Posted by Jordan Little on May 12, 2011
Some dear friends of mine are getting hitched this summer and they asked me if I’d work up some wedding invitations for them.
At first I went with a very simple, modern look. For typography I used a mix of Museo and Gotham. I was so happy with this version, but they wanted something a little more traditional so this design was sidelined.
Here’s the final attempt, printed and ready to be mailed:
I’m really happy with the results and can’t wait to be part of their big day!
Congrats, you guys!
Posted by Jordan Little on February 2, 2011
According to Electronista iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad) now account for a little over 2% of all web traffic.
Mobile Apple hardware reached a milestone today as new findings showed iOS cracking two percent share of the web for the first time. The iPad, iPhone and iPod reached 2.06 percent of Net Applications’ traffic study worldwide and were in even higher use in certain areas. In English-native and other more mobile-driven countries, the share was disproportionately higher, ranging from 3.4 percent in the US to almost 10 percent in Singapore.
Posted by Jordan Little on June 21, 2010
As if we all needed another reason to fear and loathe the horrible browser that is Internet Explorer, Engadget reports that a critical bug could let arbitrary code run on your machine just by hitting the F1 key on your keyboard…
I’ve got to agree with the sentiments in their last sentence. Instead of avoiding your F1 key, try switching browsers:
Chrome
Firefox
Safari
Read the Article
Posted by Jordan Little on May 12, 2010
Google, in a pretty forward-thinking move, will start ranking sites not only by content and inbound links, but by page-load speed as well. This bodes well for clients of Shift Creative as we take speed very seriously in designing and developing websites.
Read the article…
We encourage you to start looking at your site’s speed (the tools above provide a great starting point) — not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone’s experience on the Internet.
Posted by Jordan Little on April 16, 2010
Extremely interesting read.
We set out to broaden our ambitions; to create a design philosophy and world-class design standards that all designers across the business could adhere to. We wanted to find the soul of the BBC. We wanted something distinctive and recognisable; we wanted drama. We knew whatever we created needed to be truly cross-platform and that we needed to simplify our user journeys.
Read the Article
Posted by Jordan Little on March 29, 2010
In layman’s terms, web standards are simply rules and methods of creating websites. It’s a very organic and complicated subject, but the reason we try to adhere to these standards is that, in the end, it benefits our clients.
Load Times and Server Costs
Ideally, a website that follows web standards (as all of ours do) will keep content and design files separated. That is, any file that defines content should have no bearing on how that content is displayed. Design files are created separately and are applied to the content when the user accesses the site. This means faster loading times due to the fact that a user only has to download this design file once. It also means faster updates, less expensive bandwidth, snappier loading, and, overall, a website that is much easier to manage.
Accessibility
Keeping design and content separate means we can work with the content by itself without any of the design instructions getting in the way. This is extremely handy when dealing with screen readers. A screen reader is a piece of software that lets visually disabled people surf the web by reading the text on the screen aloud. Screen readers have to wade through all the code of a website to pull out the juicy bits of useful content. Standards based sites make this very easy and quite helpful to those with disabilities.
It’s not just physical disabilities that we’re talking about, however, when referring to accessibility. Have you ever tried to visit a website on your mobile phone? It’s very frustrating if your phone is struggling to load a large website with lots of graphics and imagery. Keeping content and design separate allows us to cater to these mobile browsers and serve the site with minimal design and graphics.
Browser Compatibility
There are a lot of browsers out today — Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Google Chrome just to name a few. For the most part, the makers of these browsers have all agreed to follow web standards and display a website that follows these rules properly. If you break these rules or don’t follow them, a website will look very different across these various browsers. Not too good for brand building.
Future Proofing
The web changes at an insanely fast rate. However, standards, by their nature, can only change once every few years, so having your site designed with web standards can greatly increase your chance of having your site up and running for years to come, while still being easily maintained.
Search Engines
Search engines are essentially automated web browsers that traverse the internet saving every website they come across. The are programmed to work, but not too hard, and find good content that can be easily indexed. Standards based designs, having no design instructions, are easily analyzed and almost always do better than a comparable website that doesn’t follow standards.
Conclusion
As mentioned, web standards are a very confusing and ever-changing set of rules, but if followed, can provide a lot of benefits. Essentially, standards based designs are overwhelmingly positive and if you want your website to be fast, easy to maintain, and cost-effective, make sure your web design company knows all about these standards and how to implement them.
W3C
Web Standards Project
Wikipedia’s Take on the Subject
Posted by Jordan Little on March 23, 2010
For the longest time I’ve wanted a Mac Mini as a media center. The Apple TV seems to be a decent alternative, but is underpowered and too restrictive on its content. So last Saturday I finally dropped the coin on a brand new Mac Mini.
Here’s the processes / resources I used to create a pretty sweet little home media server:
Goals
- Watch movies, videos, view photos, listen to music, and view weather from your couch on your TV.
- Add & delete torrents to download onto the Mac Mini, remotely
- Control the media center via your iPhone
- Watch the movies stored on your Mac Mini on your iPhone
- Serve websites from the Mac Mini
Disclaimer: Do this all at your own risk. This all worked for me and I’m thoroughly enjoying the setup.
Purchase a Mac Mini
Apple Store
Mac Mall
PowerMax
Amazon
Don’t forget to check the Apple Refurbished Store for discounted machines, though most of the time there aren’t Mac Minis available.
Make sure that whatever Mac Mini you get/have is capable of playing high definition if you’d like that capability. Generally speaking the newer the Mini the better, and an Intel chip is highly preferable.
