Welcome to Version 5 of Jasongraphix! I’ve since redesigned, but I wanted to keep the old version of the website up for old times’ sake. Feel free to have a look around, but when you’re done, be sure to c’mon over to the current version.

Just a quick post to let you all know I’ve moved my RSS feed to Feedburner. Please take a moment to swap out the URL in your reader with http://feeds.feedburner.com/jasongraphix

If you don’t do this, you will always get to see this lovely post as my latest. That is, until the old feed URLs don’t exist anymore. Why wouldn’t they exist anymore? Wouldn’t you like to know? Actually, I’m quite proud to announce that I’ve started on a major redesign ofthis site. At the same time, I’m a little leery about admitting that fact as I have no idea how long it will take. It might be January, or it might be the Spring, or it might even be when Expression Engine 2.0 is publicly released - who knows? All I can say is that “I’m working on it!”. So re-subscribe to the new feed address, have a cup of hot cocoa and enjoy the holiday season.

They’re is doing it again! To celebrate their 10 year anniversary, Dreamhost set up a coupon code to save $110.10 off their standard $119.40 yearly rate, which gets you a full year of hosting for less than ten bucks.

I first signed up with them back in July of 2005 when they were running a similar deal, and I am more than satisfied with the service I’ve received since then. While they have had a few problems over the last several years, you can’t find a better bargain for the price. When a deal like this comes along though, it gives the old “you get what you pay for” idiom whole new meaning.

Dreamhost used to have a set of 4 tiered plans for different levels of hosting, but now they just have one massive standard plan which includes:

• 500GB of Disk Space (Increasing weekly by 2GB)
• 5TB of Bandwidth (Increasing weekly by 40GB)
• 1 Free Domain Registration
• Ability to host unlimited domains/subdomains
• Unlimited Emails, MySQL Databases, and FTP/Shell Users.
• One-Click Installer for: WordPress, phpBB, ZenCart, Joomla, and more.
• Ruby on Rails support
• …and a whole lot more

Even if you are happy with your current hosting plan and have no plans of migrating to a new host, the free domain registration alone makes this deal worthwhile.

1. Go to Dreamhost and click on the lemony, web 2.0 “Sign Up NOW!” starburst
2. Select “Pay Yearly @ $9.95/mo: 9% off + no setup = $119.40”
3. Choose your domain name and enter your personal info
4. Enter “101010” in the Promo Code box
5. Checkout for only $9.30!
Enjoy!

After putting it off for a long while now, I finally upgraded to version 1.29 of Mint. Initially I planned to upgrade, but instead I decided to drop the MySQL tables and start from scratch, installing only peppers (Mint plugins) that I intend to use.

As I was cruising through the latest peppers at Peppermint Tea, I came across a post that the author of the Pathstats Pepper was giving away 250 copies of it for free on his 25th birthday. His birthday was on July 19th and as of the 26th, he had only given away 165, so I went ahead and snagged my free copy. Even though he normally only charges $3.80 (the price of a Marble Mocha Macchiato at Starbucks), I probably would not have payed to give the plugin a shot. After toying around with it for the last few minutes though, I’m starting to feel the love. Here’s what the Pathstats panel looked like after a few minutes online:

As you can see, 6 of the 7 visitors shown were “one hit wonders”. They came, they saw, they left. That’s usually the way most search engine visitors behave, which is why I advocate conditional advertising targeted at these types of visitors. If they do happen to wander on to another page of my site, the ads are turned off because the PHP that tells the site whether or not to show ads is based on the referring URL. There is one visitor however who saw more than one page of my site before leaving. Oddly enough, that person came from a query at MSN for “removing popcorn ceilings” and then they browsed around for over 6 minutes. To see the navigation path of any of the users within Pathstats, all you have to do is click on a row to expand it. If you click on the image above, you can see the expanded view of my amazing 6 minute visitor. I can see this little pepper being a handy tool for analyzing site traffic. Sure, Google Analytics can do that, but it’s so bulky and saturated with unnecessary features. That’s why Mint is still my most used method of website stat tracking.

