Developing websites — structure, content, and design
August 2nd, 2008 by Michael Zimmermann

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 by Michael Zimmermann

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.

Yes, they have parties for browsers… when your browser is Firefox 3
June 18th, 2008 by Michael Zimmermann

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.