When you drive, bike, or scooter to work each morning, do you pass a university? If so, contact the web educator at the university and see what you can do to help connect the school to you, your company, and your professional organizations. Does the educator need/want a guest lecturer to come to class and speak on your area of expertise? Yes, you are an expert on something and you should share your expertise with educators and their students.

Exactly 7 days before that article was published, I was faced with just such an opportunity. I received a message via the Refresh Columbia contact form from a Computer Science instructor at the University of South Carolina. He wanted to know if we could recommend an online video on the basics of web design or if anyone from Refresh would like to come give a presentation. I quickly responded that I’d love to come talk to his class and I’ll be presenting over there at 9am on Wednesday. I’ve only had the opportunity to speak to college-level students once before, but I’m already making plans to speak to another class in the Media Arts department later this semester.

I’m not announcing this because I want any kind of recognition; I simply hope that more web professionals will volunteer some time to do the same. If you’re working in the industry, you are an expert on something. You don’t have to be a book author to get out there and share something useful. I’m also not putting this out here as a guilt trip. For me, speaking to other people who are passionate about the web (especially students) is fun and exciting. If you’re the type of person who can’t handle public speaking, then maybe it’s not for you. As an introverted person, I would have put myself in that category a couple years ago, but the more public speaking I do, the more I enjoy it. So give it a whirl sometime. Maybe start by presenting to people you know at a local Barcamp or Refresh group. I’m betting that you’ll want to do it again.

This process of mentally classifying design inspiration has become a critical part of my growth as a designer as well as my ability to explain web design to the non-designer. In The Web Designer’s Idea Book, Patrick McNeil takes the task of cataloging current trends and styles to a meticulous new level. Within the book’s 256 pages, McNeil has sorted over 700 screenshots of stellar site design by color, design style, type, theme, element and structure. Within these 6 chapters, he has defined a total of 75 individual design categories. Some examples of these categories include: Blogs, E-Commerce, Minimalist, Wood, Pink & Blue, Muted, Rays, Gradients, Tabs and Massive Footers. Then, within each of these seemingly exclusive categories there are a few paragraphs explaining when, how, and why it should be used along with an average of 8 or 9 example screenshots.

Obviously, reading this book will not teach you to be a great website designer. What it will do is expand your design vocabulary and train you to break down your favorite sources of design inspiration into bite-sized chunks that you can use in your own work. I spent a good portion of the cold, rainy weekend reading through the text in each category and pouring over the pages of screenshots. I saw quite a few familiar examples of good design, but was amazed by quantity of inspirational sites that I had never heard of. If I had one complaint about the book it would be that I wish all of the screenshots were full-size, or perhaps if they couldn’t be, that there was an archive of the full-size screenshots posted somewhere on the web. Regardless, I’m sure the book will be a huge source of inspiration for me for years to come. Then, when it is too old to serve as inspiration, it will most certainly be an excellent resource for web design history.

* As I was writing this review, I discovered that Curt Cloninger just released a sequel to this book: Fresher Styles for Web Designers: More Eye Candy from the Underground You can be sure that I’ll be reviewing this book as well in the near future.

I’m certain this isn’t an original idea, but I haven’t ever seen anyone blog about it…probably because I don’t even really know what this technique should be called. Accessible toggle boxes, sliding anchor content, fairy-dustless slight of hand? Help me out here.

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.

Last year I waited until November was over to post about it so I could show the progression of fuzziness. This year I decided to show my face as soon as I had a beard worthy of my last name.

So, who’s with me? Anybody else out there laying down their razor* for the month and sporting the woolly caveman look?

* I make an exception for occasionally shaving the hair on my neck.
I just can’t get into the wild neck beard.

I'm a big fan of President-Elect Barack Obama. I'm also a big fan of Chuck Norris. So Keith Robinson's idea of going to chucknorrisfacts.com and replacing "Chuck Norris" with "Obama", nearly made me fall off my chair laughing. So... I decided a bookmarklet was in order:

Directions:

1. Click & drag the bold "Obama Facts" link below to your bookmarks toolbar. If you're using Internet Explorer, right-click the link and Add to Favorites...
2. Visit chucknorrisfacts or any website that mentions Chuck Norris.
3. Click the "Obama Facts" link in your bookmarks toolbar.
4. LOL
5. Repeat step 4 OVER and OVER!

Obama Facts

PS: This is just a simple snippet of javascript that replaces every instance of "Chuck" with "Barack" and "Norris" with "Obama". You can click the link to see it in action on this page, but if you do, be sure to hit refresh before dragging it to your toolbar. Otherwise the bookmarklet itself will be altered so that it replaces "Barack" with "Barack" and "Obama" with "Obama". Enjoy!