I have entered the dark side. I now serve Google Adsense ads on my site. :) I mentioned this idea last week and that I only wanted to serve contextual ads, and only to the 87% of people who were visiting my site via search engine referral. As it turns out, conditionally serving ads wasn’t very hard at all. I woke up early on Saturday and before my wife woke up, I had it all working.

To keep the code simple I determined whether or not someone was coming from a search enging by checking for “q=” or “p=” in their referring url. MOST search engines use one of these 2 variable names in their query string for the search terms.

1. Check for “q=” or “p=” in the referer and set a variable in the header include. Simplified PHP: Thanks Ryan.

   //Should we show Google Ads?
   $referer = $_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"];
   $showads = preg_match("/[qp]=/i", $referer) > 0;
   

2. Edit my MT Individual Entry Archive template to insert a “large rectangle” ad unit between every 15th comment in the comment loop.

   <?php if ($showads && <MTCommentOrderNumber> % 15 == 0){ ?>
   <script type="text/javasctipt>...</script>
   <?php } ?>
   

3. Place another “skyscraper” ad unit in my sidebar.

   <?php if ($showads){ ?>
   <script type="text/javasctipt>...</script>
   <?php } ?>
   

That’s it. Pretty simple really. Google only allows you to display 3 ad units per page, but they control that themselves. So, even if you have 20 javascript ad sense requests on a page, Google will only render the first 3. So on pages that have over 45 comments, there will be ads below the 15th, 30th, and 45th comment and that’s it. On pages that have less than 15 comments, only the sidebar ad will show up.

Example of page with only comment ads:
Google “Popcorn Ceiling Removal” and click on my page.

Example of page with only sidebar ad:
Blingo Search “win at blingo” and click on my page.

I read through the AdSense Terms & Conditions and this type of conditional display of AdSense for Content blocks doesn’t seem to violate any rules. If anyone finds out somehow that it does, please let me know. I would recommend this technique to anyone who gets a lot of search engine traffic to specific posts on their personal site. I don’t think it’ll help you build your adsense empire (LOL), but I’ve been making a few bucks a day since I set it up.

When it comes to making money from my personal site, I generally shy away from the idea. I’ve been a banner-ad/popup/sidebar-ad hater since I first started using the web, so why would I EVER want to put such them on my own site. Well, for one, I’m curious. I’d like to know what the payout is on these things. While you’ll NEVER see a girating pig with state abbreviations on my site begging you to refinance now (who clicks on that crap?), I’ve thought a few times about adding Yahoo or Google ads that might be relevant to the content of a particular post.

How Not to Annoy Your Regulars

Personally, I don’t find Google AdSense style ads that annoying. Sometimes I even click through them if one of the links look interesting, but they usually blend into the site so well that I look right past them. However, I still don’t think bloggers should ever present ads to their regular users. Who is left, you ask? Search engine visitors. According to Google Analytics, over 87% of my visitors are first timers:

According to Mint (Yes, I’m a stats junkie…) Most of those people are coming in via searches for random things like popcorn ceiling, publix sushi, and my favorite, the blingo search for I want to win at blingo. Somehow I get top-ten plus search engine rankings for a lot of really random keywords.

While I don’t want to serve ads to anyone who reads my rss feed, or visits the site via links from my friends sites, I don’t feel bad about serving relevant text ads to the throngs of people who want to ask me all kinds of silly questions about getting rid of their popcorn ceiling. Don’t get my wrong, I appreciate those visitors, so I won’t go serving them girating pig refinance ads. However, if they came here via a search, maybe they’d get something out of some related AdSense links. My plan is to serve ads below my sidebar for anyone coming from a search engine. I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to do this yet but there are a lot of engines out there. I’ll probably look for query string clues like &q= on the referrer url rather than going by domain. I’m open to suggestions though if anybody has a better idea.

So Which Service Should I Use?

I’ve applied for a beta membership for the Yahoo! Publisher network which Dustin Diaz says is far superior to the Google program, but then, Dustin works for the big Y! Anybody else have any experiences with AdSense they’d like to share to convince me one way or the other. Dustin, feel free to add your 2 cents as well, I was just pickin’ on ya. :)

I had a few people say they liked the animated logo rollover in the upper right corner of my new design. How did I do it? Well I’m glad you asked. It’s a Non-Preloading CSS Rollover Transparent Animated Gif Background Image Link. What? Too many adjectives? No way! The more the better, so…Yea! It’s bound to be at least as popular as Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper.

