As a design professional and an artist I’ve always been fascinated with medical illustration, and these great paintings are really remarkable documents that transcend above the ordinary. They are really beautiful and grotesque, created in 1819 by Kyoto-area physician/artist Yasukazu Minagaki (1784-1825). The paintings were studies created from actual corpses which were actually the remains of recently beheaded criminals, and it is the grotesque expressions which really makes them stand out in this time period. There are two scrolls of 83 paintings currently hosted at the Keio University Library. Check out the rest of the images here (there is a link to page navigation in the bottom left corner of the page).
Hey this is a pretty cool addition to the Youtube video player. If you want to link to a specific section of a Youtube video in minutes and seconds, you can now add that to the end of the link, so if someone clicks the link the video will start playing at a certain point. I tested this out with my demolition derby video…click here and it will start right at the monster truck portion 24 seconds in. Here is how you do it.
To specify a point, append a tag to the end of your video link with the following syntax: “#t=1m45s” (you can change the numbers before the ‘m’ and ’s’ to edit the minutes and seconds, respectively.
So you’ve just had me design you a nice looking dynamic website for your small business here in Portland or wherever your company resides…now what? The next step is you need to market and track ad campaigns and conversions! I’ve been using Google Analytics on a number of client websites, to track traffic obviously, and more recently to target conversions. Some of the newer features in Analytics are really great for figuring out just how visitors arrived, what page they entered on, where your traffic ends up going, as well as numerous other details. This is obviously important as it allows you to figure out which pages are successful, and which could use some sprucing up to make them maybe more appealing. Best of all, this application is absolutely free, and if you really want to get into it you can even use adwords to promote yourself as the two applications are integrated almost seamlessly. Check out this informative article to learn more about these exciting topics like Goals and Funnels!
Read More- Complete Guide to Google Analytics
I was fortunate enough to get away from the computer and designing websites long enough to drive up to Astoria to play a gig with Lana Rebel this weekend. Astoria is a cute little town on the coast of Oregon right up at the top Northwest corner. The drive was beautiful, and on Sat we were able to head out to Ft. Stevens beach which was amazingly completely empty right around sunset. The light was perfect, the ocean was amazing as always…and I snapped a few picts with the iPhone.
My good friend Nancy is an paramount Stumbler, she sends me so many links like every day I barely have time to check them all out. This one struck me as quite nice, and a simple little Firefox addition that will force you to pay a little more attention to the world around you. It is a simple add-on for Firefox that randomly plays a nice Tibetan chime. Take a break and live in the moment.
When I was redesigning this site using WordPress I noticed those sneaky developers had added a class to the current page. If you notice the current page list item tag now has “current_page_item” as an additional class definition, which turns out to be really helpful when using WordPress as a CMS. What’s so cool about that you might ask? Well it allows you to target the navigation class to apply different style to it without adding your own php to the mix, so your visitor can see which page or section of your website they are on. Excellent!
So I have been approached by a few clients to re-design their sites for a better iPhone experience. The launch of the new 3g version has really generated a lot of excitement for the mobile platform, both for website design, and video delivery. I was doing some research this morning and discovered this great little open source app called iphoney. While it doesn’t exactly function like an iPhone (you can’t do the pinch enlarge trick) it gives you a “pixel-accurate web browsing environment” to quickly view what your site or app will look like when viewed on an iPhone.
So I am attempting a post from the iPhone using the WordPress app. Posting without the usual interface is tedious, however this will be extremely useful for quick posts. The ability to add pictures directly from the phone is also key. I will add one of our extremely lazy cat Kingston. He knows how to sprawl!
I feel like such a nerd even posting this, but there are a ton of new apps coming out on the iPhone ever since they released the new version 2.0 upgrade, and here is one that even comes with a slick promotional video. The nifty app allows you to blog to your WordPress powered website directly from the iPhone! You can write a post, upload pictures from the phone, and it even lets you edit existing posts! Now I am going to go hit myself in the face with my geek punishment stick.
WordPress for iPhone promotional video-
WordPress for iPhone- Official site (with link to iTunes for download)
So this has been a problem we’ve all encountered when coding out sites with CSS tableless layouts. When you have divs floated left and right it takes them out of the flow of the page and basically they don’t read as content within a container div. Traditionally I’d been using another div with “clear:both” in one way or another after the floats, or *gasp* a defined height. I was searching for an alternative method when I discovered this article on the Sitepoint blog, which claims simply using “overflow:auto” on the container div will force it to behave. Initially I was skeptical, but I have been using this method for a few weeks in production, and holy smokes, it works! Additionally my comrade Mark Wyner states that “overflow:auto” does not work in ie6, however using “overflow:hidden” will work. So give it a try, you will be amazed…I was. Some report this doesn’t work in ie5 on Mac…but c’mon if you’re on a mac you SHOULD be using Safari at this point!
*update*
Mark discovered another thing about this which seems only true in Safari. If you have floats below floats this will not work, you should try additionally adding “clear:both” on your floats below.
Bitclone is a small Portland, Oregon based Web Design Agency owned by these two nerds Eric Baldoni and Alex Carey (pictured above somewhere in the outdoors, clearly lost without their trusty computers).