Seattle.BloggersPub

In our round-up of the Bicycle Master Plan post, we quickly linked to an old DJC op/ed about why Copenhagen was so successful in getting such high ridership numbers on bicycles. There are some amazing facts in that article. 32% of Copenhagen’s re…

I would point every techno-phile who likes these here weblogs over to Friends of Seattle’s new blog.
One hot recent post, was an actual design discussion about how, pardon les french, crappy many of our townhouse projects look in the city. No wonder p…

Hometown sustainability hero, Alex Steffen who writes for WorldChanging.com writes a fascinating post about density today, comparing Seatttle, our fair Emerald City, with London (with stops in Vancouver along the way).
I have to say, I agree with him…

Arriving in the old email box this morning, comes a press release from the Urban Forest Stakeholders, a group of citizens concerned about the health and preservation of Seattle’s urban forest. They raise a number of great points in their press release …

So after months of hand-wringing, tinkering, a few failed designs, some serious messing around with CMSs and more?I?ve launched my new site. It?s been up for a few weeks now and I?ve been slowly knocking out bugs and refining things, and while it?s not 100% there I think it?s far enough along that I can relax a bit. It?s been really crazy for me the last month or so (more on that later) and I just haven?t had the time I?d have liked for this.

But, anyway, here it is. I hope you like it. For the curious, I?ll tell you a bit about how I got to what you?re seeing now.

A new design

For those who?ve been following along, you can read about the design that almost was, if your curious what happened to my original ideas. The short story is that it wasn?t working and I just plain got sick of it.

What you see here is a direct result of me doing lots of creative exploration over the last month or two. Reading The Creative License really got my creativity going. I?d been sketching, taking photos and mocking up all sorts of ideas in photoshop. The result is this.

I wanted something more expressive, yet at the same time more usable than what I was working on before. I think I?m on the right track and were it not for technical hurdles (more on that in a second, I?ve realized that a programmer I?m not) I think I might be all the way there. The initial concept and most of what?s here now was done in a single afternoon of Photoshop, working with some rough layout sketches, some drawings of the houses, building and skylines out my window and around Seattle as inspiration. Oh and this photo, which made it pretty solidly into the design.

The colors were taken and repurposed from my old design. I was pretty happy with them, thought they were different and with the addition of the darker red, I thought I had something fun and unique going there. In any case, I really like ?em.

There really isn?t much more to say. This design was done in a much less scientific and more expressionistic manner than how I usually work and I like how it turned out. I guess I should do that more often!

Django and Expression Engine

Some of you might be wondering about the CMS situation. Here?s the scoop, short and sweet:

I was looking at Django but quickly realized I didn?t have the time to devote to learning it and building my own CMS. I was very impressed with it and will likely look at it again sometime. I decided to give Expression Engine a try. I wanted to move away from Movable Type (although, to be honest, that might have been a bad call) and Expression Engine seemed like a good fit. For the most part I like it, it?s similar in lots of ways to MT and in someways it?s better. My only regret is that I know how to hack and get around MT and learning the quirks of EE, while fairly easy and straightforward, has never-the-less been a challenge at times.

Some day I hope to have a CMS that will allow me to just design and not worry about the rest. I guess I?ll need to hire a developer for that. Next time.

Here?s to the new!

So, there you have it. I hope you enjoy the new design and all the new content I plan on pumping through it! (Fingers crossed!) Please bear with me as I sort out the details and if you?ve got any advice, criticisms or kudos, feel free to comment or shoot me an e-mail.

So after months of hand-wringing, tinkering, a few failed designs, some serious messing around with CMSs and more?I?ve launched my new site. It?s been up for a few weeks now and I?ve been slowly knocking out bugs and refining things, and while it?s not 100% there I think it?s far enough along that I can relax a bit. It?s been really crazy for me the last month or so (more on that later) and I just haven?t had the time I?d have liked for this.

But, anyway, here it is. I hope you like it. For the curious, I?ll tell you a bit about how I got to what you?re seeing now.

We’re trying to have some fun before summer ends. We’ll be posting sporadically until Tuesday, September 5th. We need time to properly store our white shoes until next year….

I just noticed that Mike Melanson is on Techmeme for his recent post about the status of the alpha/beta for Flash Player 9 for Linux. It’s really good to see more Adobe bloggers on Techmeme - congrats Mike!

Hey everybody! I’ve got a new site and I’ll be blogging over there from now on. Come on over! Update you bookmarks! Grab the new feed! Site: dkeithrobinson.com Feed: http://www.dkeithrobinson.com/rss_2.0/…

Can you put a value on Central park? Do we want one for Seattle? Where could we put it? I think the idea of investing in new streets is passe, supporting an infrasturure of the past versus the future. It…