workflow blogs

Inevitably, when finishing development of a front-end, I find myself going through the painstaking process of cleaning up extraneous CSS styles. This style was for debugging, this block was for a page that got nixed, this piece I used when conceptualizing the site another way: I don't think it's possible to develop a website without removing some styles at the end. Dreading another round of CSS cleanup, I considered programming a tool to spider a site and tell me which parts of the stylesheets were used. It seemed a daunting task so I checked online, and sure enough, someone had already developed it, and far better than I could have. The tool ... (more...)

If you're anything like me you open up Google Analytics with your morning coffee, check your email, then reload Analytics, just in case the cache has refreshed. There's a new version of an OSX dashboard widget, Dashalytics, that will revolutionize the amount of time you can spend obsessing over minute statistics. Dashalytics puts Google Analytics at your fingertips, providing a quick access point to some of the most used Analytics reports, directly from the dashboard in Mac OSX. Configuring Dashlytics is simple, just enter your Google Analytics account information; it even supports multiple Analytics accounts through the keychain on OSX. After logging in, you are able to access the three most used tabs: visitors, content, and ... (more...)

At first glance Mac OSX Leopard looks like Tiger with a new, sleeker skinning. A few new applications are available, and a few others are broken, but overall basically the same thing. That is, until you discover the Spaces command. Spaces are great, they’re like the Expose flyout but taken up a level. With Spaces, you can arrange all the windows on your screen, all the clutter, into multiple, separate areas. Each of these areas functions like its own desktop, when you use the Expose flyout, only the windows in that Space are seen. And the best part is that you can set programs to open by default in certain spaces. I love this ... (more...)

Everyone knows the value of improving your workflow. Well it turns out I work a whole lot faster on a Mac, both in web development and web design. I think the OSX developers must have thought a great deal about workflow, because Mac has a lot of great features: from much more drag-and-drop integration between programs than windows, to little things like the mouse command to fly out all windows or show the desktop (this saves me so much time). But workflow on a Mac goes much deeper than these features. Web development is great on a Mac, since the programs you need for coding run very quickly and the terminal is really handy for doing lots ... (more...)

About a week ago I started work on YogaEneryHeal.com. The site is relatively small, so I opted to go with plain old HTML pages for the majority of the pages. The only php is on the article page, which is a switch to make coding easier, and the contact page in order to process the form. Overall I wanted the site to be very simple and to have a soothing appearance. I got some great photographs from their photographer and even one that I incorporated into the header (at first I didn't notice how low res the photos were, and I ended up working with one of them, ugh). There was a registered trademark of another company ... (more...)