Blackstone Media Blog

Now that I’ve been here at Blackstone for a few weeks now, it’s probably about time I posted something to this blog. They haven’t added my name to the list at the top there yet though, hmm… Anyway, here it is, my first post. Enjoy!

A little bit about myself:

I’m married, in my early-30s, a military brat, and have a 4 1/2 year old boy and a 3 year old girl. My wife and I are expecting our second boy in January 2009. My wife is British, and we’ve just returned from living in the United Kingdom for the last 5 years. We’ve been living in Louisville since June. I started at Blackstone at the beginning of October.

Louisville is a great city; It’s not too big, not too small, and there’s a LOT to do around here. My family just went to the Louisville Zoo’s big Halloween party; It is my kids’ first “real” Halloween (the holiday just isn’t that big in the UK…), and they absolutely loved it! Louisville’s also got a ton of cool little hole-in-the-wall clubs, cafés, shops, and all kinds of bigger, touristy places to visit here. With all the museums, parks, theaters, and other places we’ve yet to discover, it looks like there’s here plenty to keep us busy.

Now that my voluntary community service for the Louisville Metro Board of Tourism is over…

Have you heard of Big Huge Labs?

Nearly 50 awesome web-based tools for designers, writers, and flickr lovers. I can’t say enough good things about this site.

Some of my favorite fun tools are the Hockneyizer and Lolcats, but there are some really useful tools to get serious work done too. For example, the Palette Generator and Writer are both indispensable.

If you haven’t visited the site, you really ought to check them out.

And, just for fun, here’s a map I just made using Map Maker.

Places I’ve Been

Make yours @ BigHugeLabs.com

“Cuil” - an interesting new search engine born July 28th, 2008 claims to have a larger index than any other search engine (three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft). Developed by former Google employees, Anna Patterson (the architect of Google’s large search index TeraGoogle, and the technical lead for one of the two Web ranking groups at Google), Russell Power and Louis Monier, as well as IBM’s Tom Costello.

It’s site crawler Twiceler is strategically common (like Google’s) allowing for site submission and takes use of your robots.txt for indexing.

Check it out, it’s design is pretty cool.

http://www.cuil.com/

For any of you developers out there that stick to the rigid web standard coding practices know the hassles that arise when conforming to the Strict Doctype. A new discussion, that may not be that new to some of you, is misvalidating pages due to the “target=”_blank” declaration when trying to force a pop-up window.

I realized that is age old command is not supported in the Strict Doctype and while searching for a solution, I ran into an ethical discussion on how this feature disrupts the expectations and familiarities of web users pertaining to usability.

So the conclusion is, most people don’t like pop-up windows. Why do you say? Because people are used to clicking on a link and using the back buttons. It actually, it disrupts the average user by having to close out the new window and reopen the previous window to head back where he started when he could of just clicked the back button.

http://csscreator.com/node/30016

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/popuplinks/