Here are before and after shots of the web site for Princeton Academy of the Sacred Heart in Princeton, NJ.

Enjoy...

Posted by Bob Monsour at 4:08 PM | Permalink

I just recently learned that Google Reader, Google's feed (RSS/Atom) reader has a new beta. So I decided to give it a try.

I am very much liking what I see and the fact that it's not another app, that it's in my browser, is nice (but that has its own problems that I'll write about some other time). It's got some nice keyboard shortcuts, and as long as you can export your current newsreader's subscriptions into OPML, you can import them right into Google Reader.

Give it a look, if you're looking for a strong browser-based newsfeed reader.

Posted by Bob Monsour at 10:13 PM | Permalink

Here are several possible photos for "An Evening in Paradise". Do you have a favorite?

Photo 1

Photo 2

Photo 3

Photo 4

Photo 5

Posted by Bob Monsour at 9:38 AM | Permalink

Camino - Mozilla power, Mac style.: Finding that Camino (with the 1.0 release id'd by Tim Bray and Dave Shea) to be a very nice Mac browser. One thing that I particularly like is that the Bookmark Bar simply wraps to a second line, rather than inserting the >> mark that Safari displays to indicate that you must click to see the links that don't fit.

The documentation speaks of a "find as you type" feature that is supposed to be "on" by default, yet it doesn't appear to function. No great shakes. It just requires, as the other browsers do, a press of cmd-f to get the find started.

In my brief 30 minutes of Camino-ing, it feels fast and compatible with the variety of sites I visit.

Posted by Bob Monsour at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Watch the construction of the new gymnasium at Princeton Academy of the Sacred Heart.

I installed a wireless network camera that FTP's images to the school's web server every 10 minutes between 7am and 5pm. One of the options for the image filename is a "base name" followed by a string representing the current date and time. I then wrote a PHP script that, when the page is requested by a browser, walks through the files in the image directory and displays the one with the latest timestamp on the file.

What I'm looking forward to is creating the time-lapse movie of all the images once the building is complete. Quicktime has a very simple mechanism for doing this. All you do is choose "Open Image Sequence..." under the File menu and point it to the first image in the sequence. It then imports the files, using the increasing sequence number in each filename, to create a movie. You have complete control over the rate at which the images are presented too.

I'll probably create the first sequence once the outer shell of the building is complete and post it on the school web site (and perhaps here as well).

Posted by Bob Monsour at 1:45 PM | Permalink

TextMate: The Missing Editor for OS X is quite the wonderful editor for Mac OS X. It has very nice support for various languages as well as shell integration and other features too numerous to mention. If you develop on a Mac, this is the editor. That said, I've heard others say that "any editor is better than a new editor". This can be quite true for someone who has been developing for years on end. I know several who swear by emacs, due to the level of knowledge of the tool and the productivity they get from its inherent flexibility and programmability. I'm not in that boat and think I've found the right editor for the kind of work I am now involved in, standards-based web site development in XHTML & CSS.

Posted by Bob Monsour at 7:37 PM | Permalink

Just yesterday, I started using two Mac utilities, both of which were new to me, but have been around for a while.

The first is called Taboo. The search for Taboo was borne of a major frustration with Safari. Having become addicted to tabbed browsing, and the dangerous adjacency of the 'Q' and 'W' keys, I too often wind up quitting Safari completely when all I really wanted to do was close the current tab. Well, Taboo offers the necessary warning, saving much head pain. I was in the middle of writing notes using Instiki as a personal note-taking app and was in the middle of taking notes at An Event Apart (which was a great experience, by the way), when I managed to quit Safari and lose about a half-hour of unsaved notes. Now, with Taboo, that will not happen again; unless, of course, I manage to click right on through the warning dialogue.

The second, and way cool app, is called Mousepose, prounouced mouse-poh-zay, like Apple's expose, but with a mouse instead. What Mousepose does is give you a hot key combination (of your choosing) that puts a "spotlight" on the mouse position. It then can either time out or the same key combination removes the spotlight. Eric Meyer was using this during his presentation yesterday and it was very useful for highlighting portions of the screen. Working at home on a laptop with a second monitor to add display space, it is incredibly useful in simply locating the cursor.

I recommend both of these to any Mac user who has such needs.

Posted by Bob Monsour at 11:12 AM | Permalink

Well, they've finally done it. Web design standards bearers Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer have announced the date and location of their inaugural Event Apart.

As they describe it:

You will learn how to:

• Design, write, and structure your site to communicate clearly and effectively.
• Let user needs and business goals guide redesigns, and get buy-in from bosses and clients.
• Separate your site’s underlying structure from its visual presentation.
• Translate even the most sophisticated and complex visual designs to CSS layout.
• Make pages that load twice as fast, rank higher on Google, and work better for more users.

You’ll also gain insight into how experienced standards-based designers approach and solve common problems as Eric and Jeffrey re-create an attendee’s site in CSS and semantic XHTML, and then re-cast it to look and work even better.

This is not an introductory class. Not a rehashing of basics. Not for beginners. Not to be missed.

I will not be missing it and I suggest that if you are involved in web design, are an active practitioner of CSS/XHTML, and are anywhere near Philadelphia on December 5th, you too should attend.

Posted by Bob Monsour at 8:30 AM | Permalink