Be Good Not Bad : Web Design :: Brian Warren : Denver, Colorado

Or, “How I got from Version One to Version Two”; Or, “The Tools I Use”

Well, it all started with pulling out the Nikon and taking a photograph of my desk. Then, the image was manipulated using Adobe® Photoshop® software. I use Photoshop for most of my design mock-ups.

Next, I spent a significant amount of time in BBEdit turning the mock-up into actual HTML code. This is both geeky and fun. Over the past couple years I’ve developed a passion for making good clean code. This isn’t just a desire for excellence, but I’ve learned that designing good clean code that adheres to web standards is easier on your web visitor, more accessible for disabled users, and easer to develop to look the same on all modern web browsers.

So, once I had things pretty much how I wanted them in BBEdit, I had to incorporate my design into my blog software. I use a program called Textpattern to manage my blog. This software (like pretty much any blog software out there) makes it simple …

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I have been meaning to do this for quite some time. Today, I had the right spark at the right time and it all just happened in a whirlwind of excitement and madness. Welcome to “Version Two”. The redesign of my blog was mostly inspired by a desire to have more than one color, a hankering for some spice and just a few things about the previous design that were sitting around nagging on me. I hope you enjoy it.

I adjusted the name just a tad, to reflect our lovely contributing editor and maybe one or two more contributors in the future.

If you would like to see the old design, stop by Version One any time. It’s a static page, so don’t expect it to change.

A couple new and not-so-new features you may notice: The links on the left now have an RSS feed. So, if you use an RSS reader, you can subscribe to my links. (Note that the main blog section has an RSS/Atom feed too.) What on earth am I talking about? Well, I don’t want to get into it entirely, but RSS …

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This Article was written by Aaron Orr, Watchtan’s part-time contributer.

When I was a child my Mom would read me stories from a series called “Owl at Home.” Owl was a wise old bird who lived in a small house in the country. One day he made some tear water tea by crying into a kettle. I don’t know why, he just did.

This is one of those tear water tea days. I went to work at 8:00 A.M. and no one showed up until 9:00. I was tired and could have easily slept another hour. My supervisor swears he told us when we were all gathered yesterday. I have NO recollection. Either way, it didn’t help. It was “cold” (45ºF) and very windy (Kansas-like wind that cuts through your clothes), and damp from the rain we got last night and this morning. The ground is muddy and sticks to my boots and in order to keep my tent clean I had to take them off on the porch. I think I’ll make some tear water tea.

Then I had to change aircraft from the one I was …

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We adopted a second cat. Clive, our first cat, is still pretty spunky, and so we thought maybe he would be more melllow with another cat around to humble him a bit. So we adopted Edith. She is a beautiful black cat who recently had some kittens.

But Rusty, our dog, just didn’t get along with Edith. He would just pace back and forth, extremely upset. He whined, barked, and whimpered. We could barely get him to bed down at night, relax or even just stop paying attention to Edith.

Due to several battles and a very, very sad dog, we decided she’d be happier somewhere else. So we took her to the Colorado Humane Society. Even though we didn’t have her but for three days, it was really emotional to let her go.

After all that, we realized something important: It sure is good that you can take a cat back, but things will be different when Anna and I have children. I can just see us a few years from now thinking …

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This Article was written by Aaron Orr, Watchtan’s part-time contributer.

18.98 gigabytes of music. That’s what my iPod contained. That’s a lot of music representing hundreds of years. From Modest Mussorgsky and Leopold Mozart to modern classics like Haddaway’s “What is Love” made popular by the movie “Night at The Roxbury.” There was a bit of everything for every one of my moods. There was hard, working out music, soft, relaxing music, loud, angry music, country music, pop, celtic, latin. But it’s all gone now. A bazillion ones and zeros turned into digital mush.

I would probably be really upset if this was Apple’s fault. But it’s not. I have no one to blame but myself.

After painstakingly updating composer information for several dozen classical tunes I switched my computer to update my iPod automatically. Automatic is good right? It requires no thinking. Well, no thinking is what happened.

“Are you sure you want to enable automatic updating?” The warning window asked. “All existing songs and playlists on the iPod “ippopodimus” will be replaced with songs and playlists from the iTunes music library.”

No worries, I …

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This Article was written by Aaron Orr, Watchtan’s part-time contributer.

I’ll admit I’ve watched a few episodes of “Fear Factor” and I appreciate the competition of it all, especially in this day of political correctness gone amuck where it’s “inappropriate” for one person to be exalted above another despite his achievements. At the same time I just can’t handle how pathetic some of these reality show people are. Yes, I give kudos to anyone who will knowingly eat eight inches of horse rectum (hold the mustard, tomatoes and horse, please), but for crying out loud, how many variations of “unlock these two locks with one of these six keys” can they possibly come up with? Who designs these stunts? A prison guard? A janitor?

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s really cool that the people on “Survivor” are out there testing their overly-suburbanized selves against nature, but come on, is there some sort of special screening they go through to ensure they are the whiniest, back stabbing-est group of folks alive?

It seems to me that I am, perhaps, not in the target demographic for reality TV. …

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You may or may not have heard, but Microsoft has been developing a search engine that they hope will rival Google. Here it is:

MSN Search

I tried a few searches in it. I have to say – I’m extremely underwhelmed. That’s not to say that my hopes were up much to begin with. Google has set the bar very high. Each time, I found the Google results to be superior in their pertinence and over-all helpfulness.

But hey, that’s just me. People search and use the internet differently. Let me know what you think.

Note: Read the full introduction from yesterday’s post. Basically, introducing Aaron Orr, a guest contributor to bw.watchtan.com. Enjoy his unique perspective and humor. Thanks,—Brian.

“Mah sa’lam,” (goodbye) the man in the white dishdasha (deesh-dahsha) said to me as he exited the dirty, white four-door Nissan pickup I drove.

“Shook-rahn,” I replied and immediately thought, “Dang! What I meant to say was … uh … was, ‘fee im allah,’ (go with god), not ‘Thank you.’” But he was already gone and I was pulling away from the dirt shoulder of the road.

It’s strange … language and the mind. I’ll be minding my own business, taking a shower, when suddenly, from some dark recess of my brain will come, “Masaw hanoor,” (the reply to the Arabic for good afternoon). This or some other phrase, that does me as much good right then as a piece of steel wool, will pop out of a dusty corner. Why can’t I remember this when I’m walking through the gate manned by the Iraqi National Guard troops on my way to the chow hall? Sometimes intentionally searching for a word or phrase …

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Sometime tomorrow, you will be presented with the first entry by Aaron Orr, our first guest contributor to bw.watchtan.com. Aaron Orr is a crew chief in the 82nd Med, currently deployed to Iraq. Many of our readers already know Aaron and can attest to his unique perspective and humorous look upon life. I hope you will enjoy his entries on this website. For more on Aaron, and some fantastic pictures he’s taken, visit his website here.