April 27, 2005. With the recent design of Holly Tickner’s Tiny Forest, one of the biggest changes was largely unseen. Gone was the bloated, Dreamweaver-generated code, and in its place was streamlined, valid XHTML markup, using CSS for all of the layout (all hand-coded in BBEdit). It’s fairly common knowledge that good markup can improve search engine rankings, but this was a great opportunity to see it first… Read more »
April 22, 2005. I’ve just finished a complete redesign of Tiny Forest, the personal portfolio of cartoonist and illustrator Holly Tickner. The site has quite a bit in common with the original design, which she created herself. The spot illustrations, typeface, and colors are all lifted directly from her design, which you can see here: For the new site I started with the same basic elements and simply… Read more »
March 31, 2005. In February I made some changes to Tense Radio, a Flash-based MP3 player for Tense Forms (a label and publisher I co-founded). The new player had a variety of subtle changes. Previously it used a default buffering time of 15 seconds, adding to that as necessary. That’s about all Flash provides for on its own. The result is that users with fast connections had to wait longer than they should… Read more »
March 29, 2005. RSS is a very cool technology that’s quickly gaining in popularity. It’s like having your own newspaper, with only the news you care about. And instead of having to wait for the next day, it’s updated continually. While it’s quite popular already, it’s a long way from mainstream use. One of the biggest stumbling blocks is that it’s rarely presented well. Many web sites have an “RSS”, “XML”,… Read more »
March 23, 2005. The site was a bit of a mess today, unbeknownst to me. I was making some changes to the database for a new version of Tense Log, and one of those changes had some rather adverse effects here. While I’m on the subject, here’s a preview of a Tense Log v2.0 template (altered slightly to get the best bits in). Tense Log v2.0 has a completely redesigned template system that’s far more… Read more »