I would like to continue presenting this talk at other venues. While this line of thinking is catching on, there are still far too many organizations that practice design and development in a segregated manner. There also seemed to be some genuine interest on what this talk would look like if focused in the other direction (i.e., how designers are vital to developement). I would love to have the opportunity to share my thoughts on that subject as well.

This concept seemed like a perfect fit for the journalism space. I thought it would be fascinating to see news rooms open up what they are covering and be able to participate in real-time with the writing and editorial process. It could be messy for sure, but the potential for insight and richer news stories seems tremendous. Well, the Guardian recently announced that it will be making half of that idea a reality by maintaining an open newslist and promoting Twitter discussions with the #opennews hashtag.

All news stories are broken up by subject matter with the general time they are slated to be published and who is working with them along with a way to get a hold of them.

This process allows the public to help fill in a news agency’s gaps and improve their coverage. By knowing what is slated to run or what is not, individuals can provide valuable feedback to news providers early in the coverage process. This can lead to more efficient use of time on covering the most important news stories of the day. Additionally, providing access to each journalist working on the story creates an avenue for those with pertinent information to help the story along. This two-way access equally aids both the public and the journalists.

So many informational sources are becoming increasingly open. I have found the news industry to be abhorrently behind the curve both in how they disseminate information and how they collaborate around it. With luck, this process will catch on with the public, succeed and expand to other news agencies. I look forward to the day when this level of openness is a standard in the news industry.

Speaking of speaking, I will be presenting at the Plone Conference on November 3rd. Hope to see you there.

Less than two weeks ago, I updated Iconic with 18 new icons. I have had some time on my hands as of late, so I was able to add another 22 icons to the collection. This update includes bars (for charts or mobile coverage), alternate documents, upload/download, cloud upload download, a pilcrow, microphone, award, aperture and a few others. Most notably, I finally was able to get a camera icon that was decent.

The set is now up to 177 icons. I will continue to create icons as it makes sense, but this recent addition took care of all the pressing additions on the list. Some icons that have been suggested just do not seem possible given the grid used for this set. That said, I continue to give them a shot from time to time. Depending on how the next few weeks treat me, the set may break into the 180′s soon enough.

Go download the updated set.

As an aside, I am having a hard time designing certain forms, most notably the camera. Iconic is designed with an 8×8 grid that I try to fanatically follow. The whole premise behind that decision was that it would lead to icons which would be legible at extremely small sizes. This makes detailed icons quite difficult and has a lot to do with the “chunky” feel of the icons. Honestly, I find the challenge of working within such tight constraints to be quite enjoyable. It forces the design to be as stripped down as possible and it is a great deterrent from me “noodling” on paths for hours on end.

I would love to see the set break past 200 icons at some point this year, although that will likely be a challenge. However, the volume of icons is causing a separate issue — processing time and file size. I had to remove the Omnigraffle stencil from the collection as it was ballooning the final download to well over 20Mb. Given the number of downloads this set gets a month, it was beginning to create a sizable Amazon S3 bill. So as the number of icons goes up, I may need to remove certain colors and sizes. I would love to get your feedback on this.

Here’s to a return to normality. See you soon.

When I first got started on this idea, I was very interested in always presenting something that was semi-finished and as polished as possible. This resulted in the presentation time taking longer than the actual work I was presenting. Additionally, getting my work to the polished point I aimed for would become so overbearing that I would have a hard time seeing the end of the tunnel. For some people with the slow and steady approach, this may seem simple, but for someone that’s a bit more sporadic, it’s a big deal.

