DesignWell

I read many books from the library. I don’t finished reading many books though. First of all, they are free, since they are from the library, and second my attention span doesn’t last that long. I believe browsing the web daily from age 14 (circa 1996) will do that to someone (read the latest cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, is Google Making Us Stoopid). Most of the books I read come from the magazines I read (The Atlantic, Books & Culture: A Christian Review) or from the podcasts I listen to (Diane Rehm, This Week in Tech).

Either way, I want to share my latest reading endeavors across my blogs. But how? (more…)

If you’ve been around WordPress for more than six months, most of the following plug-ins should be familiar to you. In case you haven’t heard of any them, I highly recommend all of them. I’m not a fan of widgets (too-limiting), since I create websites for a living. I’ve divided them into Anti-Spam, Category/Tag, and Additional Content. If you are not caching your blog, remember, don’t install too many plug-ins. (more…)

No matter how carefully you design your site, visitors will always request a page that is missing, moved, or non-existent (especially if you experiment with your site structure frequently). This past week, I’ve been obsessed with HTTP 404 errors and working on creating a better 404 Not Found page. The default 404 page for WordPress offers the opportunity to search the blog, but you should go another step. Usability is one of (if not the) key trait of a great website. If thought has gone into even your 404 error page, then I’d guess that much thought has been put into your entire site. (more…)

I’ve been familiarizing myself with WordPress 2.5’s new media gallery. If you’ve visited my blog before, you know I don’t upload many images, but I’m hoping to upload many images to my wife, Rachel Steely’s website. I was annoyed to find out that the default image posting size is medium (which is about 300px). On top of that, if you select full size, it doesn’t mean full size. It means your WordPress theme’s column width. So unless you are using Kubrick your media size will not be your column width. (more…)

It’s been a hot debate over what to include in your blog’s RSS recently. I say you should include more than blog posts in your RSS feed IF (and this is a big if) you can editorialize what goes in. The following, explains how to change which tweets from Twitter get posted to your blog and into your RSS feed.

If you use Alex King’s Twitter Tools (version: 1.1b1), you will want to make the following two changes to his code. The first one will make your tweet-post URLs and title more beautiful and SEO friendly by not splitting words at the end. The second one will remove reply tweets (’@username’) from becoming posts in your blog, so that half-conversations do not get recorded. (more…)

On Saturday, February 9 at 11:30 am, I spoke at BarcampIndy 2008 on Graphic Web Design and Cascading Style Sheets. All presentations were broadcast on UStreamTV.

The premise of my presentation was to show an overview of the process between layout in Illustrator and PhotoShop to coding in HTML and CSS. I find that web design is often segmented between the coders and graphic designers. I propose that the best outcome can come from bridging that gap. I do this in my daily workplace and try to show tips and techniques for others to bridge that gap. The time slot was only a half hour, so I could not go into coding detail, but only point to tutorials via links. (more…)

Today, I came home to see the dreaded “DISK BOOT FAILURE - INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER” notice from Windows XP. This has already happen recently–a little over a month ago. This time though I knew what I was doing.

All my personal data (photos, music, program installation files) are on a separate drive that I then backup every week to an external hard drive. This separates the data from the hard disk that contains the operating system and creates a second copy. Separating the data from the operating system also allows for an easier backup, since the whole drive and be duplicated. I use Retrospect Express that came free with my external hard drive to copy and verify the external drive.

Most likely my master boot sector (MBR) became corrupted and so I told the Windows XP installation CD to install a second copy of Windows. This fixes the master boot sector and allow me to boot into the previous version. Walla! The problem is fixed.

Now if I could only figure out why the hard drive’s master boot sector become corrupted in the first place. My first thoughts were heat, but then why would only the boot sector be corrupted. If you have any ideas, please post them!

Have you ever seen a book on Amazon or another website and wondered whether your local library had a copy of it?

I have to admit as much as I like my library, Indianapolis Marion County Public Library. I do not care for the web interface with it’s URL session ids and timeouts and JavaScript linking! So I try to stay out of the website until I want the book. I saw LibraryLookup on 43 Folders. I tried LibraryLookup, but was annoyed with the ISBN interface. BookBurro looked promising but it only worked on 20-some library. I’m not a member of any of those libraries.

