Some Random Dude

A site I helped work on, The Apartment, just launched. The project was to rebuild their site/blog in a much more interactive model with greater potential for user interaction. The site was built in Flex and was relatively large in scale. On top of it, this was my first Flex project, so it was quite a learning experience.

I definitely suggest checking it out. There were some very large technical challenges for this project, as well as a few we still need to tackle. Still, we are pretty stoked about its (beta) launch. One work of warning - the content can be a little risqué, so I would think twice about opening this site up at work.

For any of you wondering why I have not written a very noteworthy article in a while, this project had a little something to do with that. Hopefully things will be calming down a little from now on and I can get back to my regular schedule.

Just like every other bloke out there that has a blog, I’ve had my problems with comment spam. What you might not know though is that your spam may be giving you a false sense of who is visiting your site.

I regularly check my site logs to see who is coming to my site. I am especially interested in browser statistics - not only for this site, but in general as well. Last month, I noticed that the segment of visitors using Internet Explorer had steadily risen to around 45 to 50 percent. I found this to be a strange occurance since I was usually seeing a vast majority of Firefox users coming to my site with the occasional Safari boom when I’d post to Pixelsurgeon, Newstoday and Artdorks.

It wasn’t just a coincidence that during that same timespan, I was seeing my highest concentration of blog spam to date. I would sometimes get over 100 comment notifications that were spam and that doesn’t count the number that were actually blocked by my spam filters.

Read the rest of this post…

Seriously, this has got the be the best find I’ve come across in a very long time.

I never have felt quite right with the tools I’ve used for the XHTML/CSS work I’ve done up to this point. Dreamweaver almost always is an overkill and all the extra tools just end up getting in the way. Notepad is nice and simple, but unfortunately, too simple.

Then Notepad2 came into my life and all became right in my XHTML/CSS development life. It has all the best code-based features that Dreamweaver has in the nice, simple shell of Notepad. By far, the best feature is the ability to “zoom in/out” on the code. Truly awesome. Did I mention it’s free? No? Well it is.

Download it now and enjoy

I get a fairly good amount of traffic coming through this site so I wanted to post this on here to see if I’d have any takers.

I’m looking to work with someone to create a few blog plugins for some Flash apps I made a while back. One of them, for instance, is an XML/Flash slideshow I made a while back and really works nicely in the blog environment.

Drop me an email: somerandomddude AT somerandomddude.net

What an interesting month March was. I know we’re a good half a week into April, but I feel I’m still recovering from a flurry of different projects, all of which were being worked on at the same time and none of which are completed (of course).

Unfortunately, all my design projects at this point are very code internsive. I feel as though my mind is attempting to hold each project into memory because I know if I let myself forget about the nuances of any of them, I’ll be blankly staring at the screen wondering what the hell I’m looking at.

I definitely miss design-only projects where brief periods of estrangement from a particular piece of work can be an invigorating and refreshing influence. Maybe it’s just me, but I just don’t feel the same when I’m coding.

On other subjects, I feel as though I have a bunch of projects that are all over the hump in terms of completion and there’s going to be one week where there’s just tons of news to write about. The XML slideshow is definitely at a 1.0, but I’d like to have some sort of backend to make things a tad easier for content creation. The XML media player is probably closer to a 0.3 right now but I think one hardcore weekend (preferably along side Sam) would push it close if not to a 1.0. Lastly, the spatial photo browser is back on the front burner and will be getting my full attention for this entire week (at least). I’ve gotten the basic stuff up and running and I’m starting to push and pull at the code to see what else I can get it to do without a ton of extra effort. I’d like to post something on here by the end of the week…