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A New Series: sIFR Explained

With all this debate going on recently amongst web designers and developers on embedding fonts (check out Zeldman’s blog entry on talk of new, competing specifications), I thought now would be a great time to dive in a little deeper to a technology that exists today to embed any font you’d like into your pages: sIFR.

If you don’t know, sIFR stands for Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (Inman is Shaun Inman, who originally conceived of the idea). You can read the history of sIFR’s development at Mike Davidson’s website. In short, it takes existing text, styled in CSS with one of the small list of web fonts you are capable of reliably using, and replaces it with a small bit of Flash, where the font you really want to use is embedded. The result: any text can be replaced on the fly with a font you desire. Nice, eh?

I’ve always found that sIFR can be frustratingly difficult to get to know at first. Documentation can be a little tough to follow. So, I’m starting a new series that looks more in-depth into this technology. At the same time, I will be doing my best to take my findings and posting them back on sIFR’s main documentation wiki. I’m going to go through getting sIFR working, then through the properties and methods you can use to customize it, and then go further with examples on interacting with it once text has been replaced. I’d like to throw in stats and benchmarks here and there too, where I can.

So check back soon – I’ll be posting the first article this week. In the meantime, you can check out examples of what people have done on sIFR’s wiki, or check out a site TMX Interactive (the group I work for) designed and marked up that also uses sIFR, Haven Music.

Feed Cleanup

One of the things that always bothered me about my blog was that I had no idea if anyone was reading it, and if they were, who. So I made a few small changes as of today, if anyone really cares.

One, I added Google Analytics to the site to see if I am getting any traffic at all. Believe it or not, this site is still running on Textpattern 1.0rc2, so the only method that I had available to me at the time was to go to the Admin section, click on the Logs tab, and see some basic stats of people hitting the site. Now, Google Analytics allows me to understand a little deeper who is hitting the site, from where, and what kind of basic stats they have.

The other issue was that I suspected that a majority of the people that accessed this site were ones who saw my articles three years ago (!) on Cameron Moll’s site or from the 2005 HighEdWebDev conference and subscribed for the heck of it and never visited again. I’d like to start this blog back up again somehow and give it some focus, but I never knew how many people were actually hitting the site through the feeds. Today, I’ve switched to using FeedBurner to host my feeds so that I have a better understanding of who is reading. And if it’s no one? Well, I might have to call it quits, or get myself focused, mount a small campaign, and see what the results are.

Either way, if you have subscribed to this blog already, you should be redirected now to the FeedBurner feed automatically. For cleanliness’ sake, you might want to update the URL to the feed for this site to http://feeds.feedburner.com/redarrow.

UTF-8

I just stumbled on this article that does a great job of explaining UTF-8 and character encoding. Via 456bereastreet

More stuff happening

If you haven’t visited in a long time, you’ll remember that my blog had a really, really ugly green background color. It drove me crazy every time I saw it, but always thought the solution to fixing the problem was to do a complete redesign. Well, I couldn’t take it anymore: colors were swapped to something more neutral and the logo was updated slightly. I’m no designer, so you’ll have to forgive me if the changes aren’t that much better.

Since moving to Philly, things have been very busy. While working at TMX Interactive, I’ve had the privilege of working on several projects. A few of them have launched:

Cost of a Burger

A great site talking about hidden card processing fees and how Heartland Payment Systems gives you the rundown of what your rights are as a merchant allowing customers to purchase your services or products with credit cards. Love the design work done on the burger animation and the clean, simplicity of the site as a whole.

A Change We Can Believe In

Haven Media Group, in a nutshell, is a music network that brings fans and artists closer through exclusive events, etc. This site features a song and video they created about the recent presidential election, which you can purchase from the site. Again, love the creative work here, especially with the timeline given.

Sony eBridge

A teaser page for the new eBridge website, which provides the ability for users advertising via discs to track their campaigns. We’re finishing up a design to go live on the 13th of November, but the teaser already gives you a good idea of where the final site is headed.

I’ve also done some minor freelance work as of late, updating my friend’s site Ellen Rady Designs. Seriously, if you are anywhere close to the Cleveland area and are looking for an interior designer, Ellen has an amazing talent of making things look warm and inviting.

And so much more! Just spending time on the weekends exploring the area, getting to know what’s around here. The one nice thing about Philly is that it’s so close to three other states, and there’s so much to see.

A New Place

What some people don’t know is that I recently moved from the Cleveland area to the Philadelphia area. For many, it seemed sudden, but while the move itself was quick, the decision to do something else was a long time coming.

Sherwin-Williams was a great place to work. It’s obvious from the beginning that they have built their company around catering to their employees, and there’s a reason why people celebrate 40- and even 50-year anniversaries there. I made the gut-wrenching decision to leave for a few reasons: one, I didn’t think that I had the ability to make any more lasting, beneficial changes in our department; two, while Sherwin-Williams makes the best quality paint in the world, it left us always building the same things: websites about paint; three, I didn’t feel, in the end, that this was the right place for me to settle down and work for the rest of my life.

With that, it was time to make a change. I posted resumes to several companies, always telling myself that I would stay away from a design agency because they never seemed to have their acts together, unless you are the likes of Happy Cog or Blue Flavor or someone similar. Yet, I ended up working for a design agency anyway.

A month ago, I joined the team at TMX Interactive. I was impressed by the group of designers and the quality of work they were putting out. The Creative Director, Patrick Walsh, seems to have a good head on his shoulders and a great eye for design. As a markup guy, I relish in the fact that comps are set to 960 pixels wide and follow grids and are more consistent in styling. These guys don’t just design, they know what it’s like to make a website, and it’s evident in the work I’m seeing coming from there. My responsibilities: as a lead front-end developer, I not only set standards for how we approach front-end development, but I work with the designers and application developers to put together the most realistic and cohesive package we can.

They’re also reinventing themselves, in a sense, by using their unique approach of combining Six Sigma methodologies with the latest philosophies around building websites, and they’re soaking it in. No one’s perfect, and we all learn as we go, but it’s nice that TMX takes the approach of being willing to learn rather than sticking to old ways.

Since starting at TMX, I’ve worked on 5 websites already. I’m looking forward to sharing the work we do here in the future. (Yes, that means that while all my friends are in Ohio, I’m going to attempt to keep this blog up-to-date while I’m out here in Philly.) One piece we did recently was a humorous bit: we’ve added a new candidate to the presidential race: Jack Obain, a hilarious mix of Barack Obama and John McCain. The creative work on this, despite the amount of time we were able to devote, is really fantastic. I admire people who know how to do this stuff. Check out the accompanying video below and let us know what you think.