New Site Design — Built with Web 2.0 ;)

Miscellaneous

Last weekend I had some spare time, a picture and a bit of inspiration and decided to redesign my website. The reason it has taken me so long to create my own design is that, simply put, I’m not a designer. I usually don’t know where to begin and how to get the design to flow correctly. I mean, I know good design and can even sometimes spit out things that are viewable, but I’m no designer.

So where did I start? <Leans back in chair> It all started a couple weeks ago when my Dad and I decided to go hiking up at Sanborn Park. Originally we were going to go Jeeping, but it had just rained the night before and his Jeep doesn’t have a winch yet, so we went hiking instead. The conditions were perfect and I was able to snap a few pretty good pictures. Out of the set, I was really drawn to the misty trail image. I liked it so much I decided to play with it in GIMP and afterwards decided to design my entire site around it. Once I had the picture, the rest of the site practically designed itself.

So browse around and let me know how you like it. I’ve also added some cool new Web 2.0 features:

  • All links have a new animated fading rollover effect pulled in from the CSS and animated with YUI.
    • This is part of an API I’m building in order to keep presentatin separate from the JavaScript.  More on this soon!
  • The tagline text fades into view when the page loads. I plan to add more random statements over time — any suggestions?
  • Comment submission is now done with XHR. I plan to make this more robust in the future.
  • And of course, shiny title bars.

The fading effects and XHR comments were all built with the YUI libraries.

Misty Trail - Sanborn Park

The YUI’s First Year Party

Technical

If you haven’t heard yet, the YUI team has put out an open invitation to their first year party.

Quoting Nate Koechley from the YUI blog:

This month the YUI Library turns one year old. When we started last year I wrote that I was “thrilled to have you with us.” That’s never been truer than it is today. We owe an outstanding first year to you. Libraries aren’t achievements themselves — it’s what people do with them that’s exceptional. We love everything you’re doing, so we’re throwing a party to thank you, our amazing community.

Join us Thursday, February 22nd, from 5:30 to 8:30 PM, at Yahoo! HQ in Sunnyvale, California. Visit Upcoming.org for details and to RSVP. 300 people max, so RSVP early!

You can bet that I’ll be there along with many other WebDevs from PayPal. The guest list is up to 197, so RSVP now!

Czech Beer

New Version of OpenDownload

Extensions

I finally got around to updating the OpenDownload extension and it’s now better than ever. Firefox 2.0 now hides the “Open With…” and “Save” options when downloading certain file types. When this happens now OpenDownload adds a “Run” button to the dialog. See screenshot below:

OpenDownload screenshot

I also fixed the bug that would, sometimes, execute the file multiple times.

I’ll be trying to find time to update my other extensions. Recently I’ve changed jobs and am working on a couple other open source projects. I can’t go into much detail right now about the open source projects I’m working on, but expect to hear more soon.

I’ve been at PayPal for about a month now and am really enjoying it. They hired me into their web development platform team as the JavaScript specialist. We’ve adopted the YUI libraries and they are working great to conserve time and provide really customized functionality. Will be sharing more soon.

Speaking of PayPal…

Updates for Firefox 2.0

Extensions

Good news everybody (cue up Professor Farnsworth), I’ve finally got my server back up to 99% and have upgraded all the extensions for Firefox 2.0. You can go to my extensions list (http://mozmonkey.com) and download the latest versions there (NOTE: I haven’t updated the version numbers listed on the site yet). I’m also updating my update.rdf and submitting the extensions to addons right now.

Even better is that all the extensions have now been committed to my shiny new Subversion source control that’ll I’ll open to the public sometime next week. When I do I’ll also release and article on how to download and painlessly upgrade extension version numbers with my handy build scripts.

I hope you enjoy the extensions.

Delay in Firefox 2.0 Extensions Release

Extensions

I know many of you are still patiently waiting for my extensions to be compatible with Firefox 2.0, but I continue to have severe web server issues. Somehow the server that hosts my extension site has come down and I cannot access it. I’m trying to get the hosting company to reboot it in safe mode right now so I can get to my code and give all of you upgrades to the extensions.

In the meantime, if any of you have hacked the source code and upgraded my extensions, please post a link to them here.

Again, sorry for the delay and thanks for the continued support. You’ll get updates soon.

Extension Upgrades for Firefox 2.0

Miscellaneous

I’ve been getting loads of emails everyday from people requesting, or demanding in some cases, that I upgrade my extensions to be compatible for Firefox 2.0.  Be assured that I am working on this.  Right now I’m trying to get my server back up to 100% after it had been hacked twice.  I expect to be releasing updates next week — I appreciate your patients.