#reboot

So What’s New In May?

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Hey, hey, hey. May 1st has come and gone and those who have promised them­selves to Reboot were either suc­cess­ful, or behind. One of the sites I’m curi­ously await­ing to check out is Bryan Veloso’s new ren­di­tion of Aval­on­Star.

So what the heck am I doing this early in the morn­ing? I can’t damn sleep, and have been try­ing to fig­ure out how to orga­nize my shiznit a bit bet­ter. I have too much stuff going on (as usual), and need to com­plete tasks I have set in my to-do list. But it seems that that list just keeps get­ting big­ger and wider (in terms of those URL-bookmarks).

Any­ways, just wanted to catch-up with this writing-thingy-majig. Maybe some­one out there can help orga­nize things with some cool advise and/or refer­ral gift =)

Speak­ing of which, here’s some cool things that have inter­ested me in the past cou­ple of days:

  • Mac­Book Pro — yeah, I’m a “switch-hitter” now
  • Text­Mate Basic Tuto­ri­als — this will prob­a­bly change my devel­op­ment work­flow for work and on-the-side
  • Com­pil­ing new “points of inspi­ra­tion” from the Reboot-ed sites, new and old
  • … and the list goes on—but it seems that I should be catch­ing some Zs now as I hear some people’s alarm clock going off; at least I think I’m hear­ing it

From my mind to yours, keep learning.

CSS Reboot Spring 2006 Slowly But Surely

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Despite the slow start and server issues that Adam had to deal with over at CSSReboot.com, the Spring 2006 CSS Reboot has finally com­menced! Things are finally look­ing on the up-and-up with about 1470 Reboot­ers push­ing the but­ton to show the world their pride and joy. There’s actu­ally 1471, but I won’t be par­tic­i­pat­ing this time due to other projects that took most of the time this past month. There’s always Fall, not to men­tion, being a spec­ta­tor is fun by itself. It’s pretty much infor­ma­tion over­load with all the lat­est and new tech­niques being show­cased. Not to men­tion, it great inspi­ra­tion for those of us need­ing it once and a while.

Any­ways, there a lot of sites to con­sume. Lots and lots of eye candy, and food for thought. Sorry, I’m a bit exd. If you want to know how this feels, it’s like being the first-in-line for the new Jor­dan’s.

Con­tinue reading →

Year of the Dog

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The Year of the Dog seems to pro­vide a big­ger bark. It also pro­vides new oppor­tu­ni­ties to learn new thing http://www.37signals.com/ buy­ing spree of Web 2.0 app-groups, I just won­der when and if they’ll ever re-align their own site to Web 2.0 stan­dards. One can wish but all can be sur­prised. I guess that’s what makes Tech­nol­ogy so interesting—anything is possible.

PS. There’s sup­pose to be a rumored launch of Camp­fire some­time this week by the great folks of 37signals.

Reboot Mentions

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Day 4 of the Fall ’05 Reboot just brought more peo­ple acti­vat­ing their sites for every­one to won­der around and see. Mind you that these were freshly designed. Some are still lack­ing con­tent but structure-wise, its there. A hand­ful just have great inno­va­tion. Some seemed to bring in new tech­niques, as well as bring back old ones (i.e. ani­mated GIFs). Any­ways, there are so many sites to see, but here’s a cou­ple that I really like so far:

