Stupid Sucks!

Today I saw a little post by Brian Cray “Target IE6 and IE7 with only 1 extra character in your CSS” which bugged me a little so I thought I’d post my thoughts. If you haven’t read his blog post, go check it out real quick.

Brian and I (as well as most of the rest of the web world) use the classic “*selector” and “_selector” hacks for IE6 and 7 (as shown in Brian’s post). This is fine and dandy except that Brian includes these hacks with the rest of the non-hacked CSS which I don’t agree with.

Brian argues that by including the hacks with the rest of the CSS it minimizes HTTP requests, saves time (and thus your client’s money), users’ bandwidth, etc. This is where I think Brian has gone wrong and I argue the opposite. read more…

I wrote this article for the ThemeForest.net Blog

On a daily basis I view all sorts of websites and all kinds of designs. One thing in common with successful templates on ThemeForest or with websites around the web is strong visual hierarchy. Often times I see templates that have a great concept going but has poor visual hierarchy. I’ll cover what visual hierarchy is and some great examples in this article.

Continue reading at http://blog.themeforest.net/tutorials/visual-hierarchy-in-web-design/

Occasionally I’ll be asked where the idea for “StupidSucks” came from. This is actually a pretty funny question to me because of the history of the name. Over the last year or so it has evolved into something quite different from the original idea.

Where did I get the idea? Winco. If you’re not familiar with Winco, it’s just a large scale grocery store similar to but smaller than Costco. I hate shopping at Winco because of the incredibly stupid people I encounter every time. read more…

An article I had written for the ThemeForest.net blog was published today (”Using AWS S3 to Power Your Digital World“) and one of the comments to the article mentioned Mosso’s Cloud Files. I had heard of Cloud Files before but I couldn’t remember if I had really looked into it. Due to the comment I thought it would be a good idea to take a look at Cloud Files and give a quick comparison.

There are a few arguments as to why you should use Cloud Files instead of Amazon’s CloudFront + S3 and Mosso even wrote a blog post with 10 reasons why Cloud Files provides a better experience than CloudFront + S3. They have some really good points but from my perspective it comes down to two things, price and performance. So after taking a look at Cloud Files I’ve come up with a quick comparison.

read more…

I wrote this article for ThemeForest.net

As a designer, web developer and techie-geek I need a versatile and robust data storage solution that I can afford but also use without learning some new language. So far, I’ve only found one service that can handle the large majority of my needs. This article covers how I use the Amazon Web Services Simple Storage Service (AWS S3) to meet most of my needs.

Continue reading at http://blog.themeforest.net/general/using-aws-s3-to-power-your-digital-world/

I personally believe it’s important to take a step back occasionally and take a look at what you’ve done with the last few years of your life and if you’re headed in the right direction. Today I was looking back at my experiences starting out in the freelance world and decided to look back a bit farther and evaluate.

Overall, I am very happy with my accomplishments over the last few years and I feel like I’m really heading in the right direction. It’s been a rocky road and I’ve had to work incredibly hard to achieve some of this but it’s been worth every tear and drop of sweat.

In the last 4 years (from age 19-22) this is what I’ve done. read more…