So, things are a little different this time around. I am making a smallish, yet significant redesign to the site. This new design will be made 100% for my needs – I just can’t simply create a theme for myself AND for the public. However, all the code and assets used on my site will be offered up as open source. The new design will be focused on forward-compatibility and speed. The number one goal will be for the theme to be light and load quickly. The theme will extensively use HTML5 and CSS3 for layout, visuals and motion and will not put much effort in supporting browsers which don’t play nice with what we all will be using 2 or 3 years from now. For many, this is not going to be appropriate for them, which is understandable, but that’s just the only way this can feasibly happen. Here are some specific points that will be addressed:

• Displaying of less content on the home page for a greater emphasis on specific content, smaller page size and less database queries.
• Creating a more segmented layout between content meant for consumption (e.g., blog posts) and content meant for discovery (e.g., related posts).
• Less content, simpler code, easier maintenance and a lighter footprint.
• Some interface considerations for viewing on mobile and tablet devices.

I have already begun the buildout of this theme. For below are the rules I have made, for better or for worse. I am dead-set on making this project happen and seeing it to completion. To those ends, these rules will be followed as though they were the law:

• The design will happen in real-time. There will be no effort put into showing polished steps of the progress. What you see is where I currently am in the process.
• All work will be posted real time on my server. It will be ugly from time to time. I am OK with that.
• The project’s code will be updated and available at any time on GitHub (project page). Note, the code commits will also be real-time and in no way indicative of stable versions (until explicitly communicated).
• The theme will be built in HTML5 and use heavy amounts of CSS3. There will little if any backward compatibility.
• The code is going to be the exact code i use for myself. To the semicolon.
• There will be a strong effort to write good code, but i am not interested in winning a popularity contest from hardcore software engineers. If my final code does not meet your expectations, fix it.
• This is going to happen, but at my own pace. If you want to speed up the process, contribute.
• Striving for perfection is nice, but I am not going to stop the train whenever I run into a hitch. 100% good > 90% perfect.
• I am done caring how people will think of this project in a healthy sort-of-way. If you don’t like it, don’t use it.

It will be interesting to see how this process works out. I am trying to push away the noise and distraction that I have foisted upon myself for this project. With any luck, this greater focus on actually getting stuff done will help me get this damned thing finished. I would love your help in this process. Feel free to leave a comment on this post if you’d like to help.

I have held off on advertising because when I would put the advertisements on my site, I always felt a little dirty. My thinking was, if I felt dirty, I can only imagine how first time users with no emotional investment in my site would feel. From a user-experience perspective, this just did not feel right. I genuinely do not feel this way with the InfluAds system. I would love to get your feedback on how you think the advertisement alters the experience here, but I also want to open up a discussion on the larger impact advertising (and the revenue that goes along with it) will bring.

Why advertise?

To be honest, I have never really been interested in actually making money from advertising. The notion was that given the amount of time and effort I put into this project, I felt that there had to be some return on investment. Call me crazy, but just knowing that the site is finally generating some revenue highly reassures me to continue pumping blood, sweat and tears into it. Considering how much money I spend just keeping the blog online, it did not seem appropriate to spend even more money on things that may improve the site. That is why I am so excited to get some money coming in, because I am going to be able to start paying for some potentially interesting things.

Almost all of the ideas that I am going to invest in are going to make you (the reader) better off. Here are some of the I will be tossing some money towards:

Commissioning Web Projects

This, above all things, really excites me. My plan is to commission open-source/creative-commons projects that will benefit the web design/development community as a whole. I have already begun doing this as a trial run on a certain project, but with the added revenue, my hope is to fund 10 to 15 of these types of projects a year if enough money comes in. I already have a couple projects in mind. All the details around this idea really deserve a dedicated blog post, so I will hold off until then.

Supporting Web-Oriented Charities

Another idea I have kicking around is to use the money from advertising to help support worthwhile causes focusing on the internet. Obviously, organizations like the EFF come to mind, but there are plenty other organizations doing worthwhile work.

Promotion

OK, this probably will not make your life better off, but it will potentially bring more eyeballs to this site which, in the long run, should mean greater ad revenue. I personally do not think that my current traffic is large enough to support some of the things I would like to do, so in the short term, I am going to have to invest some money to get this site visited more often.

