This was my gut reaction to the name “The CSS Awards” but I decided to check it out. Upon looking at the featured site of the day, which is a cool site, i looked at the rating system and the my reservations were confirmed. Flaws exposed.

The grading categories are as follows:

• Design
• Creativity
• Usability
• Content

Breaking the Problem Down:

Neither Design or Content have anything to do with CSS. Design is just that. The design or artistic direction a site has. CSS is merely the conduit to which the design is conveyed and made possible. Content has even less to do with CSS. At least CSS is required to make the design possible. CSS and content, by definition i must remind you, are separated. When I learned CSS this was at the core of the philosophy behind CSS. “keep your content and design separate”, yet here at The CSS Awards, content is a platform upon which your site is graded. Starting to wonder if these guys actually know what CSS is used for.

Creativity could have something to do in awarding a site based on its CSS, assuming it’s referring to creatively written CSS but in todays featured site, I would say the creativity being referenced is from some use of JS. But I go back to my point in that when it comes to putting a site on the web, the creative part doesn’t typically have too much to do with the CSS being that it only does one thing. Style, and again, it doesn’t do it intelligentl .

One could argue usability MIGHT be applicable, however this is more based on UI which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with CSS or semantic XHTML. I guess my issue is the semantics of the name “The CSS Awards”. How can you even actually judge a site based on CSS. The CSS Awards even make my case for me. Only 2 of the categories vaguely have any relation to actual CSS and it’s debatable how strong of a connection that is.

The site basically gets the job done for what I wanted to do with it, but in the future I plan on adding a lot more features. For now this will do though. So go take a look, leave a comment let me know what you think. If you have any good ideas about what I could do with the site feel free to chime in and let me know. Enjoy!!!

Regardless, I do like the designs I worked up. If you do as well pick one up. My personal favorite is the “Design the Future” Yellow Canvas one. Take a look and let me know what you think!

I was aiming for a Classic American feel to all of them while using some of the techniques and looks that I’ve been playing with lately. I hope you enjoy them!

As I have spread my fingers into different internet pots I’ve fine tuned the Digital Skraps brand and tried to get that name out there. I’ve tweaked the logo, the Digital Skraps Yellow, the bee angle, and tried to slim things down and focus on readability and typography a little more instead of trying to fill every gap with something.

One of the things that pushed me into the direction of really nailing who Digital Skraps is would be Twitter. The DigitalSkraps Twitter profile allowed me to express myself and work on the public perception of this site, through another. Up until recently I posted on twitter through their website exclusively so I was onstantly looking at my background image that i put up there. After being forced to stare at it i decided it was time to update a few things. So all design tweaks to this site and the Digital Skraps brand actually started with twitter.

I also created a theme forest account which I hope to start posting templates and themes on. That site needed a banner for my profile page. This prompted me to try and carry over my theme of yellow and big black letters as well as the bee aspect into that. Those 2 things where kind of transitional moments. Even something as seemingly obvious as needing to brand yourself, for me, got lost in the act of just getting something up. It came secondary.

Certainly I’m still fine tuning it. I have a new idea that i want to explore but it will be a while before I tackle it, much less show it to anybody. That being said, I do hope to have some new blog posts very soon. I think the first couple are going to be tutorial related. Maybe a mixture of App reviews.

I appreciate you sticking around and visiting the site. For my RSS subscribers, I particularly thank you the most for subscribing and not canceling on me since I haven’t exactly been a well of information to draw from.

Hopefully the site will continue to be refined, grow, have more content and further the Digital Skraps brand.

I’m going to leave you with these glorious and painfully bad DigitalSkraps.com throwback screen shots. A little embarrassing but after 2 years it’s good to remember where you started out at.

A Quick Run Down:

Part of my job is staying on top of web trends and technologies. as a result I have my ear to the ground in a lot of places and I’m finding some amazing stuff all over the web on a regular basis.

It got to a point where I was wanting to share it all but would have driven a few of my friends absolutely bonkers had I been sending it to them through I.M. every day. As a result I started looking for a way to share it all but thought a full blown site would be more work than I currently have time for. Also, I wanted to share it the way I would with my friends through I.M. which usually consists of me just copy and pasting the link and sending that to them with no other info. very quick and “click to find out” sort of set up.

The obvious handicap there is I know what my one of my friends would think is cool and want to look at where as I dont have that benifit of being selective with a wider audience. So some information would have to be added.

With the DigitalSkraps Twitter profile being fairly young at that point I had begun posting a few links here and there within that but again, didnt want to over load my followers and have them stop dropping. The volume of stuff I wanted to share had again interupted what I wanted to accomplish.

Keeping with the theme, the same way I run across all this wonderful stuff around the web, the service BrightKit was brought to my attention. Allowing me to manage multiple Twitter profiles. So I gave it a shot. BrightKit is set up to give you the first account for free and then you can add any secondary accounts for a fee, however while in beta, all accounts added are free. Not knowing when beta would end, I quickly started trying to think of every possible Twitter profile I could possibly want in the future just to add it for free now. Upon thinking of all the ideas that could require their own Twitter account it occured to me that Twitter was the perfect place to share all these links, but I simply couldnt do it through DigitalSkraps. So i quickly created CoolTweets and added it to my BrightKit profile.

BrightKit recently launched a bookmarklet called “Hootlet” which allows you to tweet any site your currently on. It automatically shrinks the link and adds it to your tweet inside a pop up. So the ability to share these links got even easier cutting out probably over half the work!

