Help Haiti
Lend a hand with the earthquake victims in Haiti by making a donation to the American Red Cross.
Going Forth
Well, it’s been a while since I made an update around here. Sorry about that to anyone who still comes by, or has a brown line in their feed reader (hopefully it’s not brown anymore!). As always, I continually hope to post more around here, and I think now I may be able to change that, for, today begins a journey into self-employed-dom. I’ll be leaving my post at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia in about a month or so and will be making a full-time effort of things over at RHM Interactive.
This certainly isn’t something that I’m doing on a whim. Ask any previous full-time employer that I’ve had and they’ll all tell you that during evaluations and exit interviews, the one theme that’s been a constant, has been my drive toward someday running my own web design/development business. I’ve gained a lot of experience and insight working for those people, and now it’s time to put that experience to use. I’m very excited that what was once just a dream, a plan, an idea, is now becoming a reality and I’m looking forward to being able to work on a host of interesting projects.
What kind of projects will I be doing do you say? Well, my 9-5 focus over the last three-and-a-half years has been client-side code: HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I expect I’ll still be doing a bunch of that going forward, but I also plan on doing some other fun stuff like UI design and back-end coding. I hope to venture out into Objective-C/CocoaTouch land to develop some iPhone application ideas that have been rolling around in my head, and I plan to move this site over to a new platform to force myself to learn a new CMS.
That said, I’m looking to post more here about my adventures as a self-employed HTML Jockey, so keep an eye on your feed reader or Twitter as things progress. Obviously, when the time comes, I’ll be kicking up more dust over at RHM Interactive, and that Twitter account, as well.
Now, where’d I put my parachute?
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NY Giants 2009 Schedule
Here it is, this year’s iCal formatted Giants scheudle:
webcal://robmaurizi.com/extra/giants_schedule.php
As with past seasons, NBC owns the right to move games around during the second half of the season to suit their prime time viewing needs. These games typically aren’t updated on the Giants ghetto downloadable schedule, so they won’t be updated here. Check local listings to be sure you’re watching the right games at the right time.
Go Blue!
Replace Default Field Values with Labels
Lots of times, it makes sense to pre-populate a form field with some text to guide the user. Usually you see this when space is limited, and the site tries to use the field’s value as a label. However, the field’s value isn’t the label— it’s the value. We see this often when a form has little real estate available to it, or sometimes when the designer doesn’t want to clutter up the interface with extra text. Read more…
Apple’s (New) Game Plan
Much to my excitement, Apple released updated iMacs, Mac Minis, MacPros and a host of other items last Tuesday. I’d been looking forward to picking up a new iMac for a month or so, since keeping my media on an airdisk drive is really grating on me. At the time, I began looking at the high-end iMac (3.06gHz, 2GB DDR, 500GB HDD) and saw that it was upgradable to 4GB DDR/1TB for a few hundred bucks more. Deduct my company’s employee purchase plan discount and that became a pretty solid machine at a reasonable price. Read more…
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Customizing Form Fields with CSS and jQuery
As promised, here is a discussion on how I customized some form elements with a fancy look and feel. It’s really fairly simple and utilizes nothing but standard form controls and some unordered lists. Read more…
New Digs
OMG, A BLOG POST! OMG A BLOG POST! OMG A BLOG POST!
Sort of, anyway. But yes, this in fact a blog post and not an automated collection of yesterday’s links from Delicious. Just dropping a note to say that a) there’s a redesign in the house and b) there’s an actual real post in the works featuring CSS and Javascript goodness.
The redesign was prompted by an upgrade to Wordpress 2.7.1 which somehow threw my blog into a tizzy when clicking on “Blog” in the nav would bring you to this post about blogging with Textmate. More of a back-side reorganization than a full-blown redesign, but you wouldn’t know it by looking!
The forthcoming post (I promise, it’s on its way. There’s even an outline on a pad on my desk!) will be about doing up custom form elements with CSS and jQuery and was prompted by a project I had for a client recently.
Okay, poke around, see what’s different and what’s not and I’ll be back after some ice cream.
QOTD 8/28/08
Don’t do browser makers jobs for them. If a site breaks due to bugs in their software – leave it be. It’s their problem, not yours.
Get Out the Vote!
Nope, not that one…
The Lights Out made it to the finals in Harpoon UFO’s Best Unfiltered Band Search and if they win, they’ll get all sorts of great promo opportunities. That in a time when good indie bands are hard to come by thanks to mega labels cranking out superb wankery that seems to jive with American CrapholeIdol.
Giants iCal Feed Updated
I’ve updated my NY Giants iCal feed for the 2008 season:
http://robmaurizi.com/extra/giants_schedule.php
You can either copy the link and subscribe to it in an iCal-capable calendar application, or just click on it to save the .ics file and load it into your calendar. The latter is required if you’re using MobileMe and want the schedule on your iPhone (like me).