Recouping Costs Associated With the Blog

This blog costs way too much to host considering the amount of traffic it gets. I will be working in the coming weeks to lower the amount of money I pay monthly, but no matter how low I get the number, it will always cost something. At the very least, I would like this blog to no longer pull money out of my own wallet — that will make future work on it much easier to swallow.

What you can do to help

As long as I am pulling in money from advertising, this plan in one shape or form is definitely going to happen. The big variable at this point is just how much I will be able to generate on a monthly basis. If you like this idea and would like to see it happen in a meaningful way, here are a few things you can do to help this thing along:

• If you are someone who already pays for advertising, consider buying some ads from InfluAds. The more ad revenue InfluAds pulls in, the more revenue all the advertisers receive.
• Subscribe to my RSS feed if you are not a subscriber yet. More traffic should mean more revenue.
• I will be spending some time in the coming weeks researching each service/product advertised on this site and post my findings for full transparency. If a service advertised on this site seems interesting to you, by all means, click the advertisement and consider purchasing it.
• In the coming weeks, as more details get hammered out, make sure to participate in the discussion and give me your feedback. I want to get this right, and the best way to ensure that is to get other minds thinking about it as well

I am very excited about the next few months and what could be possible to accomplish during that time. My biggest goal on this site was to help make the web the smallest bit better through what was written/published/released from here. I feel as though that small bit could become significantly larger.

Due to the structure of this set, some icons have been tremendously challenging to render out. One icon in particular that caused me trouble was a cloud. Luckily, I found a little inspiration from Jez Burrows. I ended up creating a cloud icon, folder icon (filled and stroked) and a much needed alternate mail icon. The first mail icon was (and still is) simply horrible — I would normally just remove it, but considering how many people use this set now, I am a little cautious to start removing icons some people may be actively using. Below is a preview of the icons.

In the next few weeks, I would actually like to release the Adobe ExtendScripts I use to generate each individual file (all 6000+ of them) for the set. This will likely be what I work on next. Until then, download the updated collection and continue to hit me up if you have ideas on how to add to or improve this icon set.

First, Iconic. This icon set continues to grow far larger than I ever expected it. The set started at 96 icons and has ballooned to 120. This new release has added the following icons: Info, at symbol, star, dial and two versions of loop. I continue to think that the set has reached its natural conclusion with each subsequent release. I will refrain from making that assumption due to plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Here is a quick preview of the six icons:

Off Franklin took a little more time. Posting updates to your Tumblr themes could use some work. I have posted some updates that have gone through and some that have not gone through. The real problem from my perspective is that it goes into a black hole. No notifications for success of failure. That is why I waited until today to post these updates — just to make sure the Tumblr theme actually updated in their system. The updates for Off Franklin are listed below:

Static page support

This feature was obvious. Thank you everyone that emailed me about this — I frankly did not even know the feature existed.

Un-sticky the sticky footer

Don’t want to persistent bar for pagination? Done. By toggling off that option, the sticky footer shows up below the main footer. Congratulations, you now have a footer for your footer.

More style control for the sticky footer

The sticky footer really expected you to put in an image to look appropriate. After seeing how people have been using the theme, it became apparent that there needed to be an option for a solid color background. That option now exists.

Styling bug fixes

The footer was, ahem, untidy. That has now been fixed.

Feedback is priceless. Please drop ideas, questions and/or concerns in the comments. I do read them and I do take them seriously.

While I am glad that these updates are now public, I am equally disappointed at how late I am in releasing the WordPress theme. The process is taking some time and time has been in extremely short demand. One reason why I felt it important to post these updates is to ensure you that I am in fact working on this stuff and have not forgotten about my promises.

Starting this week, I will be taking a job at Adaptive Path and I could not be more excited. I had the chance to work as a contractor for Adaptive Path for the past few months and I instantly enjoyed the environment and approach towards solving problems. I have learned so during my time with AP – I especially enjoy the fact that I am surrounded by people much smarter than I.

