Following a technique advocated in “transcending CSS by Andy Clarke”, I’ve taken the current design and ‘gray boxed it".  (I want to point out that my goal is to learn HTML5/CSS3, not to create a wholly new design).  I simplified the site to its simplest elements: From the graphic, you can see its a very simple layout; navigation, header,  rows of three articles and a footer. Each article has a title(h1), a comment(p) and notes(aside). ...

I’m off to redo my film site using HTML5 and CSS3. As I stated some time ago, I’ve been interested in the two technologies for some time. Little things like CSS shadows are very nice and semantic elements like article, aside and nav certainly contribute to a site better than div, div and div. I’ve two books on HTML5; HTML5 for Web Designers/Jeremy Keith and HTML5/Bruce Lawson and Remy Sharp. Both are excellent for providing an understanding of the why along with the how. ...

With the upgrade to Snow Leopard, I took the opportunity to make my MacBook Pro, a better development machine. This meant creating a Web server environment which matches my production shared hosting environment. Far easier said then done. I started with MAMP. I wanted to have a complete server environment that is well supported by the community and was easy to maintain. I felt that MAMP met these goals better than going with the native OS X web environment. Apple hasn’t been the best at offering the latest stable release of Apache, MySQL (in fact, not supported at all) and PHP. MAMP offered all three plus PHPMyAdmin (handy at times) and a smattering of additional goodness. ...

I haven’t updated the blog in quite a while. I’ve been working on a lot of things but haven’t found the time to document the work. The latest thing I did was update this blog to 3.0. So far I haven’t seen a huge difference. I also changed the theme from “minamalism’ to twentyten, which is the new theme for Wordpress. I like the new theme. Very simple, great style. ...

Oh, the agony. I spent the better part of a day trying to get Xdebug working on my MAMP site on my Mac. I read here, here and here… all you have to do is to “edit your php.ini file” and bada-boom! you are off to the races. No, no and no. The problem was that it kinda works, then it doesn’t, then nothing does, then things work but xdebug doesn’t. Over the years, I have realized that when things start to get real hard, I’m doing something wrong, terribly wrong. Some where in some place, I’ve made the simplest of errors, creating a cacophony of bugs so bad, I’ve got to look down to see up. ...

I’m interested in what HTML5/CSS3 are bringing to the Web. A simple thing like using CSS to drop shadow an image is  quite nice. Beats having to use Photoshop… Based on the drop shadow alone, I thought it would be good to begin using these two new web standards, So I changed my photography site Stills from one using a Lightroom HTML template to one of my own implemented with HTML5 and CSS3. ...

A couple of plugs for stuff I use: Eizo ColorEdge CG243W - Great new monitor that is accurate, a nice size and a joy to use. As I stated earlier, it inspired me to get back into photography. I like it, I like it a lot. colormunki - in order to properly use the Eizo or any high end color monitor, one must calibrate it. It seems the best way to do this is to use Eizo’s software and a calibrator such as the colormunki. I’m a bit miffed in the x-rite, the supplier of the munki, has yet to release software for Snow Leopard. Turns out that Eizo’s software, Color Navigator, works great with the munki. I like the device, it is easy to use and clearly well-designed. And when xrite releases the new software, I’ll also be able to use the device to calibrate my printer. nice. ( AND!!, buy by 12/31 and get $50 rebate) ...

I recently changed monitors from a Viewsonic 2025 that had a DVI issue (apparently this is a common thing for Viewsonic… nice) to a BEAUTIFUL Eizo ColorEdge CG243W. WOW! Better color, larger screen, deeper blacks, crisper text, everything is just fantastic and a joy to use. With this new view, I was inspired to go back to my photographs and create a Web gallery of my favorites. This has been a tremendous amount of fun! ...

My Leopard installation used a OS X RAID 0 implementation to keep my system safe and sound. I mirrored two 1 TB drives then used them for my startup volume.  When I switched to Snow Leopard, I needed an extra drive to ensure I had sufficient backups prior to installation (I always clean install when I upgrade operating systems.) I thought the easiest thing to do would be to “split” the RAID 0 drives up with both containing a complete backup of my Leopard installation. But I also thought it sounded too easy and while purchasing Snow Leopard at the Apple store, I casually asked “can you split a mirrored RAID and retain the data?” ...

I seem to be in “tweaking” mode… After changing the site from hand-coded to database driven and getting feedback from Feedback Army (highly recommended), I’m adding salt and throwing in pepper. A good comment from the Feedback Army was suggesting adding time of movie under each image. Good idea. Done. BTW - a very good reference on CSS is CSS Mastery by Andy Budd. Highly recommended. Another comment was to add a bit more on the About/Contact page. Done. ...