dangerouslyawesome

http://www.weknowhtml.com, the business-y end of this operation, finally got the overhaul it deserved.

design by Dan Wilt (i’ll link to him when his site is up), development and copy by me(duh), with some editing help from my awesome girlfriend and a KILLER testimonial/case study from Tara.

working on the wordpress template version of the site so it can have its own blog, thats coming by the end of this week.

but it’s nice that the business cards will be driving to something i’m proud of…and i’m really, really proud of this one.

3 months of hard work has paid off, we just launched Comcast‘s FEARnet.com. If you’re a comcast subscriber and watch ANY tv, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve seen the commercial teasers for this thing. Its pretty big news, and a huge victory for my team.

We’re currently streaming 10 full length classic horror flicks + tons of supplimental clips and trailers, running a community including a built-in chat room, have a database of almost 8000 movies browsable by name, popularity, tag, and our fancy dancey relationship browser “Web of Fear”.

Don’t forget the News and Reviews section, or the Games and Downloads (including some sweet myspace skins).

Speaking of myspace, the teaser myspace page has had over 800 friend requests over the past weekend…and I’m about to launch the full blown version very soon. I’ve figured out some pretty sweet tricks for building myspace pages, more to be documented soon.

Check it out, register, poke around, and get scared.

fearnet.com launches monday.

myspace page has over 200 friends approved in 24 hours.

weknowhtml redesign almost there. feverishly working to launch with the November1 CSS Reload.

halloween parties tonight. house marathon tomorrow.

maybe i’ll squeeze in my midterms somewhere.

its been a really busy week.

the fearnet myspace profile is live and in teaser-mode…full version going live on monday with the rest of the site!

ill be feverishly approving friends all weekend…ive approved 40 in the last hour!

i kinda cant believe how cool that page turned out…see myspace doesnt have to suck!

ive never seen anything quite this bizzare in my life.

Neil Lee’s optimized firefox builds for Deer Park were my a must-have for mac, and he has finally updated for Firefox 2.0.

Ive been using 2.0 since a couple of weeks into RC3…first at home on my iMac, and once I was satisfied, at work as well. And satisfied I am. It’s no secret that I can’t live without this browser, moreover, many of its extensions are SO important to my daily work. Even though Safari has some similar tools, FF is just more elegant about the whole thing. And, I’ve gotten really, really good at developing in Firefox and knowing how the same page is behaving in other browsers…most of the time, anyway.

Though, despite all of its awesomeness, the Mozilla builds are notoriously slow as crap on macs…I mean, they’re usable, but they get laggy and lack the “snap” my windows machine has (when it’s not busy crashing), or safari’s performance in its native OS X. Luckily, Lee’s custom builds for Intel, G5, and G4 macs fill in that gap. I just installed is Intel build, and its really the most refreshing experience my web browser has given me in a while. All of the wonders of FF2.0, but with all the snap of Safari (even gives Camino a run for its money, performance wise).

Speaking of…I have Camino installed…but I wish i could make it my primary browser, or even give it a permanent home in my dock. But its blatant lack of support for Firefox Extensions (i understand the technical limitations of why that is…its just unfortunate) makes it useless to me. Sure, pimpmycamino helps, but really, its barely a band aid.

My only complaint, really, is that something is up with tabbrowser preferences…though tabmix has been suggested as a replacement.

Notice that I didnt say a single thing about a certain blue E that recently released its 7th incarnation. I’m saving up all of my muster for that write up once i get my breath back. But its coming.

And on the topic of coming, I finally have the designs for weknowhtml.com, thanks to Dan at Enhanced Innovations. The site looks incredible…I’ve started development, and am going to work feverishly to launch with the November 1 CSS Reboot. So keep your eyes peeled for that.

a project’s production line is limited by 3 factors:

1. quality of product (ideally high)
2. speed of turnaround (also ideally high)
3. budget (ideally low, at least from the perspective of the person paying the bill)

the trick is…you can only have two at a time.

of course, the maximization point of this equation is where all three lines cross and optimize with the right quality, speed, and cost. but in the real world, you only get 2.

• which 2, as the customer, would you choose?
• which 2, as the producer, would you choose?

via denny

during THIS pumpkin season, pirates won.

Avast, ye scurvy sea dogs, salute the jolly roger me wench carved tonight.

flash/rich HTML coexisting is definately turning up a whole new, fun set of challenges. So far, some of my favorites are: * having rich modal windows appear behind flash elements (fixable using the iframe shim technique) * setting focus of various elements (fixed by creating a variable in our base page class that let me set the default focus to any elment by ID) * today’s, having to do with the ExternalInterface.AddCallback method in flash, and its playing nice with swfobject.

In essence, we have a login function that pops up one of those nifty DHTML layers with a login box. Our top navigation is all flash, and has a login call to action…so having flash call javascript functions isnt hard, but getting javascript to “poke” at the flash and have it run an internal function is a bit trickier. Utilizing the aforementioned callback method, its fairly simple. The problem we had was, in Internet Explorer, order of operations was a bit out of whack.

we got an error on: __flash__addCallback(coreLoader, "loginNav"); coming from INSIDE the flash…what seemed to be happening was the javascript that set up the object “coreLoader” wasnt running at the right time because of the time it took for swfObject to set up the embed. So, adding coreLoader = $('coreLoader'); immediately AFTER so.write("topNav"); set up the object again, this time not filling the object with a null (because swfObject had correctly identified an embed with id=coreLoader), and allowing the internal flash “addCallback” function to work.

hm, technical writing is difficult. but i felt the need to document this problem (even if it wasnt very well) for my own future reference, and hopefully someone else will find it handy as well.

the more general moral of the story is: pay attention to order of operations, they may save your life some day.

my windows PC, NONE of my windows PCs, have ever gone 19 days, 13 hours, and 13 minutes without a reboot. And still been snappy, or even useful..

Things ive done in the last 19 days and change include:

• dvd ripping with handbrake
• photoshop/imageready work
• textmate development
• parallels use for IE browser testing
• firefox open ALL the damn time (memory leaks, huh?)

i know ive got a pretty max’d out configuration, but really…i need to reboot my windows PC at work TWICE a day because windows rot is so bad it becomes unusable…and the only programs i use are firefox, IE, visual studio 2003, and imageready.

so, for the record, 6 month windows rot requires 2 reboots a day, 7 months of OSX and i can still go 2/3rds of a month without a reboot. my name is alex, and im a happy mac user.