This transition to a full-time position should have a positive impact on this blog. We all know working for oneself in any web/design related field can be erratic. In this new role, I am expecting a more even-keel work/life balance which should give me more time to devote towards substantive content on Some Random Dude. All the ideas I have spoke about this blog have not been forgotten – with a more predictable schedule, I should be able to realize them.

Have I mentioned that I am excited? Because I totally am.

During this holiday break, I took out a substantial amount of time to finalize and package up the icon set used for this blog under the (perhaps overly pretentious) name Iconic. The icon set comes in both vector and raster formats (SVG/PNG), includes 13 different colors and 5 different sizes (for the raster icons). Ironically, designing the icons was the easy part — actually getting them ready for you took all the time. Check out the icons below the fold.

On the subject of time, 2010 will be the year where I devote my attention and time to polishing the site. I will be releasing less projects, but will try to present them in a more refined manner. I will not be redesigning the site again, but I will working to constantly improve it in small increments. On that note, I took on the task of re-releasing both the Bitcons and Sanscons icon sets; outputting the icons in multiple colors and sizes as well as refreshing the project pages. If you look at my web traffic, you would quickly notice that the Bitcons and Sanscons pages are by far the most visited on this site. Therefore, it seemed appropriate to devote some time to improving those pages first and foremost.

In the coming days, I will be writing in more detail about what my plans/goals are for this site. Until then, enjoy the icons.

Straight To Business

I am aware most of you are quite uninterested in hearing about my process or the background of this project, so if you want to cut to the chase, check out the theme for yourself and, if you like it, download the theme.

Screenshots

Even more so than its predecessor, the Franklin Street theme is conforms strongly to its grid system. The grid is a 14 column setup and has proven to be extremely flexible for my own personal needs. I am hoping that it will be the same for public use.

About The Theme

The Franklin Street theme was designed specifically for displaying a large and diverse range of content on the front page. Some Random Dude is essentially a lifestream blog where I pull in content from my online accounts. The main problem was that the content I was generating varied drastically size, format and importance. Simply stacking them vertically did not seem to be the proper way to handle the information. Therefore, I created a tiered system where each type of content was put into one of three buckets — large format, medium format and small format. Large format content is consists of blog posts, medium format contains mainly images and photos and small format is filled with Twitter updates, Delicious links, etc. This design element was the most important piece of the previous design and it is remaining unchanged in the new version. This format, however, makes the theme somewhat of a niche design as most people will not have the need (or the desire) to format their content in this way. It is important to know that just like this site, this theme actively blocks IE6 and Safari 2.0. If that is not your thing, you may want to pass on this theme.

Differences Between Old And New

From a visual perspective, I think the differences are quite obvious. This theme was designed for public use as the top priority, so the visual treatment is restrained and designed in order to maximize flexibility. One of the biggest changes is just its sheer drop in weight. The old theme is heavy, almost beyond practicality. The new theme uncompressed is still smaller than the old theme fully compressed. Additionally, the markup is far more minimal than the older version as well — making maintenance and alterations less of a nightmare. Lastly, all Javascript effects you see in the old site have been removed as I did not want to make the assumption that people would want that on by default. I may create add-on packs in the future for those who would like said effects.

I am a firm believer that all good projects involving code are written (at least) twice. I feel like the old theme was well-intentioned, but ultimately missed the mark on some very important features. I have submitted the theme to WordPress with the hope that it will be added to their theme collection. Once the dust settles and all the bugs/mistakes have been cleared away, I will begin the process of implementing this theme on my site. This theme will have some custom alterations made to fit my needs more snugly — I will be happy to share the final implementation of this theme for my site if anyone is interested.

Feedback Is Golden

Let me know your thoughts on this theme and if you have any ideas on improving it. Like all projects that have yet to see the light of day, it is probably missing the mark in various ways. Let me know if you know of a way to improve upon it.