Update:By @dkr's request, I also give you the Bacon Facts bookmarklet.
Powered by http://www.bacontwits.com - not really.
But sort of.

Update Again: After Bruce's comment, I was tempted to make a Tim Tebow version of the bookmarklet as well. Instead, I made one that prompts you for what word or name you would like to replace Chuck Norris with. Go ahead, give it a whirl: Custom Facts

To my surprise, a very kind volunteer came to the rescue with a head-start on an extension and an invitation to improve on it. The problem was that his simple extension did exactly what I wanted it to. When you right-clicked on a link, there was a “View Background Image” item that, when you clicked on it, linked to the CSS background-image of that element.

I didn’t feel the need to improve on James’ extension until it stopped working in Firefox3. Yes, there are many other ways of discovering the background-image of an element in Firefox (specifically through Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar) but I wanted my context menu item back, so I dove into the extensions folder and added the following functionality:

• It checks for a background image on the link you right-clicked on.
• If it…
  • Finds an image: You get a “View Link Background Image” context menu item.
  • Doesn’t find an image, but finds one on its immediate parent: You get a “View Parent Background Image” context menu item.
  • Finds no image on the link or its immediate parent: You get a disabled “View Link Background Image” context menu item.

While it doesn’t seem like a mission-critical extension, I’ve started relying on it for my day-to-day work and thought you might find it useful as well.

So without further ado, you can download the extension here.

Here are a few things I learned from the panels I attended:

1. From Rob Weychert’s Design Lessons in Chess - After quoting Sun Tzo, Rob went on to explain how strategy without tactics is like attempting to design a website without putting much thought toward the Information Architecture. Tactics without strategy however, he explained, is like trying to designing a website without knowing anything about the client.
2. From Ethan Marcotte’s Comps vs. Code: Couples’ Therapy - Ethan once worked with a designer who gave him a flattened Photoshop document to build HTML from. When he asked the designer why, he/she responded that “I was afraid of something changing.” Ethan explained how this kind of relationship doesn’t work between designer/developer and how he has learned to maintain communication through “The Handoff”.
3. From Aarron Walter’s Findability Bliss Through Web Standards - “The three simple goals of findability: 1) Help people find the website. 2) Help people find the content they’re seeking. 3) Encourage return visits.”
4. From Nathan Smith’s Striking a Balance - “If MacGyver were to choose a Javascript library, he’d probably go with jQuery because he knows he can do anything with it. If Bruce Lee were to choose one, he’d go with YUI and master every one of it’s weapon-like features.”
5. From Chris Heilmann & Dan Rubin’s Making Accessibility Sexy - “Making the Business Case for Accessibility: More users equals more customers, helps create goodwill for your brand, less chance of future legal action”

New brain-expanding knowledge aside, the best part of any conference is the chance to meet new people. At some conferences this can be an intimidating task, but not at the Jam Session. It’s just large enough of a conference to feel like part of a crowd, but small enough that you get opportunities to interact with the same people more than once. It was great to see a lot of familiar faces and meet new ones from all corners of the web.

Another interesting event from this year’s conference was the mysterious disappearance of Freddie the MailChimp mascot. MailChimp was one of the sponsors of this year’s Jam Session and placed a life-size(?) cutout of their cuddly mascot at the entrance of the main Loudermilk conference room. At the end of the first day, Freddie was abducted by someone who went by the Twitter & Flickr handle: ihazurchimp. At first this seemed like a simple practical joke, then maybe a publicity stunt. With each twitter update and Flickr post, it became more and more obvious that it wasn’t MailChimp, and that Freddie was not going to be returned. When Freddie showed up in South Carolina, I started suspecting my fellow Columbia residents, but I believe my coworker Ken Seals has solved the mystery. If his theory isn’t correct, the suspects have some ‘splainin to do.

Writing for Digital-Web

After years of learning from and being inspired by the web professional’s online magazine of choice, I’ve finally contributed an article to Digital-Web. I decided to write about finding and using stock imagery. It’s not a groundbreaking or hotly debated topic, but selecting and incorporating stock is an essential step of the design process that is often skirted by web design educators and authors.
Check it out: Cooking with Stock

Finishing up the Exterior Painting

This has taken way too long, but Ames and I are almost finished painting the exterior of our house. We took your suggestions and went with Scheme #4. Somehow the colors didn’t quite come out the same as my Photoshop mockup, but we still think it looks pretty sharp.

