ChrisDigital.com : Digital Designer Blog by Chris Carvey

I’m using a theme for my blog called “Journalist”. I wanted something no-nonsense, with a minimalist 2 column layout that I could remix to my taste. Once I read Matt Mullenweg (founder of Automattic) uses it, I was sold. I realized when making this choice, I was using an older theme (optimized for 2.7) and I was aware it didn’t have some of the bells and whistles of some of the more expansive Wordpress theme frameworks. This made me mindful to continually review what I was doing, looking out for conflicts with the latest Wordpress install, and researching features I needed to add myself. I’m glad I stayed on top of this, because a SEO problem was occurring in my header.php file I didn’t catch originally when I was tweaking the theme…

I met Johnny back in 1996-97. We worked at Graj + Gustavsen, a retail branding and creative development firm here in NYC. At this particular time the office was full of freelancers, myself being one of the last to arrive. This was during a hiring burst to ramp up for several impending presentations to numerous retail brands and a major cable network that was planning to build “themed” retail stores across America.

I loved it. I was a young kid, just a few months removed from graduating from the School of Visual Arts and my Scholastic illustrator contract had just ended. There I was sitting in the middle of a retail brand incubator with a slight bump in pay. I was feeling good about myself, and I was only scratching the surface of that experience – because in walks Johnny…

I have a few female co-workers here in NYC that are single, and every now and then we have a conversation about the ridiculous ratios of women to men is in New York City and how Carrie Bradshaw in Manolo Blahniks destroyed the city by attracting hundreds of thousands of women here to find their Mr. Big.

I highlight their pain because It just doesn’t make sense to me that someone hasn’t developed tools to even the odds. Between Facebook, Twitter, Match.com, eHarmony, etc. somebody, somewhere can come up with some kind of data architecture, API, and license rules that allows everyone to share in a serious money making opportunity…

I’ve been working a lot in Wordpress lately, and it started to dawn on me how powerful the software is. I can only imagine what’s coming in Wordpress 3.0. The power I’m referring to specifically, is the ability to use custom fields with posts/pages. This basically allows an editor the ability to associate related information with a entry or record into the database. As a simple example, visualize splitting an entry into 3 variations: Full, summary, tease (or large, medium, small) and have every thing encapsulated in the same database record. Here on ChrisDigital’s Digital Designer Blog, I’m using this in the Bookmark links section to grab the “referrer”, “source” and their URLS from each post. This is very cool…

As of today HTML5 is no longer like a mythical white Unicorn, or just a new and cool buzzword uber-geeks throw around on Internet blogs. It’s something more real and tangible, thanks to Matthew David. He does a brilliant job breaking it down in his post “Inside HTML5: The Browser becomes a first class RIA citizen” over at InsideRIA.com.

I have only dug into HTML5 as a curiosity about the font embedding that’s coming in the future, (and I was intrigued by the native support for audio and video) but I have not really thought of the more comprehensive development implications of the coming HTML5 standards until now. This article is really worth a read, especially the information about the proposed new foundational elements, and the CSS3 special effects…

I’ve been kicking around the idea of starting a blog with my son. He’s an old soul at the ripe old age of 11 and in the middle of a lot of stuff “tween” boys think about. What really caught my eye about him is that his Aunts call him all the time when they need to get a present for a child in his age group (his mom as well) and he takes his advice giving seriously. So we’ve been kicking around some ideas for a while now of what to do together. Besides, he’s really interested in what his old man does for a living and this is something we could share…

I’ve primarily used “Arial” and “Verdana” as my html text fonts. Recently, I’ve been re-visiting that as a rule. There’s been a number of Windows and Mac OS updates in the “wild” for a while now, so perhaps my options have expanded and I thought it’s a good a time as any to freshen up my work…

I take a look at some cross-platform options, font replacement techniques, font embedding and what future standards might offer an intrepid developer down the road…