“Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide.”

I just finished taking the A List Apart’s 2008 survey for people who make websites. The survey was well done and only took 5-10 minutes to complete. I’m looking forward to seeing the final report based on everyone’s feedback!

If your profession is one mentioned above, make sure to provide your feedback!

During the time that I’ve been using jQuery (about a year now), I’ve run into three fairly significant browser issues. Between IE, Firefox, Safari, and Opera, Firefox is the only browser that I have yet to experience any issues with (related to jQuery, of course).

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Fresh on the heels of receiving my Aviary Early Bird Invitation, I received a Dropbox invite!

Basically, Dropbox is another online file sharing service that works with both Mac OS and Windows. Check out the Dropbox home page for a screencast and information about the service. Their FAQ page also has plenty of information.

The beta program includes 2GB of free storage…but sign up now because once the beta is over, new accounts (FREE) are currently slated to receive only 1GB.

If you are interested in “beta testing” Dropbox, I have 9 beta invites remaining. I will send them to the first 9 people who request one.

Update: I’m all out of invites…

If you haven’t heard about Aviary:

“Aviary is a suite of rich internet applications geared for artists of all genres. From image editing to typography to music to 3D to video, we have a tool for everything. At Worth1000, we are creating a complex ecosystem for artists and providing the world with free, capable collaborative tools and an approach to collaboration and rights management that will turn the marketplace for online art on its head.”

I signed up for an “early bird” invitation months ago and last week, I finally received my invitation email. I’ve been playing around with Phoenix and Peacock and am very impressed with the quality of the tools.

The tools are definitely designed more for the “advanced hobbyist creators”, however if you’re familiar with Photoshop, Phoenix should look very familiar. [screenshot]

If you are interested in “beta testing” Aviary, I have 4 early bird invites remaining. I will send them to the first 4 people who request one.

Update: I’m all out of invites…

Even though my current design is fairly new, I’ve never been very happy with it. As a result, I recently started the process of designing a new WordPress Theme from scratch, and was planning on blogging about my experience.

While researching WordPress Theme tags and functions, I came accross a site called ThemeTation. Launched on June 5th, 2008 by Kai Loon, it is a well designed site that includes a WordPress related Weblog as well as free WordPress Themes (SuperFresh and Blue Blog).

What really caught my attention was the very informative series Kai Loon put together on creating a WordPress Theme from scratch. If you’ve ever considered taking on that challenge or are just interested in how WordPress Themes work, I suggest you take a look:

Part 1 - Structuring, Designing in Photoshop

Part 2 - Slicing and Coding

Part 3a - WordPress Implementation

Part 3b - WordPress Implementation cont.

Thanks Kai Loon!

I stumbled across this site today and thought it was worth mentioning. It offers a service that helps programmers, designers, writers and entrepreneurs connect.

From ProgrammerMeetDesigner.com:

“This site was created to unite programmers and designers because rarely is a person good at both programming and designing. PMD helps programmers and designers partner up to make websites and web applications that look and work great.

Now content writers and entrepreneurs can also join up to find people to work with.”

What I am most intrigued by, is the ability to look for people interested in partnerships, not just single projects (which is also an option). I have a number of projects that I’m interested in exploring and am excited at the prospect of finding a designer to work with.

So, if you have a project or idea but can’t do it alone, take a look at ProgrammerMeetDesigner.com. Oh, and if you are a designer, who’d be interested in working together with me…let me know

In my spare time (yeah, right), I’ve been busy developing a web application using CakePHP. I ran into a problem tonight that I wanted to share, in case anyone else happens to run into something similar.

After making some changes to my app, I went to test it out, only to get an Vista notification stating that httpd.exe had shut down unexpectedly. I checked my Event Viewer Application logs and found an Error with the following details:

Faulting application httpd.exe, version 2.2.6.0, time stamp 0x46deb625,
faulting module ntdll.dll, version 6.0.6001.18000, time stamp 0x4791a7a6,
exception code 0xc00000fd, fault offset 0x00065950, process id 0x998,
application start time 0x01c8db31c2d05070.

After a bit of debugging and scratching my head, I remembered that I had deleted a “view helper” file that I had created, but forgot to remove the reference to it (var $helpers = array()) from my app_controller.php file…doh!

I am a bit surprised that CakePHP wasn’t able to catch this problem since it seems to catch so many other “missing” situations. Perhaps there is a way that CakePHP can prevent the issue…

I’ve signed up to participate in the third annual CSS Naked Day, which will be celebrated on April 9th! For the entire day, my site will be without style!

If this is the first time you’ve heard of CSS Naked Day, it was started by Dustin Diaz to promote Web Standards:

“This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words. It’s time to show off your <body>”

Are you brave enough to strip naked for a day?

Note: Only my content delivered through WordPress will be “naked”, the rest will be left “fully clothed”.