Power & Light: Category Art + Design

Best interview ever!

Aiden Bordner — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 20:40:25 -0800

Wow, geeze. I had an amazing day. After a fun, but lackluster meeting with the nice folks at Gershoni via iChat, I figured the day was pretty well blown, so I might as well send out a couple more applications.

What has resulted has me dancing in the snow kissing old ladies and throwing babies in the air.

I don’t want to say much, because a) the horse hasn’t arrived, so we don’t need the cart; and b) they’re probably reading this (Hi, guys!).

That said, let’s just say I may soon be on a path for World Domination.

I’ll be cackling maniacally. (Oh, and don’t try to get ahold of me Tuesday or Wednesday… I’ll be in The Bay!)

Typo: The end is nigh // Job // Plagiarism // GM4.0

Aiden Bordner — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 22:50:00 -0800

Typo: The end is nigh

Not for Typo on a whole, mind you. Just here.

I’m preparing the first sketches on the long-overdue development of my personal site and one of the major components is going to be a completely overhauled blog presentation. And, when that happens, I’ll be switching to Mephisto due to the unnecessary weight of Typo and it’s sluggishness on this shared server.

The new system will employ much AJAX and DHTML goodness. Don’t worry: not a bunch of useless crap. I’m working on the wireframes now for a novel way to look at a blog. Admittedly, there’s not a lot you can do with a blog, but I’m asking questions of myself as to how people really interact with blogs, the differences between posts like this, which are dated and time-specific, and posts for longevity. The result is I think that there should be more user control over what is on the screen at any time, and fortunately JavaScript, CSS and the DOM will let me do that to some extent (at least I hope).

I’ll be using the moo.fx animation framework due to it’s “superlightweight ultratiny” footprint of 3kb, as well as prototype.js. Best of all, I’ll be releasing the finished product for everyone under Creative Commons, so feel free to port it to Typo and Wordpress and the like. I’ll probably break out any custom Flikr or other modules as well.

Should be done sometime between now and the end of time. Stay tuned.

Job

I need a job. Full time. The fuller the better. The best looking opportunity I’ve seen in some time just slipped away due to the cruel winds of fate.

I’m tired of freelancing (mostly because if I was as bad at making websites as I am at selling them I’d be out of business). I’m willing to relocate. Preferably to San Francisco or Seattle. Hire me! ... current TV, this means you. :)

Plagiarism

Although many of you may know this, Karthik Kastury of 33rockers.com is a plagiarist, both of the written word and design. His site is ripped off from the Mephisto theme without credit and described as “heavily modified” (it is not), and he has ripped off – verbatim – several blog posts across the internet. I almost expect to see my seminal blog hit “How to get Typo 4.0 running on Dreamhost” on his blog soon.

For more information, see the very detailed expose on Kirk Montgomery’s excellent MaxPower.

Additional note: He’s also a damn liar. Note his Nov. 30 post about how he’s selling the site because of personal reasons. How about because the DMCA complaints cost him his Google AdSense. Thief!

GravityMusic 4.0 Continues…

For those who just love sneak peaks… here’s one.

Simple is my business, and business is good. Backend dev starts tomorrow in Rails. We’re only a week or so away from first launch. Hope it goes well!

That’s all she wrote for this night. See you all again soon!

Gravitymusic.com 4.0

Aiden Bordner — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 14:26:00 -0800

First of all, allow me to make a brief announcement regarding my seemingly permanent absence from the blogosphere: I’ve been really crazy busy and had no internet connection for a bit in Indianapolis, but now I am back.

Without further ado, the news at hand:

gravitymusic.com is getting it’s third facelift! The site that is currently up is some of my oldest work that I still mention (circa 2002) and it’s soon to be gone making way for a new Ruby on Rails powered web presence.

Gone will be:

• Flash-based MP3 player that intermittently decides not to work on XP
• Tables (eek!)
• I-Frames (EEGADS!)

New will be:

• Ruby on Rails (oooh!)
• DHTML and AJAX [via prototype and moo.fx] in news and music display (oooh la la!)
• “Web 2.0”-ie graphic shite, like reflections and starburst badges and a shitload of gradients (... em, TIRED?... yeah ok, but it looks hot.)

Just see for yourself! (Warning: Spoiler alert.)

(What’s this? News…?)

(Hmm… How “Web 2.0” (lol))

(Hmm, Quicktime? Well That should be reliable… is that a three-column navigation like the OS X finder I see?)

Tune in in a couple of weeks to find out. ;)

IconFactory Under Redesign

Aiden Bordner — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 15:48:00 -0700

IconFactory, purveyors of amazing pixel art (really the best in the business in my opinion) have taken their site down, oddly enough, for six days awaiting the launch of a completely new website.

To help market this relaunch, they have been running an extremely cool six-segment daily-updated pixel film in which the Sims-like icon workers are visited by a very angry W3C inspector (seen above complaining about undepricated break tags; very cute :) and then proceed to start renovating the place to comply.

This is the best kind of web promotion. Clever, insider, extremely high quality, viral as hell. This rocks.

See it from the beginning here. (Requires Quicktime)