Every mad scientist needs his Frankenstein. Mine just happens to be a website. Grunt Labs is my ongoing experiment, a place to play, test, and generally ignore browsers lagging behind. Grunt Labs is also a sign of things to come for the blog and Grunt, but more on that later.
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This was just too good to not share. I have no other comment other than “Pure Awesome”. Yes you can quote me on that.
via FFFFOUND!
I’ve just spent some time with Mozilla Labs newest creation Ubiquity. And I’m impressed, ok I’m very impressed. If you have spent time on a mac, chances are you used Quicksilver (If you haven’t you need to now! I’ll wait). Quicksilver is the ultimate productivity tool and goes far, far (very far) beyond just an app launcher. Now imagine taking all that wonderful power and transferring it to the your browser. I know, mind numbing isn’t it.
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So yesterday the jQuery site got a much needed(in my opinion) redesign. And in true jQuery fashion they went all out, and they ruffled some feathers, stired the pot, shook up the bee’s nest, etc. What follows is a scathing post filled with negativity and whining. Why? Cause I like jQuery(a lot) and I don’t think it should succumb to looking like one of the crappy abortions of the internet.
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So what have I’ve been doing for the last few weeks? I’m happy to announce the launch of GRUNT at gruntdesign.com. This is my new business identity and a step forward in my freelance career. CurtisHenson.com started out as a portfolio, and then became a blog, I recently redesigned the site to try and incorporate a portfolio but wasn’t happy with it. So I decided to separate the man from the myth(or something like that).
I decided to build an identity around a logo I had done, which is pretty much ass backwards from the way most people would do it. The gorilla was originally for a side project but now fronts the GRUNT name which I truly believe is an appropriate name and identity for me(being the megalomaniac I am). Domain inspiration came from my friend Will, which also included several other “colorful” suggestions.
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Pete, a Swiss guy who lives in Thailand (how could I not include that little tidbit), posted a great tutorial on how he did his donation page. He uses jQuery, which is must (right?), and he even tells you how to put it into a WordPress theme. If you have a donation form or page on your site and are using that ugly paypal button(like me) you need to get with the times (although I still want an animated gif email box). Read the PayPal donation form with CSS and jQuery for WordPress article now, or forever have an orange button on your site.
As Checkmate approaches 300 downloads I started thinking about updates. Checkmate has already received 4 bug fixes and I would like to be able to do a major update in the future. But I also thought about those people that had not subscribed to the thread or the comments. I’m not sure if these people check back often for updates but I would say most people don’t.
So I thought about having themes “call home” and check for updates periodically and inform the user, much like how WordPress 2.5 informs users of updates. But for a free theme this seemed a bit invasive to me. A simpler and effective way I thought up is to pull a RSS feed into an admin page where users could check for update notices. I know you can do this manually on the dashboard, but most theme users won’t do that.
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Site specific browsers(SSBs) are my new favorite thing. If you haven’t heard of SSBs yet, this will change the way you use the web, and your life will change for the better forever and ever. SSBs are just what they sound like: a browser specifically for one website. Sounds ridiculous and useless doesn’t it? Why would I want a bunch of browsers when I can have tabs in Firefox? Well I’m going to show you.
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News of Google Ajax Libraries API is spreading fast, and I for one welcome it. Anything I can do to speed up websites and offload files is something I’ll likely take advantage of.
They’ve recently added jQuery, and I’ve started using it with this new design. So far it is working great, but will it last? Anyone who uses Google Analytics knows that at times it can slow your page down. Although Google says this is a faster alternative to using your own server, I think the chance for slow response time is still there.
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Anyone that has ever had to use a U.S. Government website knows that they are horrible. And by horrible I mean awful. And by awful I mean terrible. And by terrible I mean they are abominations of all that is good in the universe and beyond. I have given up hope of these sites joining us in the new millennium but all is not lost.
There are a few sites that take government data and organize it into usable presentable information a non Tom Cruise type being can interpret. But getting this data means manually scraping it, which …well… sucks. I’m not going to spend my time doing it, and I doubt you would either.
Well the smarty pants guys(I’m just jealous) over at Princeton have written a paper suggesting stop the nonsense redesigning of government websites, and deliver the raw data via a structured format like RSS and XML. This would allow much more talented people to grab the data and run with it. I can only imagine the beautifully usable sites that would come from easily obtainable data.
It would be pushing it, really pushing it, but creating an API for certain government websites could open all sorts of avenues. Imagine a well done interface for the DMV, complete with AJAX, smooth gradients, and calming pastel colors. I don’t know if we’ll ever see this type of integration but it is nice to imagine.