Let me first say that designing a new css theme for an existing XHTML site (especially when I’ve learned a lot since I wrote the original XHTML) is a pain in the butt. I would much rather start from scratch with a new XHTML template and all new css…but in this case, I just wanted a new theme and I avoided the temptation to re-write all the XHTML. Well, when I was creating this new theme for the site, I noticed that I had a link with my logo in it as part of the xhtml. In the 1900s theme, I was hiding that link, since I only wanted it to serve as a header/home-button for the non-styled version of the site. For the new theme however, I planned on putting in some css to hide the img tag inside of it and use it as an absolutely positioned design element for the site. When I made my Photoshop mockup, I planned for this with the “Making this place feel like home.” starburst logo thingy you see to your upper right.

In my typical “that’s just not good enough” fashion, I decided that… it wasn’t good enough. I decided to make the image into a rollover and that I was going to use the tried and true non-preloading method of doing css rollovers that involves creating a background image with the hover and non-hover states adjacent to one another, and toggling the background position in the CSS in the :hover state for my link. I would explain this here, but it has been well documented here, here, here, here, and here.

OK, So that’s the Non-Preloading CSS Rollover Background Image Link. What about the Transparent and Animated part? In short, Animated came first and Transparent was a necessary evil. I made this nice little 3 frame gif animation of the starburst rotating and incorporated it into the rollover image and realized once I got it in place that it covered up part of my ceiling beams. So I decided to take advantage of the full power of the mighty GIF format to make it Transparent AND Animated. After all that explanation, I give you the final image, the Transparent, Animated part of my Non-Preloading CSS Rollover Transparent Animated Gif Background Image Link:

Weighing in at only 20kb, I think it’s an impressive little 3 frame transparent animated gif. I could sit and watch it spin all day long.

Here it is at 7pm (EST) on Halloween night. The “Trick-or-Treaters” are just starting to pour in and I’m here in the office with the candy bowl finalizing the switch of Jasongraphix over to it’s new default theme “Contemporary Home”. I initially started this new theme in late August to commemorate the purchase of my wife and I’s first home, but the progress was so slow that I decided to sign up for the 2^nd biannual CSSReboot to give myself a solid deadline. That decision made for a tough couple weeks, but I am very happy with the results.

You can think of it as a halloween costume…that this site will be wearing for a long time. The initial “1900s Scrapbook” style theme was featured at CSSVault, Stylegala, Screenspire, i-marco’s Choice, and yes, even Jason Santa Maria’s Oddities and Diversions list. Since there are over 900 people participating in the Fall 2005 CSSReboot, I don’t suspect the new theme will receive quite as much attention, but I definitely think it’s an improvement over the old design and a much needed change of scenery.

The good news is that whether you like, or don’t like my new theme, you can change it to your own taste. If you prefer the previous the old turn-of-the-century look, just use the “select style” dropdown box on the homepage and select 1900s. If you’d rather see the site with minimal or no styling, you can do that too from the style selector. Well, the kids outiside are wearing out our doorbell and pounding on the door so I better get back to my duties as a homeowner on Halloween. Enjoy!

Update: I’m not sure how “legal” this is, and please don’t abuse it, but you can Click Here (★ ★ ★ ★ ★) to give my site a 5 star vote on CSSReboot. I got frustrated with telling people how to browse to my site to vote for it, and their system is pretty simple, so I set this up. I guess it’d only be fair if I also gave you the opportunity to give me a 1, 2, 3, or 4 as well.

I can access my sites via FTP, but I’m getting nothing on HTTP. It seems like every few days there has been some morning outtages. I mentioned this in my last service ticket. For now though, please get me back up as soon as possible.

This is an excerpt from an email I sent to support at my current webhost this morning. My site was down for about an hour. They responded relatively quickly, restarted apache, apologized, and I was back online again but I’m tired of it already. There’s usually never a really long outtage, just short annoying ones. AM downtimes, server slowdowns, and occasional MySQL connection issues are the most common. I’ve said before that I’m getting what I paid for, and I still agree. I will never decide on a webhost again based on price. From now on, if I plan to switch hosts, I’ll choose based on user recommendation.

