Archive for the 'blogs' Category

My Wife Has a Blog

Marty March 21st, 2005

he just started her own blog called Dreams, Rants and Raves to put up pictures, thoughts and poems. I think it will be great - of course, I think she’s awesome, so I’m probably a bit biased.

CSS Editors for Windows

Marty November 30th, 2004

It seems that most of my favorite blogs are done by people based on Macs. I would have LOVED to switch when I got a new computer, but I couldn’t afford the software changes even if I wanted to spend 2-3x as much for the computer itself. Someday, but I’m far away from that step. But in the meantime, I get to hear about all of these sweet programs for the Mac by the likes of Jon Hicks, but have a hard time figuring out a great one for the PC.

I use Dreamweaver MX for most of my core design, although I use StyleMaster 3.5 for a lot of the basic CSS (the wizards are good time-savers, even if I have go in and fix them). A lot of the designers I know swear by Homesite 5, although I can’t seem to find it anymore - Macromedia seems to have stopped production of it. Others swear by TopStyle, although I made the choice earlier to opt for StyleMaster 3.5. However, after beta testing StyleMaster 4.0, I’m thinking that I might need alternatives unless they manage to work out all of the bugs before release.

Supposedly Dreamweaver MX 2004 has Homesite +, which is an upgraded version of Homesite 5.5, but I think having a bare-bones editor (without the processor lag of DW) would be nice option. But are there other options out there that I don’t know of?

Sick as a Dog

Marty November 8th, 2004

Man, do I feel like hell. I seemed to have picked up the flu from my friend Kim’s kids - and it’s a ball of fun, let me tell you. I think I got all of 15 minutes of sleep last night, if I’m lucky. Of course, I’m rarely that lucky. If I didn’t have so much going on at work, I would be out of here faster than Ray Lewis from a crime scene. Hopefully, the drugs will kick in soon and I’ll be able to make it through the day.

In other news, this blog was finally discovered - and not in the way that I wanted it to be. I got over 300 spam comments from some online poker site, and it was getting VERY annoying. So, I did two things: one was I installed a blacklist (check it out here), and I put a little notice on the bottom of my site that any unauthorized ads on my blog will earn an invoice. I don’t know if it will work, but I saw something similar on Joseph Duemer’s site (although the article seems to be down now). At least it pissed off the spammers, which is a small win in my book.

Man, I hope those drugs kick in soon.

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A Designer’s Bookshelf

Marty September 7th, 2004

Greg Storey has answered the question that I myself have had for a long while - what are the books that designers use to help them and hone their craft? Greg’s list of his bookshelf has a lot of the more common tomes (Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards, Van Duyne’s Design of Sites) as well as some more uncommon but very sensible ones (Advertising Campaign Planning by Jim Avery made me think a bit). I know that others are out there with their own lists (I seem to remember Dave Shea putting out a list at one point), but it’s always interesting to see other designers that I admire (read: study, mimic, learn from) giving me some insights into where they get their smarts.

My own list (so far):

I’ve learned a lot, but there is so much more to learn - Greg’s list shows me that much. Oh well, onto the Amazon wish list they go… Feel free to add to my list of books I need to pick up to really get a hang of this CSS, PHP, XML design thing…

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