Mental Note: Spending several weekends balancing on an aluminum ladder is not a fun task for the hottest part of the summer.

Speaking at Refresh Augusta

Chris Harrison has driven an hour to be a part of both of our first two Refresh Columbia meetups while at the same time working to get the ball rolling with Refresh Augusta. I’ll be headed down to their next monthly meetup to talk about design for developers.

Speaking at The Webmaster Jam Session

I must have done something right at the 2007 Webmaster Jam Session because they asked me to come back again for this year. The 2008 Jam Session will be in Atlanta, GA on October 3rd and 4th. I’ll be giving a presentation titled Design Disrepair where I’ll discuss the ins and outs of renovating a website.

Speaking at SXSWi 2009?

Well, that depends on two things:

1. How well my panel did in the public voting.
2. Whether or not SXSW fits into the plan for next year.

I submitted the same Design Disrepair panel that I’ll be presenting at the Jam Session. Why? Because it’s going to be a very fun talk with a unique perspective that should be a good fit for SXSW as well. Trust me, I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately and working on it between all the other stuff mentioned above. Even with this much confidence though, I didn’t promote it because I’m not sure yet if I’ll be going to Austin in March. The last two years at SXSW have been amazing, but it sure eats up the time off and vacation budget. In the 5 years since we got married, Ames and I have only taken one vacation that was longer than a week, and that was only because it was paired with an engineering conference she had to go to. Somehow though, I’ve managed to take a full week off for SXSW twice. So…if my panel gets voted in, I can swing a long vacation with Ames and still have the time/budget for SXSWi, trust me, I’ll be there.

This was surprisingly easy to do in php:

$first_date = "2008-01-01"; 
$end_date = "2009-12-31";
$alpha = strtotime($first_date); 
$omega = strtotime($end_date); 
while($alpha <= $omega){ 
  $ufirst = strtotime("+1 day", $alpha); 
  $formatted = date("m/d/Y", $alpha); 
  $color = date("mdy", $alpha); 
  echo '<div class="day" style="background-color:#'.$color.'" title="'.$formatted.'"<&nbsp;</div>'; 
}

I made a little demo page where you can see what any year (between 1970 and 2037 - the boundaries of php strtotime) looks like. I also made another page the just shows the last 10 years.

I chose to show 10 years so that I’d get a little bit of the 90s in there, which obviously produce a much brighter blue color. If I were able to render 100 years this way, it would be a very subtle gradient from the dark greens all the way to that bright blue you see at the top. Yea, it’s mostly useless, but I thought it was an interesting way to visualize data.

I have been quietly searching for this embarrassingly goofy photobooth polaroid for at least 2 years now. I included a low-res scan of it in the original amesnjas.com website, but that was back when Amy and I lived in Florida. Like the polaroid format itself, I was afraid the tangible evidence of this memory was lost forever.

I was pleasantly surprised though when I re-discovered the picture in an old box of notes last week. The box was from the Summer after that picture was taken. We had been dating for almost two years at that point and as you can read from the polaroid, had just gotten engaged. It was really a bitter-sweet Summer though. I was headed to Italy for a 6 week project with Campus Crusade for Christ and Amy had been awarded a 10 week REU scholarship to do research at the University of South Carolina.

While those were both exciting, life-changing opportunities for us, it meant we had to be apart for almost the entire Summer. As I was packing my suitcase, Ames gave me a wooden box with hearts all over it that was filled with little pieces of paper. Each paper was individually rolled up and tied shut with red ribbon. She explained that I could open one whenever I missed her. Every piece of paper had a note written on it about why she loved me. I ran out of notes long before the end of my trip, but this was the last one I opened, and the object I was actually searching for when I discovered my favorite picture.

To celebrate our fifth anniversary, I had a recent picture of us blown up and I put a copy of that note with it in a frame. I figured it was an appropriate gift (along with some jewelry of course) for our 5th anniversary as she’s about a year and a half from being finished with a PhD at the University where she spent that summer 6 years ago. It’s amazing to me that it’s been so long since those memories were created, but we’ve got plenty more to make. Happy Anniversary, Ames!

1. Eiffel Tower
   
2. Golden Gate Bridge
   
3. Magic Kingdom Entrance
   
4. St. Louis Arch
   
5. Hoover Dam
   
6. Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas
   
7. Geysers at Yellowstone National Park
   
8. UCF Arena (Go Knights!)
   
9. Fountain of Rings at Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park
   
10. Our House (Somewhere in Columbia, SC)
    

Find something interesting in Street View? Post a link below!