With the process being so easy turning it into a site seemed doable now. Motivated by wanting to increase traffic and followers on Twitter, I did some digging to find the tools I needed to make it happen.

The tools are now in place and the site is around 95% complete. There are a few things here and there that I need to tighten up but I feel pretty confident in letting her fly.

What’s on CoolTweets?

• Video
• Artist Portfolios
• Web Apps
• Graphic Design
• Interior Design
• Green Design
• Concept Design
• Inspiration
• Mac Apps
• Home Accessories
• Toys
• and So Much More!

The Format:

Like described earlier, I wanted to make theses posts similar to just sending the link but I also wanted to help the visitor click on just the links they were thinking seemed cool. Because of Twitters character limit it also had to be condusive to that and easy to scan through so consistency and a pattern where needed.

Because the only qualification for being posted on the site is that I think its cool, regardless of genre or subject, Not everything fits perfectly into one kind of category like the ones listed above. As a result I keep having to come up with new “Categories” and rename some.

The goal however is to have the appearance of things related to eachother organized in groups which are displayed in front of the colon sign.

So if you want to watch every cool video I’ve ever posted you can go to the search bar and enter “Video”, if “Home Accessories” are your thing and you’re super into lamps, give that a search!

Because I do all the posting for this site through Twitter, and not through the website itself, I’m not able to assign actual categories to each post within Wordpress so if you’re a blogger yourself, dont think of Categories the same way when you’re at CoolTweets.com.  It would take me forever to go back and edit every post. Typically theres a new post once an hour, on the hour.

Assistance?

On that topic. I’ve done some searching and had no luck finding this. If anybody out there knows of a plugin that will search the content of a post and file it in a category for me, please let me know. I’d love to have a plugin that looked for “Interior Design:” and then file every post that began with that in a catory named the same. I currently don’t know of a way to automate that.

Hope you all enjoy CoolTweets!

There will be contact information up on the site very soon where you can send me a link to something cool that you would like posted.

Thanks!

He assumes you don’t know anything about jQuery and haven’t spent much time with it. Making it maybe not the most ideal or beneficial video for any jQuery graduates but it is always good to hear straight from the creator what the product does even if it’s just to receive affirmation that you know what you’re doing.

If you’r like me though and don’t have much scripting language experience and find it just a little confusing or want to soak up any info out there regarding jQuery I definitely suggest you watch.

If you fall into the latter you should also follow John on Twitter.

Here’s a few more resources out there I’m using to learn jQuery that might come in handy.

• jQuery for Designers by Remy Sharp
• Useful jQuery a Compilation Of jQuery Utilities
• The Complete jQuery Resource List for You to Become an Almighty Developer
• 20 Useful and New jQuery plugins

Nothing hurts you more than procrastination!

So I’m going to lead by example and try and help my fellow procrastinators out. I have had the landing page for this site up for way to long. Between switching jobs, trying to get my own business up and running, work on art, personal projects, single life, and toying with the idea of going to school/dealing with loans. What went up as a coming soon page that was supposed to last about 2 weeks. its now been months. I had managed to grab myself some decent traffic for the site under the design previous to this one. Nothing to write home about but had it been managed well would have started to turn into some probably steady traffic. Thanks to the long stay the coming soon page had most of that traffic is gone.

There are countless articles out there in the blogesphere about how its many times more important to get something, anything out there instead of waiting and waiting to get 1 perfect thing out there. So today my site goes live. Not ready, incomplete, lacking information, bugs, etc. It is however something.

So. here are 3 steps you should take to help yourself avoid procrastination.

1. Clean up that work space yo!!!!

It’s strange how the clutter of a desk duplicates it self in the cluttering of your head. I have found countless benefits to having a tidy and sometimes, even borderline baron desk. It forces you to focus on whatever the task at hand is. You’re able to channel all your concentration and effort on that one thing. Soon resulting into a finished product then allowing you to go veg out or do whatever it was you were doing when you procrastinate.

2. Prioritize

Sorting out the junk from the money can be very beneficial. The money being anything that reaps a reward and the junk being time killers. I’m pretty freaking addicted to Call Of Duty 4 on xbox but I have managed to play it less and less to force myself into doing more important things even if its just painting or doing another time killer. I have found mixing up your time killers can be productive too as it forces you to find more outlets. However, the money is obviously where it’s at.

maybe you need to tidy up or make your resume up to date, you never know when you might need to send it to somebody. evaluate whats important and try and takle 1 or 2 of these money tasks and then go chill with some junk.

3. The To Do List.

I don’t care if its Backpack, iCal, Google Cal, Moleskine or freaking trapper keeper. Putting down a daily, but preferable monthly, to do list is in my opinion the best thing you can do to to ensure productivity. Especially monthly. The advantage here is that you get to map out far in advance what needs to be done by when. Things don’t sneak up on you for your projects near as much and giving yourself a visual time frame for when it has to be done is priceless. I have my iCal synced up with goggleCal so I can access it from work if I need to and at home my iCal is always running. Setting even modest goals for yourself can quickly prove to be priceless. The smallest amount of goal driven productivity is rewarding and contagious.

Maybe you need to mark Monday night down to clean the clutter off your workspace. Takes care of all 3 of these steps in one fail swoop.

Doesn’t matter how big or small, putting something down is better than nothing just like getting something out there can be better than getting one perfect thing out.