In the recommendation department, there seems to be one blindingly obvious choice: Dreamhost. I’m really not one to follow crowds…well, maybe I am…but a lot of people have placed their chips and their honest word on this host:

• D. Keith Robinson - Web Hosting
• Scrivs - Dreamhost
• Mike Davidson - Why I Use Dreamhost

Now I know that most people who recommend Dreamhost do so inserting their own referral links (like I just did there), but I am honestly interested in finding a host that suits my needs which I can rely on. I can fix most anything I can break, so as long as the servers aren’t failing (flailing?) on their own, then I don’t care so much about support. From what I’ve read on Dreamhost’s website and from various review sites, they seem like the perfect host for me. If anyone has any negative experience with them and would like to point me in another direction, please feel fee to try. Otherwise, I’ll be switching come November when my prepaid year with my current host runs out.

Back to the crowd following thing… I saw the MIT Weblog Survey link on Clagnut and decided to participate. I’m looking forward to seeing the results.

Many thanks for the email heads up, Shawn. When I designed this site (and particularly the graphics that make up the site) I did so striving to come up with something original. I had one instance a while back where someone was using my graphics and css which was obviously unpolished and unprofessional but this…this is impressive.

Click the images above for the life-size versions. I take screenshots of things like this for two reason. 7d7846cf73c303c5534111928f6b0dc0

Apparently this is a site for a band/guy named Wade Bowen. Well Wade, I don’t know how much you paid these guys…but it was too much. Unfortunately I don’t have time right now to do any freelance work, but seeing as how you’re going to need a new design, and considering the shady nature of your current firm, perhaps I could direct you to some designers/firms that won’t rip off the latest CSSVault design.

And to you, All Access Today, I hope you’ve noticed the traffic I’ve been directing your way. I’ve included your name and the name of your client in this post for a reason - Google Rank. You probably don’t want that kind of publicity, so if you would like me to remove this post you should: Change the look of, or take down http://www.wadebowen.com/ and contact me to explain your actions - particularly the reason you thought you could copyright this work.

Update: I just had a friendly IM conversation with a member of the Galleywinter forums where things are a apparently a little heated about this issue. He wanted to hear my side of the story and clear the air a bit. I’m glad he contacted me. The truth is that I have nothing against Wade Bowen, but I am still a little upset with his webdesign company. I have contacted All Access Today to request that the background be removed. They informed me that their “junior developer” got the image from a public forum for free background images. I responded with the following request:

I have posted details on my site of what I thought was a blatant ripoff of my work. If such a public forum for free background images exists, my issue is with that forum, not with your company and I would like to amend this post. If you or your junior developer cannot produce a direct link to the forum and string where my graphic is being disbursed, then I have no reason to believe this is the truth.

As of 3:30pm EST they have completely replaced the image, for which I am grateful, but All Access has yet to respond to my request for the source of their free background image.

I DESPISE comment spam, referrer spam, and any other type of Spam that doesn't come in a can. ...and I'm not so found of the canned stuff either. I have to admit that MT Blacklist has made my life a little easier. Adding some filters on my .htaccess file has also helped to alleviate my referrer spam issues. After employing these two simple fixes, I'm down to just a few small bites of spam per week. As I started to investigate the referrer spam that was making it in, I noticed something peculiar, a lot of "Account Terminated" pages that look strikingly similar. All that was changing was the way they worded the fact that the account was terminated and the colors on the page.

