So most everyone I know in the community is a Twitter user, but I’ve managed to avoid it up to this point. However, seeing as I have absolutely nothing to do today, I joined Twitter. I’m hoping it will give me a chance to say things that are too inconsequential for a full-on blog post, but that I still want people to hear. Up till now, I was using Sprokets’ campfire room for that purpose. I’ll probably keep doing that, but, you know, Twitter is cool, too.

That being said, I’m a total n00b when it comes to Twitter. I’m aware of Snitter and Twitterrific, but are there other Twitter clients out there? Which one do you use/which one is best? Also, are there any people out there that I really should add to my “follow” list?

How about terminology? Have I already embarrassed myself by not using the in-lingo when referring to different parts of Twitter? Brad just “nudged” me; I’m not even sure what that means. Is that like first base?

Well, either way, I’m looking forward to trying it out. We’ll see what happens.

Well, well. It looks like someone has been neglecting their blog.

It happens, I guess. The problem I ran in to as time wore on without a post was that the longer I went, the more epic the post had to be that finally got me started again. A lot of things have happened, and I wanted to talk about all of them. Obviously, the post that I had in mind kept getting longer and longer.

Well, no more. Partly inspired by Russ Casenhiser (via URN), and partly because I just needed to get going again, I present you with this post: a (mostly incomplete) roundup of most of the things I’ve wanted to touch on. Some of it may be old news, some of it may be new. Either way, after this post I can get back on the blogging horse again.

iPhoneification

I got an iPhone in late September. I love it. It’s one of those purchases where, after a couple weeks, I forgot how I lived without it. I was apprehensive about the keyboard, but it turns out that was completely unfounded. I don’t even have to really try to type correctly, because the iPhone’s auto-correct is so amazing. The EDGE network isn’t as slow as everyone says (it’s slow, but come on, people, it’s not that bad). The integration between Safari, Google Maps, and the actual phone features is so convenient, it’s ridiculous. I haven’t regretted buying one for an instant.

“It’s Sproket, not socket!”

I joined the Sprokets team sometime a few months ago. This experience has been a revelation for me. I’d never worked with more than one other person on a project before, so coming on board with a team like Sprokets was, while a little intimidating at first, ultimately a huge breath of fresh air. It’s allowed me to concentrate on honing my front-end skills, and collaborating with other skilled developers always helps me improve across the board. It also lead me to a new way for me to format my CSS, so watch for a post on that in the future.

Leopardosity

I pre-ordered Leopard, and installed it as soon as I got it. Again, a new Apple product that I love. Leopard gave me Time Machine, Screen Sharing, a new sidebar in Finder, major improvements in Spotlight, and Spaces.
Spaces could use some improvement, especially when you mix Spaces and traditional, cmd-tab application switching, but it’s still awesome. I keep all of my chatting applications in one space, Coda in one space, etc. It’s nice.

The new sideboard just plain old rocks.

I’ve also been using Spotlight for launching applications/documents/websites (a la Quicksilver), which turns out to be surprisingly fast and efficient, even for just-downloaded-and-installed applications. It’s real cool.

Portfoliofy

Finally, I’m in the process of reworking my portfolio. This site has a distinct lack of Javascript, but I figured since that was a large part of my skill set, I should include at least a little bit on my site. The portfolio is now set up slideshow-style. I’ll be working on it more now, and there are some existing issues (it looks a little off in Safari, and I haven’t even begun to test it in legacy browsers), but it’s fun so far.

So, what now?

I’ve got some ideas. I’m going to try to start a once-per-week blogging schedule as far as articles go (I know, I know, there is no try, do or do not, etc…), and I’m going to step up my linking. All in all, I’m feeling good about the whole thing.

We’ll see what happens.

You may or may not have noticed, but there is a new section here. It consists of sites that I have saved to my Ma.gnolia account. Every day, I find things on the web that I want to share with people, but I haven’t wanted to clutter up my blog to do so. The solution is Ma.gnolia. There’s a feed and everything. I hope you find it useful/interesting.

I’m not sure if anyone noticed, but Google Reader now has a search bar. Those of you who use it should be jumping up and down for joy. Those of you who chose another reader because for some unknown reason Google didn’t include a search with their RSS aggregator can finally come back home.

Well, I made it almost a month since the last design change. However, this redesign is a little more extensive.

The Little Stuff

First, I went to an all-Helvetica font scheme. My typography was all over the place on the last view versions, and I feel much more comfortable with choosing one font and sticking to it. Second, but related, I moved the title and navigation to their own bar under the opening graphic, and moved the quotes under the section heads to the right of the section heads.

The Grid

The next thing I needed to change was the vertical spacing. I chose 1.5 ems as my baseline height, and went with it. Everything now lies on a 1.5 em baseline grid. You can imagine (or maybe you know from experience) that this seems like it could be a pain. It is. What was my secret weapon? Rob Goodlotte’s Syncotype. What it does is place a horizontal grid over the page you’re viewing, at any size you’d like. 1em converts to 16px, so I was able to line everything up to a 24px horizontal grid. It’s awesome.

The Em

The biggest change, which might not be all that visible at first, is that the entire site (except for a couple borders) is now in ems. The entire structure, the images, and of course the fonts, now resize with the text. The effect is that when you increase font size in your browser, the entire web site zooms. Try it out (cmd/apple + to increase size, cmd/apple - to lower size).

Seems like an easy concept; just divide all of your pixel values by 16, like I mentioned before, and you’re set, right? Well, at first, yes. For the overall structure, that’s all I had to do. The problems arise when you change the font size of an element. Whenever you change the font size of an element, like a paragraph or a heading, the rest of the attributes of that element are measured against the new font size, instead of the body font size. To get the margin or padding that you want, you have to divide the margin you’d like by the new font size, and that number is your new margin. Ideal margin / new font size = New margin.

I had my calculator program running the entire time.

Inspiration and guidance for this redesign came from Wilson Miner’s Setting Type On The Web (on A List Apart) and Richard Rutter’s Compose to a Vertical Rhythm (on 24Ways).

It’s been a fun (and trying) experiment. Hopefully this version will last longer than a month before I’m fed up with it!

Turns out that there’s an even easier way to create transparent favicons (assuming you have photoshop):  A photoshop plugin.  It supports transparency and, from what I can tell, creates better looking images altogether.  Nice.