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

Last night, Ars Technica published my latest review of the Harman/Kardon Drive+Play. This device is the ultra-deluxe way to get your iPod playing in your car. Pretty neat. Mucho thanks to Harman/Kardon for the review model.

See the review here and show it to all your friends.

It’s been pretty interesting writing for Ars Technica. They have a discussion forum where they set up a new thread for every article and review that gets published. So, once the article goes live, people start posting their opinions and questions in the forum. Naturally, only those who feel very strongly about it post a message. As a result, often you can see either “this is terrible” or “no it’s not”. Sometimes, I even get the occasional question asking to clarify something in the review.

Often I want to jump in and take the bait of the more inflammatory comments, but so far I’ve been able to hold my tongue, or, rather, my typing fingers. My friend, John, reminded me of a passage from Proverbs: “Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his …

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Vance Reeser’s blog empire grew by one today with the release of the VRblog. I got to be along the ride for this one. Vance really wanted to build a site that could keep track of his other sites, and one he could just bang around ideas and stuff without it having to be tied to a specific project.

So at the VRblog, you can check out his own thoughts and what not, and on side of the page, you can see how recently his other sites have been updated. Pretty nifty eh?

So, I got to do all the CSS and programming on this site. It was fun, working with Vance always is. He likes to push me in directions I’ve never been. Learning how to tell when other sites have been updated was an interesting challenge. Especially because his portfolio site is structured completely differently from JunkForest or Bear Hunt. Good times.

So, do stop by the VRblog and leave him a comment. Especially if you’re impressed with the CSS or something.

Last night, I was about to send off some mock-ups of a brochure for a client, and I was going to just do it via e-mail. And it struck me that email just doesn’t cut it for this need. It would be so much more helpful for the client to be able to view the comps via the web. With the web I can control the presentation of the mockups a bit more, giving me the opportunity to explain each of the pieces before the client sees them. Email is a much more haphazard medium, where you have to reference each attachment by name, and hope the client follows along with you.

So, I went to my Be Good, Not Bad site and thought through a simple way to create a place for the client to log in and look at their mock-ups. I used Textpattern to develop the Be Good, Not Bad website. So for this, I just extended it a bit.

So, first I created a new page template for the client. Textpattern has a function where you can password-protect the page, so I added that into …

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Would I sell my blog? Eh, maybe. I could think of some great uses for that cash. And I’d just start another one.

I developed some print style sheets for both this site and Be Good, Not Bad. Now, should you decide to print out any of pages on either site, you will get a lovely print version of it produced on the fly. This means you wont be wasting extra ink printing out a photograph of my desk each time you want to print out something.

Ink savings aside, there are some very handy things about creating a print stylesheet for a website. You can hide page elements, such as navigation and sidebars, from the print view, while leaving the content of your page intact. One of the coolest things about using a print stylesheet is that it is totally transparent to the user. There is no “click here for a printer-friendly version” or any nonsense like that. It’s assembled on the fly when the user clicks print from the browser.

The way print stylesheets work is fairly simple. First, I have the main content of my site that, unstyled, doesn’t look very pretty, but is highly readable. This is how Google “sees” the site. Also, this is how blind users read …

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My new iPod video arrived today. I got a black one. He is quite handsome. Apple sure is on a roll this fall. Ok, that’s all, make sure you check out yesterday’s blog entry. That one was more important.

I’ve been doing much more freelance design and writing lately than previous years, and I need a place to keep my portfolio, resume and whatnot on the web. So, I bring you (dum da da dum!) Be Good, Not Bad! This is my portfolio website devoted to ways and reasons you can and should hire me to do brilliant work. Or something like that.

Why the name Be Good, Not Bad. Well, it does have a funny story behind it. Maybe I’ll have to share that. But in the meantime, it’s a good idea, isn’t it? Who can argue against the idea that we should be good, not bad?

So, there you have it. Take a romp around, and pass it along.

http://begoodnotbad.com

I’m planning on heading down to Austin for the South By Southwest Interactive conference in March. Will anybody else be there?

Know of anything cheaper as far as hotels near the conference? I work for a non-profit and they’re paying my way, I gotta stay on budget.

I’m looking forward to it, I’d love to meet up for a pint with anybody who’s going to be there. As long as you’re not creepy.

We went on a retreat with our church this weekend. It was really good. Not sure if I want to post about it yet. Still thinking through.

But we did take some fab photos. The area we were in was right in the Garden of the Gods area near Colorado Springs. Check them out here on flickr.

Peace.