To a certain extent, this does not surprise me. Most projects of this nature need at least one good rewrite to truly get the project running on all cylinders. In addition, the look of the site just did not quite hit the mark after what has proven to be almost 9 solid months of close scrutiny. Sometimes things seem to look great in a test-tube, but when they get out in the wild, they just do not have the same vibe. So, I am rewriting a large portion of the theme which is moving along smoothly. However, this time around, I am building the theme for public use first when I will then implement/tweak that theme for this site. I feel if I build it first with public use in mind, it will keep all of those nasty little hacks and hard-coded items out of the system. With any luck, the theme will be completed in a month.

The theme is coming along nicely, although I will need to develop a plugin specifically for this theme to make it truly usable without excessive code-editing. If anyone with some WordPress theme/plugin development experience is interested in giving me a hand, give me a shout. I could definitely use the help.

That said, after this project, the layout organizer library and releasing this blog’s theme are going to be my top priorities. Yes, I could release the library right now, but I would prefer to do it right. The project I am working on should be complete around early July, so I would expect the library to be released by mid to late July. This time, library will be released with full documentation, it will be also available as a SWC and it will be released on Google Code so that releases can actually be offered up on a more regular timeline.

I know this is not optimal and I apologize for the lack of updates, but better to just do this right than to hand out a half-ass intermediate release just to release the right way a couple weeks later.

I have come to the conclusion that I just need to make a fresh start with a new hosting service. I have been with MediaTemple for years — the majority of which was on their Grid Service. Like many, I had my assorted collection of problems with the Grid, so I decided to move up to the DV. Due to recent events, I am thinking that is not the right fit either. So after chatting with a few folks, I am going to give Mosso’s new Cloud Server hosting a try. At this point, I just have a hard time justifying paying $100 a month for a VPS with 512 MB of dedicated memory when I can get 1GB of RAM for roughly half that price, based on my current traffic. This is going to suck up some time, so my posting will continue to be sparse, but my hope is this move will stop the crashes and I can once again get back to what this blog is about — writing articles.

Thanks for the patience.

About the Theme

This theme was designed specifically for this site’s Tumblr offshoot. The interface is intended for media in particular (such as videos and images), but it is still plenty flexible to handle all other types of Tumblr content. The grid will definitely not appreciate large-copy posts, but it will not break. The theme uses jQuery for just about all of the Javascript and should be very easy to follow. My hope is to continue improving upon the theme when it seems both useful to myself and to the community members using the theme. The most recent version of the theme (that is not customized particularly for myself) will always be at franklinstreet.tumblr.com.

Short Video Run-Through

Basic Features

Here are a few reasons you may like using this theme:

• Fully customizable color scheme using Tumblr’s appearance tab
• Various javascript interactive effects to make the experience a bit more enjoyable
• Images in image posts open up in a lightbox
• Uses Cufón font replacement library for better looking headers
• Handles all Tumblr media formats appropriately, including video (tested with YouTube, Vimeo and Flickr embeds)
• Support for notes (new as of 0.9.1)

Use This Theme

If you have a Tumblr account and want to install this theme, just go ahead and preview, then install the theme through Tumblr’s interface. Otherwise, download the source file and manually paste the source into the custom HTML field under the theme tab.

Please excuse my poor screen presence, but the interview was great because I was able to chat about some subjects that truly interest me. Ribbit is really doing some great work and is highly interested to engage with the design and technology communities to create next-generation online experiences. I highly suggest checking out their API.

A Completely New Direction

The old site, in retrospect had quite long legs – I am amazed how long it lasted. The problem was, when I started the site out, I honestly had no idea what I wanted to do or where I was headed. What ended up happening is that the site would be quickly and misguidedly hacked to fit the latest direction I wanted the blog to go. What resulted was a hodge-podge mess that began to collapse under its own weight.

