services
Designer & Developer Support
When other web suppliers tap us it’s usually for our ExpressionEngine chops.
Recently
Introducing version 3 of painter Juan Carlos Bronstein’s site
This one was a labor of love wherein the background remains dark, the panther pink.
Florida Council of Independent Schools adopts CSF’s Master In-Service system
The system handles re-certification for teachers at over 160 independent Florida schools.
products
External SAEF (Free)
Insert a row into any MySQL database table using a form on an ExpressionEngine page.
Tied Entries (Free)
An ExpressionEngine plugin to access content entries further than a single relationship away.
Elsewhere
"Gadget: 1. Survey":http://chaim.io/download/Gingold%20(2017)%20Gadget%20(1)%20Survey.pdf [PDF] is a cool history of software milestones "from Smalltalk to Minecraft" Chaim Gingold (2017). When you see these things collected you realize how much technological/civilizational/human progress they collectively represent. I wonder what we'd have been doing otherwise...
Volvo unveils its first full battery electric model, the "XC40 Recharge SUV":https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/volvo-reveals-xc40-recharge-first-full-electric-model with 402bhp a 248-mile range. Featuring no front grille!
A deep dive into "the Grand Seiko Snowflake":https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/grand-seiko-spring-drive-snowflake-review on Hodinkee. "The entire thing seems to have been calculated to create an effect of serenity without boredom; of minimalism without sterility."
This is actually kind of important: "How to select, copy, and paste text in iOS 13 and iPadOS 13":https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/10/15/how-to-select-copy-and-paste-text-in-ios-13-and-ipados-13. Thanks, AppleInsider. In Notes at least, 3-finger swipe-left and swipe-right isn't just undo and redo, but an entire history of actions to the document.
A lovely "poster of Frank Lloyd Wright homes":https://www.homeadvisor.com/r/map-of-frank-lloyd-wright-homes "in (nearly) every state" by HomeAdvisor.
Install "bullshit.js":https://mourner.github.io/bullshit.js/ as a bookmarklet. Your insides will thank you.
ExpressionEngine (EE) is the content management system that until recently I used for building every web property. In November 2018, EllisLab, the producer of EE, was sold to Digital Locations, Inc. (DLOC) and EllisLab owner Rick Ellis joined the parent company's payroll. The acquisition is detailed in Digital Locations' "Quarterly Report (Form 10-Q) dated August 13th, 2019":https://seekingalpha.com/filing/4600179. But the Digital Locations acquisition seems downright skeezy. Despite the company's tagline about Artificial Intelligence, it appears to be nothing more than a holding company for Mr "Bill Beifuss":https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/person/16521336. Moreover it looks like he's scrimping on incorporation fees: the company was founded in 2006 as Zingerang, then became Carbon Sciences for a decade, before morphing again into Digital Locations. It self-reports never having had any revenues. According to the linked-to Bloomberg profile, Mr Beifuss is also CEO of some other companies: Warp 9 Inc, Coeur D'alene French Baking Co, and Cumorah Capital Inc., none of which appear to provide any actual products or services either. Rick must have been aware of and a party to this bullshit. With ExpressionEngine he had a great thing going; I wonder what happened. All I can speculate is that he very much wanted to segue EE's success into enabling him to try other things professionally but that it remained his biggest achievement and he couldn't bring himself to let go of the golden goose even though it was fading without his hands-on vision. And then at some point last year he suddenly really needed a buyer. Recently, on October 3rd, 2019, he bought EllisLab back from Beifuss then sold it a week later to development house Packet Tide, that is, Tom Jaeger. So it Rick Ellis has finally let go of ExpressionEngine, even if he held on too long; despite being free EE can barely be be given away now; the technology has moved on. I'm relieved to have moved away from it onto the Node ecosystem. I really enjoyed meeting the EllisLab team at an EE conference in 2017 — such cool nice folks in person — but for me EllisLab is a cautionary tale.
I'm "excited by the Richard Mille Bonbon watch collection":https://www.ablogtowatch.com/richard-mille-bonbon-collection-rm-07-03-cupcake-rm-07-03-marshmallow-and-rm-16-01-fraise-watches/. Just fabulous. Crazy expensive but apparently all have been bought, most popularly in Malaysia.
"MacStories' macOS Catalina review":https://www.macstories.net/news/macos-catalina-the-macstories-review/ seems comprehensive enough to take over from John Siracusa's famous Ars Technica reviews.
Processes
Architecture
Before building your site or system, plans are required for both the back and front ends.
Design
It’s the competing considerations themselves that coalesce to form the design.
Installation & configuration
As well as smarts, what really makes a successful implementation likely is experience.
N
ow that the site’s wireframes have been generated during the architecture process, we turn them into mock-ups using visual elements such as a logo and an icon set; visual conventions such as a color scheme and a typeface collection; and visual rules such as a grid layout. Design appears in Jesse James Garrett’s useful Elements of User Experience diagram as the top level, labelled Visual Design.
As well as these elements, conventions and rules, the design must take into account a number of considerations that may initially appear to conflict until, with work, the tensions among them coalesce to actually form the design.
Dieter Rams, renowned industrial designer, has 10 Principles of Good Design.
Good design:
- is innovative
- makes a product useful
- is aesthetic
- helps us to understand a product
- is unobtrusive
- is honest
- is long-lasting
- is consequent to the last detail
- is concerned with the environment
- is as little design as possible.
The entire process, with dependencies