  • tanutama.com (Albert Tanu­tama) — reminds me of the old ALA lay­out. I liked the way he has that quote up-top the header area. Its just there for every­one to see and agree.
  • andionet (Andreas Ort­ner) — I like the way he got the acces­si­bil­ity fea­ture on there. Just a great exam­ple of how it’s used to serve the design. BTW, I like his Reboot Awards’ categories
  • Escape Crate (Anthony Casey) — talk about points of inspi­ra­tion. Check out how he came up with his Reboot’s design at an arti­cle he enti­tle, The Reboot Story.
  • viv­i­fied (Bas­ti­aan Ter­horst) — a well done blog­fo­lio. What else can I say but grids, grids and more grids. He totally just got ‘em the way they’re sup­pose to be used. Also, another thing to check­out would be the way he layed out the com­ments sec­tion, it just reminds me of a resume layout.
  • Best Plots — now, I don’t know if this was just sub­mit­ted as a mar­ket­ing thing but I like the way it dis­sem­i­nates infor­ma­tion in an eye-pleasing way (at least for a busi­ness site).
  • Avalon Star (Bryan Veloso) — what can I say? Its deli­cious. This one prob­a­bly engulfed lots of design hours. Check out the details. I’m just a bit con­fused about the arti­cles on the FP. But look­ing at it fur­ther, I guess the bottom-right box is a ran­dom past arti­cle. I just wished I coulda known this in the begin­ning rather than try­ing to fig­ure things out as a new vis­i­tor. Any­ways, check out his fea­turettes. Inter­est­ing reads.
  • core­dreams stu­dio — diag­o­nals, glass effect, dark and neon green scheme… “web­de­sign is an art” indeed. Great use of CSS on the graph­ic­sme lay­out and thumb­nails. I like the sub­tle use of the page curls, with the excep­tion of the FP… just got a bit happy there =)
  • ash­web­stu­dio (Derek Ashauer) — nice design-studio web­site. Also, a great exam­ple of a “Look Ma, No Tables!” design
  • Hiten Patel — sim­ple port­fo­lio site-layout. Good stuff and too the point.
  • Low End The­ory (Kristin Pish­dadi) — this one ain’t for those low-res mon­i­tors. She max­i­mized it all baby! Nice pho­tos. I like the way that she does a cus­tom header-image per arti­cle as well. That must take a lot of time, its so big… i.e. 650x135 500px-wide by some­thing. Mines only 366x122 usu­ally. Mean­while, great orga­ni­za­tion of con­tent. I just wished the num­ber of com­ments had text next to it. It seems to keep dis­ap­pear­ing in Fire­fox, and not even there on IE. Also, I wish she was a lit­tle more clear on the title of her site, or maybe its just me. She has “wiphey” on the page, then “Low End The­ory” as the title. Either way, check her blog and flickr gallery inte­gra­tion.
  • Lealea Design (Lea Alcan­tara) — wow. One of ones I really, really liked. Eye­candy. Kno’mean? Oh yah, its pink—but a cool use of pink. Nice color scheme—very vibrant, and catches your atten­tion right away. That’s good, it got me look­ing right away. Not only that, check out the way she wrote the code as well. Clean all around. Great stuff.
  • Matt Brett — another great Reboot. Another site that stood out for me, and his heav­ily favored on my list. Love the grunge. Even though it was punk­ish, he orga­nized it very well. Very well planned, designed and exe­cuted. And it shows. Great job Matt!
  • 45royale (Matt Downey) — just clean and easy on the eyes. Nice color scheme. Only thing I noticed when click­ing on the pro­file sec­tion, it seems that the back­ground of the con­tent area is a bit, tad late.
  • ribic.org (Mitja Ribic) — unusual lay­out but it seems to work with color scheme and the use of ani­mated GIFs. I com­mend his use of that old skool fea­ture. It just makes his design very inter­est­ing when you first view it IMHO. I just wish that he wouldn’t have use pop­ups to dis­play his works. Then again, his con­tent area seems a bit small for them.
  • Ron­nieSan (Ron­nie Gar­cia) — love the way he has that tab on top of his image-header. I like the lay­out dis­plays con­tent effi­ciently. Sim­ple and clean. Only iffy on the logo. The “stamp” just doesn’t do his site jus­tice the way it is. Then again, maybe its just me, but I just think he hasn’t showed it to us yet. Any­ways, a very nice Reboot.
  • Per­sonal Devel­op­ment (Trevor Delam­orandiere) — “busi­ness, life, web stan­dards.” Not nec­es­sar­ily in that order but its just true when you are in “this” indus­try today. I like the color scheme and the sim­ple two-column lay­out of his con­tent. Noth­ing flashy, just sim­ple and gets his con­tent out there right away.

Mean­while, there were some uni­form fea­tures that most sites rebooted with. I saw a lot of use of gra­vatars for their com­ments sec­tion. A hand­ful used SIFR but just the right amount of it. A good amount of the sites listed above used the live-preview func­tion encoun­tered when one posts a com­ment. And did I men­tion, the cleanly coded XHTML and CSS?

Well, there it is, just a cou­ple of the ones that led the pack. For me, its back to surf­ing for more stand­outs. I just wished that there was a bet­ter way to keep track of which sites I have vis­ited, rated, etc. It seems that its by cookie when you’re logged in the css­re­boot sys­tem, and most of the sites I rated were stored on my other PC. Man oh man, I just have to note it down and mark it on the other PC later on again. Any­ways, should be good times. I wish to add more to these at a later date. Here’s to hoping.

Rebooted

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Rebooted November 1st 2005

Let it be known that its All Saints Day today. That and I have finally and offi­cially rebooted this blog to another life. Even though there are still some sub-pages being cranked out later down the week, it should be solid enough to get y’all through =)

Any­ways, while my cre­ative juices might be some­what flat these past cou­ple of weeks (due to end­less hours of play­ing sports, and keep­ing up w/ fan­tasy foot­ball leagues), it should start flow­ing… no, gush­ing out again.

Why is this? Because of a thing that started via a blog post when them flash-heads had too much fun. CSS Reboot, mmm mmm… taste the fresh­ness. It’s some­thing new for the web-standards com­mu­nity to look for­ward to. Again, I hope you like it. I fooled around with a dif­fer­ent approach to the user-experience in con­trast to my old blog designs. You’ll know it when you see it. Also, if you encounter any bugs or any­thing of that sort, please do holler—I’m always open to mak­ing things better.

Mean­while, thanks to the peo­ple who visit and fre­quent the site. Not to men­tion, spe­cial salu­ta­tion and recog­ni­tion goes out to Ben­jam­i­nAdam for head­ing the CSS Reboot stam­pede. I hope you spend less time orga­niz­ing those reboot thumb­nails, and more time sleep­ing and then enjoy­ing the cre­ativ­ity of the com­mu­nity you helped awaken.

Regards and gra­cias mi ami­gos,
Sher­win Techico

PS. This is just a memo: “the things we think and do not say” are just the ones that we need to express and let out to the world. This is my train of thought. I hope you hop on it and enjoy the ride.