Get the Media Center Software
Download and install Plex. Awesome media center app.
Download and install Perian. It’s a package full of all the codecs you’ll need.
Download and install Handbrake. Rip your DVDs to your hard drive in an array of different file types.
Video Cables
Depending on which Mac Mini you have and what TV you have, you will need a different cable. Here are an assortment of cables you may need:
Mini DisplayPort to DVI
Mini-DVI -> HDMI
Mini-DVI -> DVI
HDMI
DVI -> HDMI
MiniDVI -> VGA
Audio Cables
Some of the newer Mac Minis have optical audio out through the headphone jack. If yours is an older Mac Mini use the mini -> RCA (red/white) cable.
mini -> TosLink
mini -> RCA
Controlling the Media Center with your iPhone
Snatch. Awesome app that allows you to use your phone as a trackpad, as well as a remote control for Plex. This article shows you how to make a custom remote screen with a decently attractive theme. Very sweet.
Air Video. Allows you to stream movies from your Mac Mini to your iPhone, works over 3G (albeit very slowly)!
Setting up the Server
I highly, highly recommend a very strong password on your Mac Mini. Change it often! To use the Mac Mini as a web server you’ll need a few things. First, you’ll need to be able to reach the Mini from outside your network. I accomplished this by getting a free account at DynDNS. You can pick from a few free domains, most of them pretty terrible. You’ll then need to download and install their free IP updater client. This small app runs in the background and updates your dynamic IP to DynDNS. This way, when you type in your chosen domain name, your DynDNS account will always know to send the request to the correct IP and get the Mac Mini.
Download and install XAMPP (or WAMP). Very nice web server stack that installs and runs very smoothly.
By default, Apache listens on port 80. Most ISPs block traffic on port 80 (mine did), so you can make Apache listen to a different port by editing your httpd.conf file:
- Open Terminal, at the prompt type: sudo vim /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/etc/httpd.conf
- Type your password and you’ll be editing the httpd.conf file in vim. It looks a little scary, but it’s just a command line based text editor.
- Press the down arrow until you come to a line that says, “Listen 80.”
- Press the letter “I” to enter edit mode, now change “Listen 80″ to “Listen 8080.” Press Esc to exit insert mode.
- While holding Shift, press Z twice to save and exit.
(Note: you can use nano/pico or another command line text editor if you are more comfortable)
There, now Apache is listening on port 8080 and most ISPs will be none the wiser.
Open the XAMPP Control app (in your applications folder / XAMPP) and start all your services. You can quit this app once you’ve started the services, they don’t stop unless you re-open XAMPP Control and stop them manually. Now go to a browser and enter the following URL: http://localhost:8080 – That website is being served from the Mac Mini!
Setup Remote Torrents
:) Keep it legal!
Download and install Transmission or uTorrent whichever you prefer, although we’ll use Transmission in this guide.
In the preferences for Transmission select the “Remote” tab. Check the box for “Enable remote access.” After you read the next point (Router Settings & Port Forwarding) and activate port forwarding you’ll be able to reach this web interface from anywhere in the world by entering the URL http://your.domain.com:9091 – Neat, huh? I’ve used this feature waaay more than I thought I would considering I’m out of my house all the time with my Macbook Pro. I simply download the torrent to my MBP, then upload it to my Mac Mini to do all the heavy lifting. Torrents are ready to go by the time I get home!
Router Settings & Port Forwarding
If you’re like me, you have a few different machines all getting their internet from a wireless router. I have a Linksys WRT54GL running Tomato Firmware. In order for the router to know which computer to send requests to, you’ll need to specify a few port-forwarding rules. You’ll need to get the local IP of your Mac Mini from your router device list. My Mac Mini happened to be 192.168.1.145. So in my router settings I set up the following rules under the port-forwarding settings:
Port: 5900 – Label: VNC – Forward to: 192.168.1.145
Port: 8080 – Label: Web Server – Forward to: 192.168.1.145
Port: 9091 – Label: Torrents – Forward to: 192.168.1.145
Shortening Ugly URLs
If you happen to own your own domain name you can avoid having to type in those ugly URLs (blah.dyndns.net:8080) by using 301 redirects. Simply open or create an .htaccess file on your web host’s server that says:
redirect 301 /home http://name.domain.com:8080
redirect 301 /torrent http://name.domain.com:9091
Now when you type in yourdomain.com/home you’ll be redirected to your Mac Mini and the same for yourdomain.com/torrent! Handy.
Sharing Preferences
Open System Preferences and click “Sharing.” You’ll see plenty of options, mine look like this. You should do the same if you want the capabilities listed here.
Screen Sharing
Now that all that’s set up you should be able to access your Mac Mini’s desktop from anywhere in the world. Just activate Finder and, in the menu bar, click Go > Connect to Server. Type in:
vnc://your.domain.com
You should be able to type in your user/pass and, voila, you’re at your Mac Mini’s desktop.
Note: VNC is unencrypted traffic by default and you should tunnel through SSH if you’re concerned about security. You can see a guide to setup secure screen sharing in OS X here.
That’s about all I’ve got for now. Please let me know if I’m missing anything and feel free to add your input!
Conclusion
This should make for a pretty nice little Mac Mini that lets you:
- Add/Edit/Delete active torrents without being anywhere near your house
- Watch movies & TV shows, listen to music, view photos, and view weather from your couch
- Control your media center with an iPhone
- Create/edit websites on your Mac Mini and access those sites from the web
- View your videos on your iPhone while in other rooms of your house or apartment
Enjoy!
Reposted with permission over at OS X Daily.