Before I even began the wireframing of this site, I sat down and put a lot of thought into what I wanted this new site to achieve. So while I am certain much of the structural and visual elements of this site will evolve, the underlying function will remain. Here are a few of the directions that drove this redesign:

Centralization of Information

The old site was essentially an island separated from nearly all the other content I create, share or find on a daily basis. If I did want to export it to my blog island, I would have to manually ship it over and publish it. That all has changed with the new site. The new Some Random Dude, is as much an aggregator as it is a blog. I am bringing in content from my profiles on Tumblr, Vimeo, Flickr, Delicious, Twitter, and Google Reader. The goal was to take advantage of web apps that already to a great job at aiding in the generation of specific content to work for this site. This is nothing new – many people are “lifestreaming” nowadays – it just seemed to make sense as the next step for this site.

Tiered Content

One of the inherent problems I have found with many of the lifestream implementations I have found is that it treats all content equally when I find that to be terribly problematic. I am trying out the idea of tiered content – long format (blog articles), medium format (Tumblr, Vimeo, Flickr) and short format (Twitter, Delicious and Google Reader). The default feed contains only long format and medium format posts so as to not post-spam people to death. However, you can subscribe to feeds containing just short format posts, medium format posts or long format posts. I am still working out how each tier should be structured to fit its format – that will likely be a continual work in progress until the site is completely finished.

Focus on Quality and Quantity

With the various formats of content, I hope to impose a greater focus on the strengths and weaknesses of different types of content. I want my short form content to come in regular intervals while being relatively informative/entertaining while leaving long form content for in-depth and well prepared content. The problem with the old blog is that I tried to fit short, medium and long format content into a one-size-fits all blog post and it just did not work. Now I can keep small, isolated thoughts outside of full articles while still being able to publish thoughts as they come. The intention for this is that posts will be much more frequent while not infringing upon the quality of the most important content on the site.

A Broader Scope

One thing this new blog is going to do is branch out from the normal content that I normally would publish. While many blog “experts” advise individual bloggers to specialize on a specific subject, that is just not how my mind works. There will definitely be posts on Flash and code examples (more on that below), but there will also be posts on many other subjects completely outside of the web design/development umbrella. Some may like this, others may not.

An Entirely Open Source Project

Perhaps the biggest piece of this project is that this entire project (and by entire, I mean entire) will be open source. Obviously, the WordPress theme I made will be offered up. The plugins made from scratch and pre-existing ones that I hacked/altered for this site will be made available as well. In addition, my entire AS3 library that I have been meaning to release for well over a year now (all 150+ classes and counting…) will be made available. All custom icons/graphics will be offered up in source format (Illustrator or Fireworks) and I am also hoping to wrap up all the Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks files of the initial grid design and site layout. Everything I can possibly offer up, I am going to. This kind of thing does not happen overnight however and while the site is launch-able, the code is not ready to be offered up. The plan is that the day the site hits version 1.0, the code will be offered up along side it.

As Open As (Safely) Possible

I also hope to continue to open up as much information as I can within reasonable limits. All traffic numbers are currently public and I will continue to make any worthwhile information open and transparent. I doubt any of this will be interesting, but it is more of a gesture than anything.

Ultimately, a Work In Progress

In all honesty, the site is still a significant mess. Trying to move 2.5 years worth of posts that were published (ahem) haphazardly has been a chore to say the least. Changes will be made, improvements will come. Most pages are simply shells of what they will eventually be. I wanted to make the information available and then pretty it up later. The site definitely is in flux – however, this time there is some organization behind it. There are portions of the site in particular that I am currently unhappy with, I may spend an article or two discussing them.

Next Steps

The first step is to get some good posts out the door as quickly as is feasible. I cannot remember the last worthwhile article I have written and that frankly saddens me. The second step is to get out of alpha as quickly as possible. There are some much needed features that have to be added and some bugs that need to be fixed. Obviously, getting to a 1.0 so I can offer up all this code is important, but it is going to be a while before I get there.

Thanks To

Alex Scammon, Jon Christopher, Kellie Okai, Dave Johnson and Ryan Teuscher. I know I’m missing some names here – my apologies.