What­ever spare spare time I’ve had the last cou­ple of weeks I’ve spent try­ing to fig­ure out how to make a lifestream page for this site. A lifestream is basi­cally a page that shows as close to every­thing pos­si­ble that a par­tic­u­lar per­son has been up to on the inter­net. A fire­hose is some­what sim­i­lar. This was tough. I first started […]

Well, I’ve got a new design up, finally. Doesn’t look too much dif­fer­ent on the face. Most of the changes are behind the scenes, HTML5 and CSS3. If you’ve got the right browser, you might see some cool fonts and other stuff. As usual, it ain’t com­plete, if I ever get around to it some other coolness […]

I have Gill Sans fatigue. Its increas­ing ubiq­uity might merely be the result of my increas­ing aware­ness of var­i­ous type­faces, con­fir­ma­tion bias, or some­thing else, but every­where I look, there it is. On all of the Col­liers Ostendorf-​Morris for-​lease signs (and there are a lot of those in down­town Cleve­land) on ban­ners adver­tis­ing lux­ury lofts, on signs […]

Prob­a­bly the best rea­son to call for good web stan­dard prac­tices and a con­sis­tent and log­i­cal approach to build­ing web­sites is the ease with which such good plan­ning enables future-​proofing and upgrad­ing how a site looks. In 2002, when I started this thing, I was blindly mov­ing about using WYSIWYG, think­ing I knew what CSS was and how RSS worked. […]

I took part in my first crowd-​sourced viral video cam­paign [even though I think those words aren’t being used in the cor­rect way] for the U.S. National Design Pol­icy Coun­cil. The video is below, but you can fol­low the rabbit-​hole of more infor­ma­tion by going here. The ques­tions par­tic­i­pants were asked to answer were: What role does […]

I was inter­viewed by CNN Money about the fed­eral stim­u­lus track­ing site Recov​ery​.gov. I wrote a more detailed post about it over at The Design State. I would also like to take this oppor­tu­nity to state offi­cially, and unequiv­o­cally, that I love squirrels.

I spent the bet­ter part of Sun­day, all of Mon­day and the bet­ter part of Tues­day in Chicago at An Event Apart. I had an amaz­ing time. The sched­ule was jam-​packed with talks from 8:30 AM to early evening both days. Not only did I actu­ally get to see a bunch of web lumi­nar­ies in meat­space, I finally met […]

Even though I was beaten to the punch.

While refor­mat­ting my work PC today, I browsed around the inter­net look­ing for thoughts on e-​government and design. I came across an inter­est­ing research brief by Peter Muhlberger enti­tled Should E-​Government Design for Cit­i­zen Par­tic­i­pa­tion? Stealth Democ­racy and Delib­er­a­tion [Abstract] [PDF]. He has a few other papers that look down the alley I’m inter­ested in read­ing as well. This […]

yeah, so learn­ing CSS is harder than i thought. espe­cially since the edu­ca­tional ver­sion of Dreamweaver that we have does not have any of the CSS attrib­utes installed on it. Thank­fully one of my fel­low web­savvy stu­dents has a CSS book that he is going let me bor­row. but all of this junk with me deal­ing with […]