It feels good to be home—it always does. Despite the 3 degree temperature, I felt compelled to take a panorama of my backyard with the snow we got. I was surprised with how much there was considering all we had in Baltimore was rain rain rain. I’m really looking forward to this week away from everything. Take a closer look of the panorama and you might see the dogs hanging out on the porch.

I have this bad habit of launching my personal websites a bit prematurely so I can at least have something up. This website is a prime example. I only have a content management system for news and the lab, and it’s been that way for over a year now. I have most of v2 finished and it’s definitely ready to post, but the CMS is not. I’ve been working on it when I can, focusing mainly on news, but the rest shouldn’t be as tough. I’ve been really excited to show something regarding the progress I’ve been making.

I’m trying something new in terms of form UI. There won’t be any input boxes, only textfields. Each textfield for inputting information is enabled and disabled using a label to the left of it. When the label is blue, it can be clicked to edit that field. As soon as content is filled in, it changes to a dark grey and the field itself can then be selected. For boolean elements such as image frames, clicking the label switches between true and false. The standard variables for each post are at the top (title, date, tags) and the rest is left up to either text blocks, images, or SWFs. The date can be specific as shown or phrases such as “now,” “yesterday,” “last saturday” can be used and understood.

To the left of the labels are actions for closing and moving elements. Clicking the move button highlights the element, allowing it to be moved with the arrow keys. The post is previewed in real-time on the right side of the window, displaying it exactly as it would be seen on the website. I use my own markup language for all the content seen on v2. It’s a refined xHTML that’s more specific to my needs. Images use the “” tag, but SWFs follow the same look and use “.” The backend handles the conversions so it can be inputted once, but appear in the formats of both the current site and v2.

I have plans for fine tuning the CMS a lot more so it does things like highlighting links and tags in edit mode, but they aren’t necessarily priority. My aim is to have a fully-workable version finished before launching v2. With my final critique tomorrow morning, I’m certain I can hope to have it launched before the New Year. Keep an eye out.

I realized it’s been a while since I posted about the free gems I find useful. I’ve known about this little diddy for a while, but never thought I’d find it useful—what a fool I was! Quicksilver has allowed me to reduce my dock down to the finder and the trash. In short, it’s a hotkey application launcher, but so much more—it can quickly open files as well. I used to live by the dock’s stacks feature to keep my apps organized, but I soon found myself having more stacks than apps! Now, all I do is hit option space, type the first few letters of the app I want and there I go. It’s especially handy for those apps that are useful, but not everyday useful. I haven’t dug into Quicksilver too much other than it’s primary purpose, but I know it offers a whole lot more.

Every day I kick myself for not taking process photos of the first few shoots for this project. I made sure to take a few for this latest one though. I also picked up some frames and managed to frame four of the photos. All I can say is, thank god I don’t work at a frame shop. After cutting the matte for one, I felt so out of shape, I headed to the print lab and had the rest laser cut. I know what you’re thinking… can a laser cut bevel? No, but it does burn the inside of the matte, leaving a nice contrast. I’d never use the bevel filter in Photoshop—and I think that justifies it enough.

I received my first newsletter from Springpad today. After seeing what they have in store for the upcoming months, I noticed a section on the page called “The Buzz.” I noticed a few familiar sources, but then one really popped out at me—Destroy Today! Either Springpad has Google Analytics and follows their referrals or they actually follow Destroy Today. I assume it’s the former, but who knows.

I found myself needing a half hour or so to create anything to feel productive. I’m in the midst of finals and a break of any kind is a good way to avoid mental strain. The result of this 30 minute break is the Destroy Today message style for Adium! For those who aren’t familiar with Adium, it’s a free, open source instant messenger for Mac. Adium supports a ton of IM services (I use it for AIM) and it promotes the development of themes/skins to personalize the app. Try out my message style if you don’t get enough blue and dark grey in your life.

Grant Skinner just posted on his blog about the importance of exporting a release build, stating SWF file sizes can be reduced by up to 35% and speed increased by 2.5 times. Lately, I’ve been cleaning my Foundation framework because it was adding a significant amount of weight to my files. Even though cleaning it up reduced file sizes tremendously, I just tested Grant’s suggestion the I. Gorman website and saw a 120kb reduction! Incredible.

Take a look at his original post here.

I finished touching up a few more shots for my sequence series. I also managed to print the final version of Jen’s with the type included (seen above). The onscreen version really doesn’t compare. I’m extremely pleased with the results so far and I still have to shoot Luke and Jessica.

I’ve been well aware of Twitter for a long time now, but reluctant to get sucked in. I tried it out a few months back and nothing really came of it. I’m going to try again, but what’s making it hard to stay consistent with it is the lack of a really solid Twitter client. I’ve tried out over a dozen now with none of them having a UI that really does it for me. I even tried out Tweetdeck with no luck. So here’s the quesiton: would it be worth it to develop DestroyTwitter?

Ps—you can follow me to get a better idea of how new I am to this.

This photoshoot is really becoming something. I’m having a blast taking everyone’s photo and I get even more enjoyment after post-processing them. Most of the shots are half processed, even this one, but I was just excited to get it up on the site. I’ll get most of the work done this weekend, so expect a bombardment of these portraits—they’re due next week.

In other news, I’ve been working on the content management system for Destroy Today v2. This time I’m going for a system that doesn’t exactly mimic the design and layout of the site it modifies, but rather keeps everything as simple as possible—maybe including some drag and drop. I’ll most likely have the news section done today, which is my top priority, but others will follow soon after.

Now, a question to anyone: is there anything missing from the site that would make it a lot easier or more useful? (visual statistics for projects, more in-depth process for lab studies, more code talk, etc). Let me know.