I am a web developer, designer, and I have abandoned this blog!

It used to be here but now it’s here. I’ll leave it up for posterity. Not that I’m a prolific blogger or anything.

I do love sharing things on tumblr so please check that out.

Image credits:

I just ran through a quick Cufón screencast tutorial by Jeffrey at Nettuts and I was up and running in about 25 minutes. It would have been half that if I hadn’t ran into some minor snags.

In comparison to SiFR, which I just learned not too long ago, Cufón is a breeze. It renders faster than SiFR, but the text isn’t selectable.

Both have their pros and cons, so it really comes down to what is appropriate for your project.

In my case, I used it to turn some h1 and h3 titles into a script font. Initially I used SiFR and forgot that it shouldn’t be used on a large amount of text. In this case, I had 12 h1s and h3s. Stupid me. Check it out below:

http://ericrosete.com/projects/elegantwedding/weddingparty_sifr.html

The render times are slow and noticeable. Silly me tried to mask that with a jQuery fadeIn effect, but there was no hiding it’s slowness (I commented the effect out in this example). If I didn’t have 12 elements being rendered of course, this would be a non-issue.

Now, here is that same page, but with Cufón:

http://ericrosete.com/projects/elegantwedding/weddingparty.html

Much faster, but, it does seem to be lighter and without the same contrast when rendered with SiFR.

So, do I go with slow render but better readability or fast render but slightly less readable?

Maybe the answer is don’t have 12 h1s and h3s.

After googling that very question I came across an article and report of findings done by MAMA (Metadata Analysis and Mining Application)  in late 2008 which looked at 3.5 million URLs in 3 million domains.

I won’t bother going through all the key findings or other data they’ve compiled but you can find it here: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama-key-findings/.

Here are a few things that caught my attention:

• 1,788,294 of URLs carried a Doctype statement—just over 50%!
• The element TABLE is used in 2.9 million URLs. 85%.
• 145,009 out of 3,509,180 URLs passed validation. That’s about 4%.
• 1,176,227 (33.5%) use Flash. China makes use of it the most.
• 80% make use of CSS, 70% use at least one script. Sounds about right.

Henri Sivonen properly framed the role of the markup validator in an author’s toolkit:

“[A] validator is just a spell checker for the benefit of markup writers so that they can identify typos and typo-like mistakes instead of having to figure out why a counter-intuitive error handling mechanism kicks in when they test in browsers.”

I’ve got a couple of robust posts in the works. They’re stuck in the draft section, but here are a few topics: “Two For The Money: An existential allegory disguised as a psychological thriller”, a personal primer about me, and possibly some other worthless garbage.

For now I’ve come to the decision to avoid Facebook and just do Tumblr/Twitter and WordPress. My social network fatigue has grown exponentially recently. Just like friendster and myspace, I think the luster has worn off. It doesn’t do anything for me anymore. It’s like email for me. Honeymoon officially over.

I was at a job interview today and their desks and setup made me think of how pathetic my tiny little home office is.

I couldn’t concentrate and kept thinking of how great it would be to have a larger display. Really, when did 17″ become the new 15″?

They’re going to retire the original Kubrick theme, so I think I’ll hold off on changing things up. I hope the next default stays simple.

Twenty Ten rolls of the tongue better than Two Thousand and Ten. Although both look pretty near written out. Something about it seems futuristic.

I still haven’t gotten the chance to surf new themes for this blog. I’m also thinking of maybe integrating it with my portfolio site. I’d rather keep it separate because I seem to want to change themes every time I see something cool or inspirational or if I’m in a certain mood. I don’t think I’m going to design my own, but I’ll probably use it to test themes I’m going to want to develop. I also feel like there’s so many great designers out there coming out with brand new themes everyday for virtually any style you have in mind. Alright, enough of my WordPress swoon.

I have pretty simple resolutions for this new year.

1) Go to bed early, wake up early. Meditate at least once a day.

2) Exercise everyday. Like I’m training to fight somebody. Or at least a 5K. Climb a V5. So a 5K and a V5.

3) Go camping. Buy a crashpad, go bouldering outdoors.

4) Travel by train. I haven’t been anywhere East of Las Vegas believe it or not. I’ve been Far East. I thought it might be cool to hop on a train to somewhere like Chicago. I’ve been told by some people that you can even do train arriving, plane departing.

5) Make a CakePHP word scramble game.

6) Learn more programming. Learn more songs for the guitar.

7) Develop more WordPress and Tumblr themes.

Write more blog posts.

Many months later, after writing about my experiences with HTML editors, Taco and Coda, I find myself exclusively using Coda and removing Taco from my dock. Having the side file navigator on the side is one big advantage over Taco. After some time using the editor for more and more projects, the features, shortcuts and FTP make Coda well worth the price. Sadly, I also removed Xyle Scope from my dock. Nice tool, but just nor practical when you have Firebug.

I’m in the process of updating a lot of things. Changed the sitemap structure for ericrosete.com to accomodate different versions, blog, slice and dice, all that other junk. I moved the blog around and defaulted on the theme just to get a fresh feel for the new year. I’ll either design a new one or cycle through all those great themes in the WP directory.

I know I don’t post often but I’m going to try to write more meaningful posts (it’s a 2010 resolution). I probably won’t do them as often as I Tumblr things. Sharing is caring. But really, I should try to write more. I hear it makes you smarterer.

2009 was definitely “a rebuilding year” if you use GM talk. 2010 should play out like a #1 draft pick with a lot of potential.