I did some Googling and there is a lot of buzz about these pages out there. The one sure thing is that no account was terminated. These domains were generated for this very purpose, to be link to our blogs and get linked back to. I'm sure that these nimnods are up to something. It's probably a scam to find blogs for which referrer links are posted. By doing this, they can better focus their spamming techniques. Because "Account Terminated" is so generic a term though, and because the rest of the text on the page is formatted so oddly (sometimes it's not even really english), it's hard to get search results on... Until now. Hopefully a lot of you reading this are coming from search engines wondering the same things I was. If you have any more information regarding this referrer spam, please post comments. Now...for the search engines, here's a listing of domains with their messages. I've also pinged the domains for their IP, and did a whois so I could provide you with a name to blame. Notice any patterns here? Time for some good ole IP blocking.

http://www.mor-lite.org/
This entire detail is now cancellation - Due to miss-proper use of the hosting account
ACCOUNT TERMINATED !
Domain Registered by: Sarahi Calista
IP: 161.58.59.8

http://www.stories-on-cd.org/
The log is now being canceled - Due to miss-proper use of the hosting account
ACCOUNT TERMINATED !
Domain Registered by: Sarahi Calista
IP: 161.58.59.8

http://www.tecrep-inc.org/
The entire legend is now in shutdown - Due to miss-proper use of the hosting account
ACCOUNT TERMINATED !
Domain Registered by: Sarahi Calista
IP: 161.58.59.8

http://www.atlanta2000.org/

This Following report is under TOS closing - Due to miss-proper use of the hosting account

ACCOUNT TERMINATED !

Domain Registered by: Sarahi Calista

IP: 161.58.59.8

http://www.psychexams.org/

The component is currently being closed - Due to miss-proper use of the hosting account

ACCOUNT TERMINATED !

Domain Registered by: Sarahi Calista

IP: 161.58.59.8

http://www.twinky.org/
The index is in closing order - Due to miss-proper use of the hosting account
ACCOUNT TERMINATED !
Domain Registered by: Sarahi Calista
IP: 161.58.59.8

This Post says that fidelityfunding.net had the same type of page up. Fidelityfunding.net though is registered to:
Administrative Contact:
Reece, Thomas (NIC-21871)
contact100@team-support-24x7.net
Thomas Reece
249 W 89 Street
NY, US 10024
Phone: 2128732251

Update (2/10/06) - In the last few weeks I've been getting a lot more spam. Not on my entire site, but on this one post. The content of this spam has been very typical, but the domains have been mostly subdomains of some of the "free website" services. I rarely get people commenting on my site that feel a need to post their links to theirdomain.blogspirit.com or msn or google groups...so I started blocking the entire domains. As I close the comments on this post, I thought I'd share a list of the domains I've blocked since this started happening. -Enjoy

• angelcities.com
• graffiti.net
• webspawner.com
• homepagez.com
• melbart.com
• mediamonitors.org
• freecities.com
• envy.nu
• bizhat.com
• free30.com
• questh.com
• galaxy99.net
• 1website.net
• freespaces.com
• createdollz.com
• blogspirit.com
• cyberturf.com
• zoomshare.com
• freehostltd.com
• 741.com
• myblog.de
• hostdepartment.com
• uk.groups.yahoo.com
• cybcity.com
• tollfreepage.com
• oddworldz.com
• groups.google.com
• ibnsites.com
• megaone.com
• 5u.com
• friendpages.com
• haywired.com
• kogaryu.com
• hostingisus.com
• cafe150.com
• myblog.com
• 100free.com
• bebto.com
• jamieweb.com
• blogs.ihola.net
• spaces.msn.com
• psend.com
• domaindx.com
• speedsurf.to
• webspace-kostenios.com
• xmail.net
• goto-site.net
• 10mbweb.com

How do you know that you’ve done a good job as a designer? Every time I’ve ever created a new design in the form of a website, or a print piece, or a painting I always try to get feedback. Interestingly enough, even when I think I’ve done a killer job, I can never predict what the responses to my work will be. I’ve designed very rushed and generic website design demos that clients have fallen in love with. On the other hand, I’ve designed demos that were stunning examples of cutting edge design and been asked, “Could you make it more green, get rid of the rounded corners, and just re-do the top section?” So how DO you know?

The new design for jasongraphix has been up for exactly two weeks today, and I’ve been getting lots of great feedback on all aspects of the design and workings of the site. Some good, some bad, but all helpful. It wasn’t until today though, that I’ve felt really proud of my new design. Why is that you ask? Because people are stealing it!

