move is being requested? It kills me that with all the great things Windows 7 can do, it still stumbles over something so basic, and so stupid.
So now I have to choose between letting the OS thumbnail my folders, so I can see what's in them without opening them, or making the whole thing look like some kind of file system ghost town, but with the ability to easily move my music around. Awesome.
The one good thing about this is that I've discovered the Local Group Policy Editor, which offers a lot of interesting customization options for Windows 7, under the hood.
Anyway, it feels good to get all that off my chest. Some of it may be unreasonable, and you might disagree with me, but there it is. Sound off in the comments if you have any extreme likes or dislikes in my list or let me know about some of your own tech world annoyances! I'm sure I'll be back with more in the future.
Lately I've been working with Andrew Gelber, a buddy of mine, to help get his skateboarding company off the ground. So far this has included creating a logo, re-skinning a WordPress theme, and doing lots of other various graphic projects. It's not a lot of work, and it's been fun and challenging to see how creative we can get.
The above rat image was created to be screened onto the bottom of a line of skateboards Andrew will be putting out soon. I sent it off to him yesterday, and I'm excited to see the final product. It's a remake of the lino-print below, that I made in college for one of my art classes:
The no Love website can be found here. it's still pretty basic, and definitely a work in progress, but it's getting better all the time. If you're in the Denver, CO area and are interested in this sort of thing, give it a look.
Though I am not a diehard Google fan, I usually use Google whenever I need to search for something, and I take advantage of a few of the services they offer like Gmail and their online calendar. Lately though, I've been a bit intrigued with Microsoft's revamped Live Search, Bing. I've been frequently jumping back and forth between Google and Bing to compare search results, especially when I have trouble finding something.
So far, I've been pretty impressed with Bing - it almost always returns just about everything I would find on Google, and the image and video search function on Bing is actually a cut above those found on Google. And though I do enjoy the simplicity of the Google landing page, which is one of the reasons why I think it became so popular in the first place, I do find myself drawn to the Bing landing as well; they almost always have a beautiful image on display, and the fact boxes you can mouse over are usually interesting.
Bing has been running a contest over the last few weeks, in order to help them find a jingle for the site. The contest simply asked people to record their idea for a jingle, and then submit it to the Bing YouTube page, where the winner would be chosen based on number of views and quality of rating.
The winner was crowned yesterday, and while the video is odd and slightly disturbing, I have to admit - the song is kind of catchy. Catchy in the way that the simple tune gets stuck in your head for about an hour after viewing. Behold the winning video:
The winner, Jonathan Mann, has been creating (and posting on YouTube) a song a day, and the video he submitted to the Bing jingle contest was his 202nd creation. Sure, it's decidedly awful, but isn't that pretty much what's expected from contests like this? Isn't being awful a prerequisite for running a viral internet campaign?
Anyway, I got a kick out of it. And almost as big of a kick out of the sourpuss people posting about how terrible it is directly on the Bing blog. It's pretty easy to pick out the people who are seemingly just mad that Bing isn't the pile of garbage they hoped it would be. But their comments are funny, nonetheless.
Also, I'm happy to report that Twitter has been down for hours now. Apparently, it was taken out by hackers early this morning. Let's hope it stays down.
Update: It looks like it's tentatively back up now. The world has its largest collection of useless information back again.
