Valhalla Island

When I turned on my computer this afternoon I was greeted with this:

I like storms, my guinea pigs don’t.

A little while ago Podz wrote a post where he spoke about ‘the A list’ of blogging and how everyone bows down and worships everything they write. How much of an honour it is to be the first person to comment on an A listers post with a big “I totally agree”. This got me thinking about exactly who the A listers are. So I have compiled a list so you all know exactly who to worship.

• Greg Storey
• Khoi Vinh
• Michael Heilemann
• David Shea
• Jeffrey Zeldman
• Cameron Moll
• Paul Scrivens
• John Gruber
• Matt Mullenweg
• Chris J Davis
• Tantek �elik

Perhaps there are more that I haven’t thought of. Tell me if you think there is. Out of that list I care what a few have to say and daily read only a couple. There’s one on that list that used to be on my daily list but has now been taken off because I just don’t like him anymore.

What we should ask is why are they A listers and what can we do to ever dream of becoming so amazingly popular? There’s one very simple and important thing that they all have in common. They’ve all done something. David Shea created the CSS Zen Garden, Zeldman founded WaSP, Matt started Wordpress, John Gruber wrote Markdown, the list goes on.

The moral of this article? Do something popular and you’ll be popular.

Update: How could I have forgotten Jason Kottke?!

Firewheel Design do some very special things and this includes being the massive brain behind Icon Buffet. Their icons are some of the prettiest I’ve seen and to makes things even better 15 sets are available completely free for you to use for anything you like, personally or commerciallly (you just can’t resell them). It’s called Free Delivery and it’s the best idea ever!

So you sign up to free delivery and at random once a month Icon Buffet will send you a completely free, professional set of icons. It gets so much better than that though, with each icon set you receive you get 5 deliverys of that set to send to friends.

After spending all afternoon in the forums I finally own every set of icons available through the free delivery program. It’s pretty exciting. The way they are packaged is also very nice, nearly every icon size in every file type imaginable. There’s even one scalable vector set. The aftermath of this afternoons icon trading has left me with no deliveries left of ‘Oslo Atmosphere’, probably my personally favourite set.

Here’s an example of some of my favourites:

Oslo Finance may well come in very handy one day. If you have an Icon Buffet Free Delivery account amd would like any set in particular or even if you just want to get started I’d be happy to send anyone anything they want. I have them all, except Oslo Atmosphere, I’m all out of them.

Good design has nothing to do with impressing people. Good design should go by completely unnoticed. Just like seeing a hanging picture that is just slightly off being straight you immeadiately notice the picture, if the same picture was hanging dead straight it’s much less likely to catch your eye. The same goes for design, you’ll immeadiately notice something horrid but something good you’ll just happily breeze through.

The same goes for a design that wows. A design that distacts you just as much through being too good to stop looking at is just as bad as a design that is so ugly it’s hard to look at. Of course this only goes for content driven design, how hard would it be to read a book if every page was lavishly decorated in beautiful artwork? A blank page with text is the best design of a book page there will ever be. People don’t look at a page of a book and say this is really designed well, they just don’t notice and that’s exactly how it should be.

Of course this doesn’t go for the design of items that have a primary function of catching attention before recognition of the content. A billboard is the perfect example of this. But then again, billboard design with less noise can often be very effective. The police billboards with short, black, bold phrases like, “TIRED DRIVERS DIE” on a white background catches attention as well as keeping noise away from the message.

This current design of Fightingfriends is a perfect example of a heavily over-elaborate design stealing attention from the content.

There are some great examples of great, unnoticable design:

• A List Apart
• Coudal Partners
• Signal vs Noise

All very content focused and all with designs that don’t steal any attention from the writing on the page.

For the first time in a few months I went to Subway for lunch today. I really like Subway. Although I always get the least healthiest of all the subs (meat ball), I still get salad and it still feels like I’m having something healthy. There’s only one bad thing about Subway, their employees are always in the world’s biggest rush.

