This past weekend I volunteered at the D2WC in downtown Kansas City. It was put on by the local Adobe User Group KCWebCore and was packed with great information. The sessions fairly crackled with good ideas and a hearty camaraderie between professionals in the Web industry.

My favorite quote was from Chad Udell who said something along the lines of, “Stop using ‘Lorem Ipsum.’ It’s not doing anyone any good.” So true since clients always get hung up on it and designers/developers may rely too much on its look while not thinking about how the real data will appear in the page.

All in all, a great conference. Here’s hoping it continues to grow.

You know, a lot of us have been kicking around these tubes for quite some time now. While I haven’t personally met everyone I talk to online, I feel like I’ve gotten to know many of them pretty well. Here’s a quick list of some of the people who have had an effect on me since I began this big electronic social experiment:

http://www.mg33.net/
Michael Gallagly was one of the people I go to know on the Flashkit boards from way back in the early days of Flash.

http://www.markfennell.com/
Speaking of Flashkit, it wouldn’t have existed without Mark Fennell.

http://raydoeksen.com/
I’ve known Ray Doeksen on several boards and I always consider his opinion to carry great weight. He’s one of the good guys.

http://kenvella.com/
Ken Vella did a lot of video work in the early days of Flash and although I haven’t really connected with him in a while, he is an inspiration.

Thanks for the interaction over the years!

There’s a catch-22 involved in crowd-sourcing which I find frustrating. The buyer will not receive work that’s as high-quality as they could from working with a single designer (or firm) who really understands their business. And the designer spends time on semi-custom designs which may or may not be chosen, resulting in an overall loss of time and effort. The whole process seems designed to grind down both sides to middling results. Now I’m not saying that everyone needs to pay Chiat/Day prices for all their design work, but if you’re asking for custom spec work, you should pay the designer for their time. Otherwise, you’re just asking for  lots of random submissions with cookie-cutter solutions to your unique problems.

Not so fast, Rich Paul!

Ok, now that this whole Web 2.0 hogwash is starting to get venture capital funding, everyone is talking about semantics and css layout as the way forward for social networks and magical user-centric webservices. Well these things, like the technologies underlying the so-called web 2.0 movement, have been around for a long time. They have only just recently reached critical mass and the mainstream eye. Now I, however, was immune to the siren song since I had taken a different route and plunged into the heady world of Flash development.

So, here I am, having taken a different job, jumping head-first into the current state of standards-compliant web design. And I tell you, I believe in it. It makes sense to separate content from presentation. It makes sense to make sites easier to update and accessible to those with difficulties. But why does it have to be so damn buggy? I mean come on. It’s 2006! I would think that by now there are quite a few people in the online world that know what they would like to be able to use when putting together a site. Well, here’s my list:

• Rounded Corners. Why can’t we specify them in the code?
• Easy n-column layouts. Sure we can hack them together, but it shouldn’t be this hard to put together such fundamental site organizations.
• Alpha transparency.
• Downloadable fonts. Why can’t my text appear how I design it to look?
• Gradients. Why can’t I specify them with code?
• Rotation. Why can’t I rotate elements on a page?
• Vector graphics. Would help with the rounded corners and a whole lot more.

Now, I know the web is about content, but after all these years, why can’t we have the tools to make it easy to produce content the way we want?

P.S. This rant sprang up after the 12th time I had to edit my CSS because of another crippling IE bug which caused me to completely re-configure my somewhat complex 2 column layout so it would work again.

Hollowmyth.net will be a place for myself and others to discuss mythology, legends and storytelling.

I would like it to be more than a factual place to learn about myths. I want it to be a place to deconstruct their meaning. I want to explore their place in humanity’s history, the factual events that may have spawned them and what mythologies we are creating today and into the future. Read the rest of this entry »

Coined by Philip K. Dick in his novella “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” kipple was described as all the useless junk that seems to multiply and accumulate around our lives. See the wikipedia article.