Alright so what do all those geeks out there want?

I’ve rounded up a sweet list of the things I have been hearing around the office… and around the web.

For the Apple Geek: If they don’t already have one, I’d say the iPhone or the new Touch would be right down their alley..

For the Designer Geek: What’s says designer geek more than a documentary about type!? Buy them the Helvetica DVD set, or if they already have that, maybe some other designer swag from Veer.

For the Gamer Geek: I’d recommend picking up one of the three most talked about games of the year, Halo 3, Orange Box or BioShock. If you want to go big time, pick them up a Wii or an XBox 360, which ever one they don’t have already.

For the Dirty Geek: Know that geek who is so busy gaming or building applications he has no time to clean? Check out the Scooba from the iRobot, the same people who make the roomba vaccum robot.

For the Green, Birkenstock-Wearing, Social Cause Geek: One Laptop per Child XO Laptop is a GREAT gift for this geek, not only do they get a nifty laptop, but a child in need gets one as well.

Come on over to Inza Coffee House tomorrow night to join me and the crew of Refresh Phoenix as we discuss Blueprint CSS.

Blueprint is a CSS framework by Olav Bjorkoy, which “aims to cut down on your CSS development time.” Matt Heidemann & Matt Gist from Integrum Technologies will talk about their recent work with Blueprint. They’ll show examples of the framework and a project they recently used it with.

See ya there!

There are sometimes when I truly wonder if designers and developers have it out for me.

Take for instance, the ASP .Net 2.0 login control. The designer wants it to look one way, however the .Net login control call only gives you so many options for style and layout. What is a front end architect to do?!

Thankfully, I’ve been blessed with the knowledge of the view as template option in Visual Studio 2005. The “view as template” option allows you to expand the normal login control code to a more complete view including the table that incapslates all the labels and text boxes.

To get to this magic option, do the following:

1. open the page with the login control you want to expand
2. view the page in design view
3. select the little black arrow to the right side of the control on the page
4. select ‘view as template’ in the drop down
5. switch back to the code view and skin to your hearts desire

Recently we’ve completed four sites for Civigroup Companies. Within those sites you’ll notice several instances of sIFR (flash replacement text) inline with content. This is no easy task for sIFR text.

While trying to accomplish this feat of magic, I spent quite a bit of time researching different aspects of sIFR and how it works with CSS to understand how to make this work properly and of course, all while being cross browser compliant! So, in order to perhaps save someone else the time and hassle of trying to figure out the magic equation, I figured I’d share my experience.

Step 1: set the sIFR class on a span tag where you want the text to be.

<span class="h1inline" style="width: 325px;">Heritage. Commitment. Vision.</span>


Notice the width style attribute, this is required to make sure safari does not include extra space behind the span and before the rest of the copy.

Step 2: set the attributes in the sIFR-screen.css sheet to make it an inline block element along with the rest of your styles.

height: 25px;
display: inline-block;
overflow: hidden;

Notice the display: inline-block; this is also a safari required attribute.

Step 3: Tune height if necessary in the sifr-config.js

tuneHeight: '-5'

This will help if you plan no not only having your sIFR text inline, but also a link. I was having difficulties with the underline of the hover state being cut off by the flash doc.

 And viola you have sIFR text inline!

I’m proud to announce that Terralever launched two new sites into the world wide web this week. We have just finished production on a redesign and large back-end content management system for Cities West Publishing sites, Phoenix Home and Garden and Phoenix Magazine.

I am really proud to have been part of this success. The website may seem large and elaborate, but with the use of themes, masterpages, and dynamic content the site itself is about 20 pages in total. This was the first website in which we were really able to experiment with large scale theme usage and I learned quite a bit about how to make the front end flexible enough to reskin.

Making sure css naming conventions were simple enough to reuse through out the process was a key piece of the puzzle. I used the content to determine the class and id naming instead of color or position since both of these could change dramatically. This was not only important to switch from theme to theme within the sections of the site, but also we chose to reuse quite a bit of code from one site to the next to save cost for our client. Thus, the reasoning in similar layout from one site to the other.

Making sure each piece of content knew what month and what section it appeared in was also a large undertaking in this process, thankfully our wonderful back end development team did an amazing job of coordinating how the data manipulated the themes and sections with in the site.

In addition to the amazing design and development that went on to create the front end look and feel, there was an amazing effort on the back end administration system. Back behind all that wonderful content is an editorial staff that needs to input it in every month in a quick efficient manner! To help them with this, Terralever created an amazing custom content management system that allows the editorial staff to select which issue an article appears, what section, enter in the content and add supplemental photos to each story.

For each story the editorial staff has full access to create and layout articles however they please. They can add as many photos, call outs, etc to make each layout custom to the story it holds. To help them with this process, we created five templates for them to start with, allowing them to enter content quickly and then make the necessary additions with more photos, more call outs, etc.

The administration also gives the staff full access for the featured flash piece on the homepage, to create and edit user polls, add events, showcase photos in galleries and have users sign up for news and emails.

While these sites were a big project and some nights were spent eating at my desk instead of in front of the TV, it’s always worth it in the end. To go to a live URL and see something you’ve invested so much and learned from is amazing.  These sites are definitely two projects I’m proud to have been a part of. I hope you enjoy using them as much as I enjoyed building them.