Developing websites — structure, content, and design

August 2nd, 2008

How do you plan a website?

I design and maintain web sites for a living, and the one thing that I see most often is too much of a focus on the graphic design of a site, or the “look and feel” and not enough on the idea of interaction with the site.

Design on the web is a very different beast from designing a print brochure, or a newsletter, or a trade show booth. I’ve spent my career doing all of these, and would like to share a bit of my insight into an effective approach to successful website planning and implementation. read more

Tags: content, creation, design, planning, presentation, structure, web, webdev, websites

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 2nd, 2008 at 9:34 pm and is filed under Articles, personal, review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Jonathan Coulton played the Lula Lounge in Toronto!

July 10th, 2008

Who is Jonathan Coulton, and why should you care?

Well, if you’re a geek, or a geek in training, you’ll appreciate almost every one of this man’s lyrics. I like to think of it as witty music for adults (or those that are in an adult frame of mind). Almost three years ago, he quit his job as a computer programmer to pursue music full-time. He started a project called “Thing-a-Week,” a regimented approach to his creative side, and one that would cement a great connection to his fans. The concept was simple, but required dedication to pull off. Every week, he would release something. Anything. Most of it was cool stuff. Some of it was übercool. Much of it was about monkeys, and other everyday topics. He’s also the man behind the song at the end of the Valve game, Portal, but you have to play it through to fully appreciate the lyrics in that one.

His recordings, while good, don’t come close to the experience at a live show. I had the privilege of attending (and helping out a bit) at his first show in Canada, and it was a truly fun and amazing experience.

Read about the show…

Tags: Code Monkey, culture, Jonathan Coulton, live show, Lula Lounge, music

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 4:32 pm and is filed under Articles, review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

System requirements for being a Geek? Get excited about Diablo III

June 28th, 2008

There are a few defining characteristics for geeks, many of which can be hotly debated. Using a custom version of Linux as your day-to-day operating system, knowing how to code in the assembly language of an obscure piece of hardware that doesn’t even get used anymore, scolding your friends for not having strict doctypes on their webpages about cats they own.

There’s another sort of geek, and that’s the one that gets chills when he or she sees an opening cinematic crafted by the team at Blizzard.

Diablo III has been announced…

Tags: Blizzard, culture, Diablo, Diablo 3, Diablo II, Diablo III, games, gaming

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 28th, 2008 at 11:55 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

What’s an RSS Feed?

June 23rd, 2008

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS allows you to grab up-to-date data feeds in your favourite reader/aggregator, or even display the feeds on another website.

Both Geeks in Training and my blog have all posts and users’ comments available in Wordpress feeds. For example, if you found a post on here that really interested you and it was very active, you could subscribe to the comment feed and all of the data would be delivered to your reader.

There are stand-alone readers, web-based readers, and most browsers have built in readers too. If you are interested in getting started but don’t know where to begin, I would recommend trying out Google’s reader. This is a web-based reader that you can access from anywhere. Some people also download feeds to their Blackberry or smart phone so they can read them on the way to work.

Find out more about RSS on Wikipedia.

Click the subscribe link on any page in this site to subscribe to Geeks in Training, or subscribe to the comment feed at the bottom of any individual article.

Thanks to FastIcon, for the icon.

Tags: ianhoar.com, RSS

This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Yes, they have parties for browsers… when your browser is Firefox 3

June 18th, 2008

Or, if you have a great fanbase of cool, dedicated people.

If you haven’t already, you should download Firefox 3. It’s a great browser, and Firefox has long been the darling of the Open Source community. I’ll have an article detailing exactly why, but this is just a quick report on the great evening I had.

I was at the launch of Firefox 3 last night, and was pleasantly surprised at the number of people there at 6pm. A couple of hours later, with the beer and cheer freely flowing, the numbers of partiers was over a hundred, and the downloads were in the millions.

Read about the rest of the evening…

Tags: browsers, Firefox 3, Free as in beer, mozilla, party, Toronto

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 9:47 am and is filed under Articles, personal, review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

How to learn and find things on the internet

June 3rd, 2008

Everybody on the web knows more than I do.

Let that one slosh around for a bit. It’s a good thing.

Little Johnny down the road might not know more, but taken as a whole, the entire posting population of the internet collectively has something new for you to learn.

The trick is to find the bits that you need, amidst all the noise.

Read on to see how you find those bits…

Tags: Google, howto, internet searching, learn, wikipedia

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Set up your own domain : Part 1

June 3rd, 2008

Ah, the true sign of a geek — someone with his or her own domain. Nothing quite says, “I roll my own” like a custom email address and URL.

Other than for bragging rights, is there any good reason to have your own domain? Can you set up the email and hosting stuff yourself? Are there low- or no-cost alternatives?

Find the answers inside…

Tags: domains, howto

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Welcome to Geeks in Training

May 27th, 2008

(or “who is this site for?”)

Let’s face it, we’re all geeks when it comes to something. Almost obsessive, willing to stay up late to figure out why something works (or doesn’t), we’re the ones who have a passion for something – anything. We’re the ones who ask questions, are eager and passionate to learn and broaden our horizons.

There are lots of beginner how-to sites out there on any number of subjects. But you can follow step-by-step instructions on your own.
So what is GeeksInTraining.com?

Tags: about, geeksintraining

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 8:01 pm and is filed under Articles, personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.