I was running late today and it was 2 o’clock by the time I got out to have lunch and so I was pretty keen to get in and get my lunch made. Relieved to see that I was late enough to miss the usual lunchtime rush there was no line at all. Stepping up to the start of my sub making journey I told the tiny little girl what I wanted. They never seem to hear you the first time though. So I told her again and she proceeded to race around throw my bread on the board, whip out her knife and cut my bread with the ferocity of a lion ripping into a helpless antelope.

She had to get some extra ingredients from the back, once she realised this fact she sprinted to the back of the store, burst into the cold room where there was a lot of banging and clanging before emerging with a tub of lettuce that she threw into it’s space. Food was flying everywhere while she was filling my sub with the works. She finished, whipped out another bigger knife, cut my sub in half and had it wrapped before I blinked twice.

This sort of extreme rushing I could understand if it was the peak of lunch and the line was out the door but I was the only person there. I don’t know about you but even though I was in a rush I would much prefer my sub made with some sort of precision. Afterall I am paying $8 plus for it. Do they not realised that there is a barrier of glass and you can see them rapidly throwing your sandwitch together.

Maybe there’s some sort of prize for whoever can make them the quickest? Either way, next time, I’m going to politely let my sandwitch artist know that it’s not a race and that I’d like it in one piece when she’s done.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD

Today I discovered Last.fm. I think I remember using it or something very similar about 6 months ago. The one I used back then had a time limit before you had to pay for it and if I had the money back then I would have, it was that good. Today I find out that it’s gone back to being free. After using it all afternoon I have to say it’s just about the best thing in the world.

It works by first asking you for a band or style of music you like. You type it in and then it starts playing songs of a smililar sound or songs that other people have also liked, that like the music you typed in. As the music is playing, oh I forgot to say you have to download thier little music player or get a plugin for something you already use. Anyway, as the music is playing you have these little buttons down the bottom.

One of the buttons is a little heart, one’s a next track button and one is a cross. If you like the song they’ve chosen to play you then you click the little heart. If you really don’t like what it’s chosen then you click the cross. By doing this it slowly begins to learn what music you like and gets very good at picking music you might like to hear. The more music you listen to and the more you rate the smarter it becomes. The more people that use the service make it smarter when first choosing the music that you like.

On top of all that it complies all the music you listen to and puts it in a playlist with your favourite artists, genres, your most played songs, all things like that. You can see mine here.

So far it’s played me some songs that I’ve never heard before that I really really like. Some Alkaline Trio and Mae especially. As well as that, it’s pretty damn good at picking music you like. About 10 minutes ago it played Box Car Racer - Cat Like Thief which could be my favourite song and has been for years. For streaming audio the quality is impressive.

My beautiful Valentine Courtney.

I love her to bits.

Some people say that all they want in life is to be happy. I think that hapiness is a product of having peace of mind. Worry and anticipation of the worst is what makes people so unhappy. You’re not happy if you’re worried about where your next meal is coming from, if you’re worried about living your life alone or scared about what’s going to happen at work tomorrow when they find out about your big fuck up.

If you can live each day without worrying about a thing then that’s when you’ll be happy. Some people might say this all comes down to you. “It’s your decision how much or if you worry at all” is what they’ll say.

But worry works on a hierarchy of levels, other elements affect how much you worry, other things like trust. If you’re worried your girlfriend is going to cheat on you then you don’t trust her and that leads down to another level of, why don’t you trust her? Again, can this be seen as just a frame of mind? Are you not a trusting person or is your girlfriend untrustworthy?

You can’t just stop worrying. Stop worrying about money, stop worrying about deadlines at your job, don’t worry about getting fired, stay calm about being unemployed and then who cares about a place to sleep and a meal to eat, right? We need worry to survive, we need worry to lessen our future and potential worry. Worrying about whether you’re going to have a job completed in time has got to be better than worrying about finding a job.

Just like worrying about whether your girlfriend will like the poem you wrote her is better than worrying you’re going to die alone.

Can anyone ever really have complete peace of mind? I think it would require a mixture of being able to control exactly how you think, setting yourself up the right way and having the right people around you, people you can trust.

