Isaac Keyet

Quebec

Isaac Keyet — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:24:05 +0000

Just wanted to post a note about the awesome meetup I just got back from in Quebec, Canada. I finally got to meet the rest of the Automatticians (well most of them) and had a great time overall. Everyone is just so intelligent, successful and cool to talk to that it was almost intimidating. We went mountain biking and gokarting, both of which I really enjoyed and I hope we’ll do more next year.

Oh, and my team for the week came up with a really cool update to a certain something that I’m not sure if I should mention right now. Will post more about this later though. It’s a-w-e-s-o-m-e!

PS3 headache

Isaac Keyet — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 02:11:20 +0000

I’m in pain right now. My PS3 broke down big time, keeps throwing what I’ve learned is the dreaded “80010514″ error which basically means you’re f*d and have to return the machine to the vendor to have either the HDD or the BluRay drive swapped. Major bummer.

In other news: It’s been (and is) a great, warm summer in Sweden. I’ve moved into a new apartment where I’m going to stay for a while and I’m still cranking hard with IntenseDebate. Watch out for new cool updates to the plugin soon!

Incredible artwork: Bendito Machine

Isaac Keyet — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 22:23:28 +0000

There are three short films in the Bendito Machine series (so far, don’t know if more are planned). This one I discovered just now, and I’m amazed by the detail and perfection in the artwork. Check it out and fall in love.

New, flashy user menus for IntenseDebate!

Isaac Keyet — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 22:43:42 +0000

A few days ago we went live with some new user menus for the IntenseDebate plugin. I’ve made the design of course, and while they’re meant to resemble the looks of the old menus in a lot of ways, there are some notable differences. The most striking change is of course the avatar being a part of the popup as this was not the case before. An enlarged avatar gives the reader a more personal and complete insight in a user profile.

The goal for the redesign was to remove non-vital elements from the menu, items that you’re probably not interested in until you know the other stuff anyway. It now shows the username in large letters, along with the reputation meter. If you have enabled your latest twitter messages, and have a description as well, now both will show - not one or the other like it was before. This is true for the IntenseDebate.com profile as well.

Of course I’m going for pixel-perfect, clean, and with fancy effects once you notice them. Hint: The “border” around the avatar is actually a semi-transparent sweet-looking box, and all buttons have fancy :hover and :active effects. All in a single CSS sprite of course. Hope you like it!

Sad robot

Isaac Keyet — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:25:02 +0000

This blog is not all about YouTube, I promise.. But this video was just awesome.

Updated blog design

Isaac Keyet — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 20:29:57 +0000

If you’re reading this in a reader, you might want to click through to the actual web page (www.isaackeyet.com/blog) to see the beauty. It’s a minor update but still refreshing if you ask me. Will touch it up a bit again soon when I have the inspiration. A design update is coming to my personal swedish blog as well.

The first useful ad

Isaac Keyet — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 00:13:37 +0000

I was actually pleasantly surprised when I discovered this new advertisement type on YouTube the other day, it’s a large bar that goes across the bottom of the video that tells the name of the song, displays some artwork if available AND links to services where you can buy and download the song. How awesome is that? Go YouTube!

WordPress nominated for Webware 2009

Isaac Keyet — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 20:24:30 +0000

So this is pretty cool… The Wordpress platform was nominated in the Webware awards anno 2009. If you love WordPress as much as I do, you don’t hesitate to go vote for your champ!

Seriously though, I’m proud. The whole team behind WordPress is truly amazing.

IntenseDebate Plugins!

Isaac Keyet — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 20:42:09 +0000

It’s an exciting day for all of us in the IntenseDebate community. Today we’re announcing IntenseDebate Plugins, turning IntenseDebate into a real commenting platform. We’re launching with 4 plugins we’ve written on our own to show the capabilities, and to check off some longtime requested features. Of the 4, I’ve been the most involved in the development of the Smileys plugin, which I’ve created all 19 smileys for.

The smileys are inspired by existing Smileys sets such as iChat, MSN, the bulletin forum boards smileys and Adium’s default ones, but are 100% made by me. I chose to create them in a 12×12px format instead of the usual 16×16px or larger, because this means they won’t break the line-heights on most sites as much. Pretty nifty if you ask me.

So go ahead! Show people what you’re capable of and write your own plugin today. Who knows, there’s a possibility you might get featured…

Ping-o-matic redesign now live!

Isaac Keyet — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 15:01:43 +0000

I’ve worked on this project for a while to create a new design for Ping-o-matic, a service provided by WordPress & Automattic. It’s taken a while, since IntenseDebate todos are always prioritized, but overall I’m really happy with how it turned out in the end.

Check out Ping-o-matic’s new design here: Ping-o-matic

For anyone that cares, this is what I’ve done on the project: Designed a new logo, new favicon, complete site redesign, modified existing code to fit the new design as well as created some new elements, all-new CSS which uses a CSS sprite for all graphics used on the site which decreases load time and server pressure a good bit, some simple javascript to show/hide the Learn more text and the function to uncheck all ping services (if you’ve already checked all). Also a PHP function that switches between navigation tabs when you go to different pages. I was heavily influenced by Jon Fox’s work for that one.

Apart from that.. well..

Created a basic new color palette for the service.
CSS3 rounded corners on many objects = less graphics needed, while still rendering perfectly acceptable in browsers that do not support this feature yet.
All CSS is kept in one document, no browser-specific fixes besides the ones contained in the main stylesheet.

I’m really happy with it, simply put.

Thanks to Matt Thomas and Matt Mullenweg for all the feedback along the way.
CSS sprites are awesome, read more about them here.