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April 18, 2007

SuperHappyDevHouse 17

Well, I've obviously not done a very good job updating this blog.  It's funny how work and life take over the things you wanted to do...  But I wanted to put up a post to talk about SuperHappyDevHouse, an event that takes place periodically in the Bay Area and that I'll be attending in a couple weeks.  It's a "private productive party" for hackers/developers/designers, a chance to get together with like-minded people to work on new ideas.  Check out the website for more info.

I hope to get some work done on some ideas I have to develop an application on the Facebook development platform.  There are a lot of different things you can do with the API they've exposed, but I think a lot of the applications currently found in the directory add little to the Facebook experience.  The conclusion I've come to is that the best use of this API will allow a secondary community to form and interact in new ways alongside Facebook.

Currently one of main obstacles I see to the success of such a scheme is the difficulty of integrating Facebook applications with Facebook itself in a way that makes the transition between the normal UI and the application (in both directions) simple and obvious.  There's no way for a Facebook user to list in his or her profile what applications they like or use; they would have to put a link somewhere else, which is simple, but not obvious.  To get back to Facebook, you can redirect to a Facebook page, but you can't send any information to Facebook (probably for good reason).

Still, I think a lot can be done with the platform, and I will be exploring that over the next few weeks and at the event on Cinco de Mayo.

December 09, 2006

Resume and Portfolio Published!

Well, it took me long enough, but I finally updated the design of this site and added my resume and portfolio.  Please take a look using the links at the top of the page and feel free to refer others to this site!

One of the things that made the update take a while was that I was experimenting with implementing this design (which is one I put together with tables a while back) entirely with CSS layout techniques instead of tables.  This proved to be quite a challenge, especially with all the browser inconsistencies with CSS.  I was able to do it, but in the end I felt like it wasn't worth the trouble, at least not for a site as small as this.  Why go through all the work of tweaking the CSS when you can use tried and true tables that render practically identically across all browsers?

The purists would say that you need to separate content and design entirely, and I can see the value of this for a large website.  But for my purposes here, I think I'll stick with the tables.  Nevertheless, I will go ahead and post the CSS version shortly, in case you're interested.  Drawing those lines isn't so easy! :)

October 25, 2006

Developer Blog Up and Running!

I finally have a developer blog of my own!  Thanks to Yahoo! Small Business and the Yahoo! Hackday event I attended last month, I have a free year of hosting to enjoy.  There are a lot of great features to this setup so far, and my domain was registered and active within a couple hours of my purchase!  That's pretty great.  It's also cool that they have blogging tools like Movable Type available for me to use.  Movable Type is highly customizable, so it should allow me to tailor the design very specifically to what I'm looking for.  But I'll spend more time on that later.

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