I guess the best part of creating unique graphics and textures for a site design is knowing how easily they will be spotted when used by others. Apparently Dale Cruse - the “designer” of Big Bottom (feeder) offers:

“Complete website design with web standards technologies including HTML, XHTML, DHTML, JavaScript, CSS, Writing, Editing, Photography and others upon request.”

Apparently he took a different meaning from Cameron Moll’s article, “Good Designers Copy, Great Designers Steal” than I did.

A friend of mine noted this weekend that the calendar that shows up on my archive pages wasn’t working properly:

When looking at one of your archived entries, say:
20 inch Intimidation
the calendar shows all the red days with posts before the currently shown entry, but only the first entry following it instead of an accurate look at the whole month.

The error was due to a very simple principle that I had overlooked when creating my individual archive pages, MTCalendar isn’t dynamic. I don’t know how I missed this, but when you publish an entry in Movable Type, an archive page for that entry is created. If you include the MTCalendar in the template for that page, it produces the calendar showing all of the entries up to that date. If you publish another entry later, it will not show up on that calendar because it wouldn’t be updated unless you republished the entire site.

I thought this would be a well documented problem for which I could Google up dozens of fixes, but I was wrong. I couldn’t find a single solution. After about an hour of trial and error brainstorming, I had an answer.

In order to make the calendar dynamic, I had to modularize it. My initial idea was to create a second monthly date-based archive template and then include it on my individual entry archives. Because I could only have one preferred monthly archive, I had to settle for making it a weekly archive with the Archive File Template set to:

<$MTEntryDate format="%Y/%m"$>/calendar.php

This way, every archive/YYYY/MM folder has a file called calendar.php in it. Whenever I publish an entry during a given week, the monthly calendar file will be rebuilt by movable type. Since each individual entry file includes that calendar.php file, there will never be an out of date calendar on the site.

It is November 2nd, so I should point out the title isn’t a political statement. Or maybe it is.

Update: Nope. Definitely not a political statement.

Regardless, welcome to the 20th Century! That’s the surprise theme I picked for the redesign of jasongraphix. It’s a little bit wicked worn, a little bit Carousel of Progress, and a whole lot of turn-of-the-century postcard art.

Most of the images you will see in this theme are either inspired by, or are photoshopped scans of actual postcards from the early 1900s. The story behind the theme goes back to February of 2003, when my wife, my sister, my brother and I took a photography trip to an old abandoned house that was soon to be destroyed to make room for commercial property. My hometown of Vero (aka Zero) Beach, isn’t known as much except a sleepy beach town, and the home of Indian River Fruit. Recently however, Vero has made headlines as ground zero for both hurricanes Frances and Jeanne.

The abandoned, overgrown, Spanish-style house was located along state road 60, and had no-doubt been a shelter for the homeless and vagrant since its last owners moved out.

It sat way back on several acres of property which also featured a two-story guesthouse and an amazing algae filled pool.

The mansion-like home was in a very dilapidated state, but with at least 6 bedrooms that we counted, it was definitely awe inspiring.

Inside and out the house was a bit spooky. The guest house looked like it had recently partially burned down. I’m not one to get creeped out, but this picture from one of the burned rooms of the guesthouse still gives me goosebumps.

Although there was no furniture left in the house, the garages and shed were littered with all sorts of dated trash. Old games, golf clubs, a Christmas tree stand, children’s toys, rusty paint cans, etc. It was an amazing assortment of junk. We decided against taking anything from the house, but on the way out of the shed, trampled and scattered on the ground, was an old postcard scrapbook that I picked up. As a graphic design student at the time, I was amazed at how well preserved this collection of turn-of-the-century media was. I’ve always wanted to do something with the graphical ideas I got from that find, and now, over a year later I’ve redesigned my website around it.

For myself, adopting movable type as my blog platform wasn't really that hard of a task. I've had some difficult issues to overcome, but those have come mainly from the design I created, and from the features that I've been trying to work into my site. For those of you considering movable type, I give it two thumbs up so far. If you have a host with php and sql, I recommend it even more.

I'd like to do some how-to posts about the design and css in a later post. Aside from those issues though, I've done a lot to make movable type perform the way it does here. Most of that can be attributed to a few tutorial pages and sites out there that are must reads for potential Movable Type bloggers.

