The Truth About Your Email Address

What your email address says about your computer skills.

I would add “@your-local-isp.com” to that list; sandwiched between yahoo and aol. Besides typically being an inferior email service compared to the free ones, what makes it so bad is that by relying on it you sacrifice flexibility in being able to switch Internet Service Providers easily.

Besides, it looks unprofessional when businesses use them rather than purchasing their own domain.

First Presbyterian Church of Orlando

The other day I was scrolling through a list of 25 Beautiful Church Websites, and I noticed FPCO was included. This was a project that I got to be a (rather small) part of when I was working for Roger West last year. I wish I could take more credit than I really can, but nonetheless it’s exciting to work on something and see the recognition it gets from the design community.

Rules for Computing Happiness

Inspired by this list of Rules for Computing Happiness (most of which I completely agree with), I decided to compile my own. This list isn’t exactly complete, as I’m sure I could always add plenty more.

Software

• Use at least two partitions (or hard drives).
• Keep the operating system, and programs on the main partition.
• Store documents, media, and everything else that should survive an O/S reinstall on a separate partition.
• Automate a backup process for the O/S partition. Ideally this should be on another physical drive, but for software-only crashes it’s still sufficient to store on a separate partition of the same disk.
• Automate a backup procedure for the documents folder, and any other important media.
• Backup the documents folder to multiple locations (2nd hard drive, dedicated thumb drive, ftp site, drop box).
• Backups can never be too redundant.
• Backup at least once per week.
• Keep the operating system as lean and efficient as possible.
• Use portable versions of software as much as possible. Keep them in an “Apps” directory in the dropbox folder.
• Use a password manager, and use a unique and difficult password for all sites.
• Never install too many fonts. Use a font manager if necessary.

Hardware

• Buy the best monitor, keyboard, mouse, desk, and chair you can afford.
• Buy the best processor you can afford.
• Purchase everything else with bang-for-the-buck in mind. Then upgrade over time, as needed.
• Don’t spend more on a graphics card than the cost of a modern video game console.
• Use an external hard drive for backups and media storage.
• Use a battery backup.
• Have multiple hard drives on-hand in case of emergency.

File Formats

• Use Rich Text Format (.rtf) for word documents.
• Use DRM free multimedia files, in the most widely supported formats.
• Use PNG for transparent images as much as possible.
• Avoid H.264 until licensing issues have been resolved.

Windows 95 Rocks!

My favorite throwback video from the Windows 95 CD-ROM:

Simply Stunning.

I love great UI’s. I even keep a small collection of inspiring screen shots for later reference. So when I came across ESPN radio’s interface I was wowed. I could care less about the content being broadcast. I played with the controls as if I was a kid with a brand new toy, then I took a screen shot to share with anyone else who might care about such huge-nerdery as I do.

The only thing I wonder is, why is it grungy AND glossy? Otherwise, it’s simply stunning.

Website Changes

Several weeks ago my hosting provider moved my account to a newer server. Overall things seemed to go pretty smoothly. However, my experience with ExpressionEngine has been less than perfect since the move. So I decided to drop it, and start anew with some changes I’ve had in mind.

I still think ExpressionEngine is a good CMS for the right project, and the right client or organization. It just wasn’t a good fit for me. So I swapped it out with CodeIgniter, a really good MVC PHP framework. This should give me even more flexibility than EE did, since I prefer writing much of my own code.

For the blog though, I went with WordPress. It’s just so robust, and well supported that it doesn’t make sense to create my own make-shift blog in CI. I think I could trust WordPress to run properly on almost every LAMP configuration I’ll ever run into. Besides, it’s open-source, so I don’t have to deal with a crippled “core” version like I did with EE.

Some other technical changes were dropping the flash navigation in lieu of a similarly animated jquery-based navigation, and dynamically consolidating multiple CSS and JavaScript files into one file each.

So now that things are back in working order I plan on getting back on track with blog posts.

Angels & Airwaves New (Free) Album, Love

I just stumbled across this link for a free download of the newest Angels & Airwaves album, “Love”. Awesome!

I have a lot of respect for any musicians willing to do this. It’s always nice to see artists embrace technology, rather than run from it for fear of losing potential revenue. It’s obvious their motivations are sincerely focused on making good music.

UltraDefrag: Portable, Open-Source Defrag Utility

I stumbled across UltraDefrag the other day, and I’m quite pleased with it. I love how it’s available as a portable version, so I don’t have to install it. I grabbed the “micro” portable version (with no GUI), dropped the .exe and .dlls into my system32 folder, and created a batch file to run weekly as a scheduled task.

Here are some links:
UltraDefrag Is a Portable and Open-Source Disk Defragmenter (LifeHacker Article)
UltraDefrag on SourceForge (Click “view all files” to find the micro/portable versions)

Also, if you’re interested, here’s a copy of my batch file. The ”-o” is for optimizing volume space.

C:\Windows\System32\udefrag -o C:
del C:\fraglist.txt

C:\Windows\System32\udefrag D:
del D:\fraglist.txt

C:\Windows\System32\udefrag E:
del E:\fraglist.txt

A/B Testing to Determine Effectiveness

A/B testing is a process that can be used for determining the effectiveness of one layout over another. For instance, a test could compare the results of two strategically different locations of the “purchase” button on a shopping cart application. The different versions would be sent at random to different users, to gauge performance. So if one button is in a more prominent location, resulting in obviously more sales, then it’s the clear winner.

The Olympic Store recently did this for it’s home page. A case study was posted here. It’s always interesting to get some insight on how the pros do it.