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

The new iTunes is now available. I’ve tried it out and the podcasting support seems to be pretty slick. Check it out at Apple.com

I work for a non-profit as “Director of Design and Media”. That’s a fancy name, but it doesn’t say a whole lot. One of my primary responsibilities is to develop the website.

I’ve learned much over the years. In the past two years I became an advocate for web standards and strove to write good code. Our navigation changed from a flash-based menu to a delightful CSS dropdown list. Pages became streamlined and smaller. They became easier to read for non-graphical browsers. It works really well and has been, for the most part, very well received. One thing I do enjoy about my job is that I’m given lots of freedom to experiment with things and I have time to learn how to do it well. I’m still not there yet, but things are going generally in the direction they should be.

So, you can imagine I was a little disappointed to read a note from a donor to the organization I work that said “Your Website is Very Difficult to Navigate”. You see, occasionally, when people send in their donations, they’ll include a little note. That note gets routed …

Read more…

I was getting my stuff ready for work this morning and I thought I’d load up a podcast or two for my walk to work. But alas, I can’t find my iPod. I look and look. Finally I decide to check the van. As I walk out to the van, there it is sitting on the ground next to the van. My poor iPod was out in the dark, alone all night. He’s back now, safe and sound.

We leave on Thursday for Branson to attend a family reunion. We’ll be gone five days, stopping for a night on each side at Aaron’s. Should be fun. It will be nice to get away from both of my jobs and be forced to slow down a bit.

DittyBot – An Applescript Adventure

I read about this on MAKE: Blog. This has to be the coolest, geekiest use of Applescript in a long time. Basically you send a text message from your phone to your email with a song from your iTunes library that you want to hear. DittyBot checks your email, sees the message, finds it in iTunes, loads up Skype, calls your cell phone, and plays it to you over the phone. All this in about a minute from the time you send the message. Like I said, geeky and cool!

iTunes is going to support podcasting. Not just support, but embrace. Just like you browse for and purchase music in the iTunes music store, you will be able to browse and subscribe to podcasts from within iTunes. I’m looking forward to trying it out.

And in case you needed more proof that podcasting is legitimate and here to stay, the govenator is podcasting now.

My wife and I saw Revenge of the Sith last night. My review: Good. Worth seeing? Sure.

We also went camping with Aaron this past weekend. It was the first time to get the Vanagon up to the mountains. We had nice comfy beds inside the van, and we cooked on the stove and kept stuff cold in the fridge. Sheesh, I must be a lightweight, I used to be a Boy Scout. I slept on the ground back then.

We did build a fire and cooked lots of our food on that too.

Everything wasn’t roses though. Whoever was at the site before us decided that breaking glass bottles and scattering the glass around the site was a good idea. We spent a good hour cleaning up the site before we unloaded. Our poor dog cut his paw too.

Despite that, we had a fantastic time. We went on a nice little hike on Saturday that surveyed some of the forest fire that was there a year or two ago.

Once we got back, we panicked because Aaron couldn’t find his keys to the borrowed truck he drove …

Read more…