• Simplified Movable Type Installation Instructions
  For setting up Movable Type for the first time on a Linux server with PHP and MySql, this is the best installation guide you will find. The instructions are short, to the point, and most importantly, they give an example of the mt.cfg file.
• Learning Movable Type
  Elise Bauer and co. have done an excellent job of explaining some of the most confusing aspects of MT. If you're trying to figure out how to do something, check here first.
• Hicksdesign - Live Comment Previews
  There are a few sites out there that explain how to setup live comment previews using javascript in Movable Type. Jon Hicks' is by far the best writeup I've read. My code ended up being quite a bit different and actually does convert line breaks in the textarea to <br /> tags, but if you want a good place to start - this is it.
• Mikeindustries: sIFR 2.0
  If you're looking for the latest news in web standards innovation, one person you need to be listening to is Mike Davidson. He's a great designer who always seems to have his hand into programming as well. One of his latest projects is sIFR (pronounced: siffer) - an improvement on Shaun Inmann's Flash Image Replacement. If you have flash and can see the Zebrawood and Cheltenham font faces on my site, then you are experiencing the benefits of sIFR.

There's so much more to write about and link to here as I've really learned a lot in the last couple of weeks. I guess that should have come as no surprise since I switched to a new webhost, used a different backend, and created a comletely new design.

I have been planning since early April to switch hosting providers, redesign my website in valid xhtml goodness, and migrate over to using movable type. Well over the last few days, those plans have started to come to fruition.

I've got a new host with all the features I need with room to grow. I've got a fresh new site design that I can't wait to show off, and which I hope will be swappable in the future. And now, I have the domain transferred and name servers in place so I will soon be able to get movable type configured.

My old hosting account doesn't expire till November, so worst case scenario, I will drag out the rollover till then as I get my design tweaked and mySQL database squeaky clean. On the bright side though, I think it will only take a few weeks. Stay tuned for updates.

A few of the people I like to read have been swapping names and changing hosts lately. This kind of activity is making me antsy to get started on my reinvention of Jasongraphix. I really can't wait to get my hands dirty with this one, literally. I've got an old (like over 100 years old-old) scrapbook that I found a long time back that is my main inspiration. I've got some old typography examples, some old newspaper scans, and I plan to get out my charcoal and ink again. No photoshop fabrications here. I plan to design the layout by hand, scan stuff in, and then put it all together in good-ole (er..new) tableless xhtml fashion.

To add fuel to the fire, I just got the first notice today that my domain/hosting plan is set to expire in 90 days. I am definitely going to keep jasongraphix.com forwarded to whatever my main site is, but I'm still toying with the idea of registering a new domain name that's less Narcissistic-obvious. Any ideas?

Every once in a while I enjoy taking a look at the usage statistics for Jasongraphix. This really is just a teeny porfolio/blog site that I maintain, but it's really interesting to see how, when, and why people end up here. Particulary useful is the top search strings. Just to give you an idea, here are some of the searches that actually brought people here.

• wedding invitation kerning
• mike gatton
• sears lil crafty
• crayola cerulean
• campus crusade for christ ucf
• backbooth directions
• publix prices
• iridescence
• men of metal hoax
• tb400-3355
• monkey cactus
• print magazine
• malebag
• quark trifold
• nesdrive
• grungy web design
• logodesign for free
• funky monkey graphic
• lords and ladies haberdashery
• webdesign bbs

I love this stuff. I need more obscure references in my site for people to find me by... words like phrontistery, grandiloquent, and spodogenous. That way someone looking for information on causes of waste material in an organ will be rerouted to this very blog entry. I pity you...whoever you are.

From a designer standpoint, the decision of which content management system to use is very clear. Nearly every one of my regular reads have movable type embroidered into their underwear. Lets face it, Movable Type is to Webdesigners what Apple is to Print Designers (and a lot of webdesigners as well).

There aren't many other popular options out there. If you're not in bed with MT then you are either programming your own database driven catastrophe, or using WordPress. Well, I'm about done trying to develop in my own time, all of the features offered by real content management systems. Although I like the challenges that programming bring me, I AM NOT a programmer by trade. The only reason I even consider the option of WordPress is that it is the chosen backbone of Eric Meyer's website. Sure, there are lots of people out there using WordPress - but as a designer, I go by what I see - and the Word Press fans out there aren't doing a great job of convincing my eyes...