I decided to roll my own Firefox Search Plugin–which is very simple to do. You just have to know the query keywords for your library (such as isbn, keyword, title). The IMCPL is an IPAC system and uses “UTL” for its title keyword. Just drop this Firefox Search Plugin for IMCPL Title Browsing or this Firefox Search Plugin for IMCPL Keyword Search in your Firefox Search Plugins folder and restart Firefox. You will need Mozilla Firefox 2.0 or greater for this.

The Firefox Search Plugins folder for PC is C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firfox\SearchPlugins

The Firefox Search Plugins folder for PC is for OS-X that’s /Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/{user name}/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/{profile number}.default/searchplugins/

That’s all there is to it. Here are the few lines of the code for the Indianapolis Marion County Public Library for title browsing:

<search
name=”IMCPL”
method=”GET”
action=”http://catalog.imcpl.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp”
queryCharset=”utf-8″>

<input name=”term” user>
<input name=”index” value=”UTL”>
<input name=”spp” value=”50″>
</search>

Over fifty-percent of the DVDs I burn in DVD Studio Pro 4 (DSP) fail and become coasters, and every fifth or sixth DVD I burn forces me to restart my Dual G5 Mac Pro! The problem is that I have to Force Quit DVD Studio Pro when it is burns or formats the DVD. I wait about five minutes after the status bar has stopped moving. I then force quit DVD Studio Pro with the DVD unable to eject without restarting OS-X. There are ways of ejecting the DVD through holes with paper clips, but I might as well restart my computer than do that. I hate it when Apple thinks they know best by not allowing for an eject button that is on the front of the computer and not software supported via the keyboard. I have the same drive (Pioneer DVR-109) on my PC at home, and do not have this many problems!

To burn video DVDs, I’ve switched to the open source burning software, Burn. I’m sure many other programs will work that support the video DVD file system.

Since I have switched, I have a 20% coaster rate, and this program verifies the data, too (which as far as I know DSP doesn’t do). Most importantly, I have not had to restart my computer yet! I must mention that I am burning at 4x. I going to guess that the DSP default (and only setting) is to burn at the maximum rate of the drive which is 8X.

As a side note, we buy hub-printable white Taiyo-Yuden 8x DVD-Rs from AllMediaOutlet for all our DVD burning. We also buy silver non-hub-printable Ritek CD-Rs for out CD burning. As far as I know, no one makes hub-printable silver CD-R or DVDs.

Are there better consumer DVD-Rs out there?

I have used a few project management software packages ArtLogik, AceProject, and dotProject (open source) at my current job and a former job. At my current job, online project management did not last long. Since we are small company of under 10 employees that do not pass projects back and forth often, there is not a great need for the overhead of project management software.

Personal Timesheet

We use job folders that an archive copy of the project on DVD and time sheets go into. Before tallying the final time sheet that is printed from Excel, I use a personal time sheet that I write on. It is a seven column time sheet with the date, start and end times, a short description, the hours of the task, the comp number (only used for print projects), and a column to check if I have transferred the time to the final time sheet that goes into the job folder.

Final Time Sheet

The final time sheet that is archived with the digital copy of the project files is an Excel template. It has a place for the job number client and project in the heading. The way these three spreadsheet cells are set up that increases productivity is that one can complete the information for all three cells, copy them to the clipboard, and then paste them into the file name of the Excel file. Thus the filename will be .xls and Spotlighting (from OS-X) the correct files in the future will be easy.

After the heading, is a list of the tasks with their date, description and total time. Below the task hours that are billed are additional fees that can be charged such comp approvals, ftp approvals, pdf approvals, and DVD approvals. This is all where material costs would be listed. These section has five columns: the date, a description of there service, who the material was sent to, how it was sent, and who said to send it. This level of description allows for a paper trail of who did what and when.

I hope that these thoughts and files help you in your project management. How do you do project management in your business? Do you use a paper trail? Track it all online?