Hopefully I can continue to refine my public speaking and presenting skills, as well as my presentation, and continue similar opportunities.

A few days ago I released the first of 3 sites for a client through my part time position at Chop Dawg Studios, Gone Native Communications.

Ocean City Magazine is a lifestyle magazine for Ocean City, NJ.  They wanted a site that reflected the shore location, that felt modern and had some functionality including archiving issues and subscribing to the magazine.

The site runs on WordPress, which allows them to run a blog/news section, their issues section and an easy to update events listing.

I started this mock up for a client, but soon realized that I was headed in the wrong direction.  I really like where it’s headed, so I’ll have to unearth it and develop it further and see where I can take it.

Tools: Photoshop

Fonts: Cabin, Yanone Kaffeesatz

3DROPS: I love the implementation of the lightbox.  It takes up the whole screen and feels very immersive.

Gridulator: Create a png grid overlay that you can import into Photoshop/your design tool of choice.  Definite the width of your grid, the gutters and margins, etc.

How to Move a WordPress Website using MySQL and phpMyAdmin: I’ve been doing a lot of WordPress lately and this is the best guide I’ve found for moving from MAMP to a live site.

Advice for dealing with design clients: Great advice.  My favs – “Don’t call yourself a freelancer”, and “The client is not your boss”

25 CSS Snippets for Some of the Most Common and Frustrating Tasks

Enjoy!

Since it’s been getting so many searches, I decided to put it back online, viewable here. Documentation is available, which goes into more detail and lists many more sources of information. Please contact me for more information or for a copy.

On a personal note, I’m really happy to see it’s received a tiny bit of interest and can be of help to people. My brother has fairly severe dyslexia, so this was a chance for me to research deeper into how he views the web & how I, as a web designer, could make it easier for him.

Web Design Resources/Blog Articles:

• 10 Rock Solid Website Layout Examples on DesignShack
• Whatever:Hover
• WordFinder Theme
• CSSReset.com

Inspiration:

• Get Concentrating
• Keith Cakes
• Prince St Films

Wildcard:

Music for me is a necessity, especially when I’m coding.  For this month’s wildcard links, here are two music related links I’ve come across this month.

• Designers.MX
• Mugasha

I still have some tinkering to do on the backend and a section for resources to add, but the site is about 99% done and most of the things left to do won’t be noticed by the end-user.

If you notice anything off, please contact me.

First off, this is my first experience using a touch screen device, as my phone does not have this capability. It’s very intuitive and smoth, although I’ve noticed some lagging when reading image heavy posts in Reeder, my RSS reader of choice.

The keyboard is fairly easy to use, although I tend to type with multiple fingers with my right hand and just my pointer finger on my left. The slightly smaller size throws me off a bit, but since I’m not going to be doing extensive writing on this (aside from the occasional blog post such as this one), it’s definitely not a deal breaker. It has taken some time to get used to having secondary keys on a separate screen.

In terms of apps, i went a bit crazy installing them, having been given a couple of iTunes gift cards. The app store isn’t too horrible to browse, as I’m used to the iTunes store. I do wish there were better previews of the apps, perhaps a demo so that the user culd see a it more than just some choice screenshots. But obviously, I understand the limitations of this. I’ll be doing reviews of individual apps, but some favs thus far are Reeder, Friendly for Facebook, Evernote, Flipboard, and Instapaper.

Things I don’t like: the notorious autocorrect. I have it turned off but for writing this post, the ability to auto capitalize my “i”s would be nice. I also wish that the auto rotation was a bit better. It seems to either been too sensitive or not sensitive enough. For the most part I tend to lock it in landscape mode.

Overall, it’s been a great device to use and since I’ve been less busy due to the holidays, my MacBook Pro has been getting lots of rest.

I heard about Sparrow via Twitter and decided to give it a try – simple interface, easy to set up email accounts.  On Tumblr, I described it as the love child of Tweetie + Mail + Gmail.  The interface is reminiscent of Tweetie (Sparrow on the left, Tweetie on the Right):

It has the out of the browser approach of Mail and the OSX feeling of Mail, along with the threaded conversations of Gmail, which I didn’t realize I missed so much until I started using Sparrow.  A feature I really like is the “drawer”, which slides out for reading emails.  It lets me control how much screen real estate the application takes up.

I’m not a power email user by far – I need something that will let me take my email out of the browser, integrate multiple inboxes as I have an email address for the start-up I work for, and look nice alongside the rest of my applications.  Sparrow fits the bill for me.

I couldn’t find any good, thorough resources on how to do this, though I found some really great scattered resources.  I figured I couldn’t be the only person trying to do this same task, so I’m going to outline my process.

The first step of the process was to export the Access database as an Excel spreadsheet.  I wanted to get the latitude and longitude of the points and insert them into the spreadsheet, rather than use the Maps API geocoder, as there were so many points, I was afraid it would be too slow to do on the fly.  I used GPS Visualizer’s Geocoder, a great tool that automatically gets the coordinates of a given address.  Unfortunately for me, it only works on 1000 addresses at a time.  I fired Safari in addition to Firefox that I was already using, and ran them simultaneously to cut down on the time it would take to process the points.

Once all 12,000 points had been processed, I exported the XML from Excel.  It looked horrible.  It definitely wouldn’t work for me.  Something to do with Excel or something to do with my inexperience in XML/Excel?  A little of both I think.  Anyway, I did some more Google-ing and found a way to export XML from a Google Docs spreadsheet, using this great Docs’ gadget.  I processed a couple thousand at a time and in very little time, I had a nicely formatted XML document.

The next step was writing the Javascript to actually map the points.  I used two tutorials, one from XML.com and the other from GeoChalkboard.  After a bit of wrangling, I was able to map the points.  I ran into a problem though in that the vast amount of points caused the browser to come to a grinding halt or crash completely.  I found a post from In Usability We Trust and used MarkerCluster to cluster the points together.  One of the added benefits of MarkerCluster is that it creates almost an infographic, rather than just a huge cluster of red tabs.

Unfortunately, the sheer number of points I was trying to plot slowed down the browser too much to be usable.  This method works great for a smaller amount of points, as I tested it with about 1000 points and the browser had no major hang ups while trying to load the points.