Now that Amy and I have moved (so...sore), I think it's time for me to start planning the migration of Jasongraphix to a new webhost and a new look. This site is in dire need of a complete re-build and my webhost - well they're just getting old. It has been almost a year since I gradjidated and started work as a full time web monkey, and since that time, the only upgrades that I have made revolve around this blog. No major graphical changes, no cutting-edge uber cool cssness, and no changes to the way my portfolio is viewed. Just a little bit of php coding and database planning - and I'm a webdesigner, not a programmer for cryin out loud!

I have plenty of ideas, inspiration, and motivation. Ideas for improvement include implementing rss, trackbacks, a better inline commenting system, and a simpler method of displaying my portfolio. To save time on the programming features (and give more time for stylage) I'm going to look into using Moveable Type as my blog engine. I want to start sharing my knowledge with how-to's and downloads, not only for the public, but for my own memory as well. Seeing and reading sites like mikeindustries.com, jasonsantamaria.com, airbagindustries.com, stopdesign.com, and alistapart.com (just to name a few) provide more than enough inspiration. Motivation comes mostly from my own personal desire to make cool stuff, but the fact that I'll be moving in less than a year - sending out my website to hordes of potential employers doesn't hurt either.

Ok, for those of you wondering why my site is being funny, I thought I'd do a little Spring Cleaning in the half hour I had before I clocked in to work today. Some links may be kinda b0rked for a while but I wanted to get the main part of my site out of the "crazycreative" folder and into the root.

I'm also doing this because I'm running out of room! This hosting account lasts till late October, and I have to keep all my webjunk squished into 50MB till then. I'm planning on switching at that time to a host with a better price and better features. I defintately need 150+MB of space, php, and MySQL. I would like to have unlimited subdomains, CPanel, and a reseller account - but usually "That ain't cheap!"

So far the best option I've found is All About Hosting, a british company with servers in NJ. With them I'd either go with their Mini Reseller ($40/yr), or Standard Shared Hosting ($30/yr) deal. Either way I get 500MB and much more advanced company than my current host.

It's still in testing phase, but check out my blog archive! Much thanks to Russ and Ryan at work for helping me figure out how to make this page go. I had to do one sql query to get the years for which there were posts. Then I had to do a query within that loop and create another loop that would display a list of the months that had content. Tricky, Tricky, but it works.

I've been making progress on the NESDrive project as well - Or at least the server. I got my RAM in from Computer Surplus and plugged it all in. Then I formatted it and installed XP Server 2003 on Monday night, but found out that it will not support my sound card (A Turtle Beach Montego - TB400-3355-01). I tried a few different drivers but Windows just wouldn't recognize it. Then I found a review of Server 2003 from someone who had the same exact sound card which he could not get to work either. SO I gave up. Fortunately, my friend Justin had a spare SoundBlaster card lying around he could give me (THANKS JUSTIN!) so I'll be getting that all installed as soon as I can.

I will be getting a pictures post of the progress of the NESDrive hardware work soon as well. I spent Wednesday morning routing out the second controller port hole in the CD drive cover. All I need to do now is cut the holes for the Power, Reset, and LED, and it will at least LOOK like a working NESDrive.

Finally, a place for me to blog out my ramblings and get feedback. All it took was for me to add a couple tables to my database, and finagle some SQL queries, and create a repeated region, and ...well you get gist - if you want something done you have to do it yourself.

I know, I know, there are dozens of sites out there that make blogging easy, and open source projects that simplify the commenting process. I just thought that most of those were too complex for what I wanted to do with this site. The biggest issue was the commenting. I wanted it to make it easy for people to post feedback and show the number of comments on each post. Many people have simple commenting set up like this: christilina, shawn wall, even Vlad at softshape. The other main issue is that I have 2 sites (so far) that I want to post to. This is my personal space. I assume I will use this for tech stuff, design issues, work thoughts and other tidbits that would be kind of out of place on amesnjas.com. This will make amesnjas interactive as well

...so excited!