100 hours later the latest Fightingfriends redesign is 90% complete. Actually, I’ll give it more credit than that, say 96%. All that’s left if some tiny things on the static pages but sometimes they can turn out to be a redesign by themselves. I’m rolling this out now because I just can’t wait anymore, I’ve slaved away on this look and am very keen to hear opinions.So much for a realign aye? This really couldn’t be much more different from the old design. But speaking of the old design, it’s been getting a lot of attention from other people lately and a few people have actually used it on their sites and that makes me very proud. It was hardly made to be distributed but it is encouragment to port it and sell it which I think I might just do.

Anyway, this redesign. I’ve called it version 14.01 because I’m just not sure how many times Fightingfriends has been redesigned now, I’m probably being modest when calling this the 14th.

Before starting I told myself I would finish it before throwing it into the live arena at all. I was so close to keep that promise because the Wordpress side of things is finished, it’s just a few static pages that require very little attention. The whole time while I was working revisions were made and idea’s were improved upon.

Nearly everything that I set out to include in this design was included exactly how I wanted it to be. There’s one exception though, that is that AJAX comments weren’t included. I did try, I promise I tried but I failed many times. After talking it over with some #wordpress friends I was convinced that it wasn’t a good idea to start with. This made me happy because it meant that now everything I wanted is included.

Some painstaking detail has been placed into this designs CSS, especially when attempting to make it identical in IE and Firefox, which it is. There’s over 600 lines of CSS, the most I have ever written for a single design. It’s full of very, very long decendant selectors to make sure IE gets it right and Firefox too for that matter.

I’d love to hear what you all think. Leave some comments in the new look comments section with your thoughts and criticism.

At least 20 times per whatever project I’m working on I will not know something and need to look it up. It’ll be little stupid things. Mainly just syntax type things where I’ve forgotten whether it’s a comma or semicolon. Things like the SQL syntax for maximums.

For PHP stuff I’ll immeadiatly go to php.net. That site is just such a massive wealth of PHP information. If you can’t find the answer to your question there then what you want to do probably can’t be done. The search is very, very good. 80% of the time it will skip the step between searching and finding the page you want. Much like Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” but it does it automatically and never gets it wrong.

Anyway this wasn’t meant to sing php.net’s praises (even though it deserves it). For anything that’s not PHP I’ll just do a normal google search and this happens about 50% of the time I have a problem. Every single search I make for tiny little pieces of programming information will, 19 times out of 20 times, result in the answer being found in a blog post. In a single post all about the exact information I was looking for. Everytime I think “Why do people make posts about this kind of stuff, who would possibly want this information?” Then I realise it’s me that wants the information and that it comes in very handy.

I realise that they’ve posted it to help people. People like me and that’s what open source is really all about. Helping People.
Often I come accross things or write my own code that is pretty cool or that has been very useful to me. I sometimes think about posting my findings but will quickly dismiss that idea thinking that ‘everyone knows that already’. But they don’t and there’s bound to be people out there that might be looking for it one day.

So from now on I’m going to post my useful code, my special ways of doing things, my CSS tricks and my javascript effects. No matter how simple it is.

Hey! I have another blog. I’ve had it for ages now but I hadn’t done anything with it. I got it via invite when wordpress.com was first realeased privately. I thought it was cool but didn’t do anything more about it but something happened the other day that made me want to use it. The entire story is in a post on the site.

One of the reasons that I didn’t do anything with it when I first got it was that it barely had any themes and the themes it did have were ordinary. Most of them are still ordinary but there is one huge stand out. Hemingway is my theme over there and it’s very sexy.

Another reason I didn’t want to use it is because I didn’t want to take any content away from fightingfriends. I didn’t think there would be any point splitting one sites worth of content over two sites. So I haven’t, on my wordpress.com blog I write about music, something I steer well clear of here. And likewise there will be no tech, design or internet stuff over there. So anyway, everyone should go to USERNAME.WORDPRESS.COM and you should bookmark it, you should add the feed to your feed reader and then make it your home page just to be sure.