SNEAKY.ME » web

San Diego Web Design

Jason — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 20:04:24 +0000

Square Orange, LLC located in San Diego, CA offers affordable web design and web development rates and is currently offering 20% off to all new clients! They do great work and have designed this blog and many other websites for us in the past. If you’re in need of website design or website development for you or your business in or around San Diego, CA give Square Orange, LLC a call. You won’t be disappointed…

Stuff White People Like Posters

Jason — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 19:51:52 +0000

Stuff White People Like is a hilarious website dedicated to, well, things white people seem to like. In addition to their website they also have a coffee table book and now posters of fan favorites for sale. Here are my favorite posters which are currently available here. Click the thumbnail images below to view the full poster image.

Daniel Tosh of the show Tosh.0 gets an iPad

Jason — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 07:06:07 +0000

And look how he uses it. Awesome…

25 Hilarious WiFi Network Names

Jason — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 03:49:26 +0000

These are super funny! A friend emailed me this blog post and the WiFi hotspot names cracked me up so I wanted to repost the link here:

http://www.holytaco.com/25-hilarious-wifi-network-names

Some of my favorites:

PicturesOfBalls
TurdBurglar
GetOffMyLawn
H1N1
JoelsADoucheBag

Free Open Source Basecamp Clone

Jason — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 22:57:04 +0000

Successful project management is crucial to even the smallest company. Having the right tools on-hand can make all the difference. I’m sure you’ve heard of Microsoft Project and possibly Basecamp as well, right? These are definitely some of the most popular software choices out there for project mangers but they can also be very expensive.

MS Project licenses can cost a ton of money depending on how many you need and Basecamp charges $24 per month for their smallest hosted plan. Enter ProjectPier. ProjectPier is an open source project management tool that’s been around for a while which you host on your own web server. It was built to basically clone the functionality of Basecamp but since it’s open source it’s free to install and use. Take a look at the screenshot below to see what my install looks like.

click to enlarge

As you can see not only can ProjectPier mimic most of the functionality of Basecamp it can also be made to look almost identical as well. Here’s what you’ll need:

Download and install the latest beta of ProjectPier (v0.8.5.0) located here
Configure your ProjectPier installation by following the install guide
Once fully configured download and install the free BaseQamp theme for ProjectPier located here

After following the steps outlined above you’ll have a great tool to manage all those projects on your plate and some extra cash in your wallet each month as well.

Blueprint CSS Framework

Jason — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 08:27:20 +0000

A friend of mine introduced me to a CSS framework called Blueprint. What does it offer you ask?

A CSS reset that eliminates the discrepancies across browsers.
A solid grid that can support the most complex of layouts.
Typography based on expert principles that predate the web.
Form styles for great looking user interfaces.
Print styles for making any webpage ready for paper.
Plugins for buttons, tabs and sprites.
Tools, editors, and templates for every step in your workflow.

Within about an hour or so I pretty much had it down. Check out this quick-start tutorial and this more detailed one to get yourself going. It eliminates a lot of the repetitive CSS work you normally have to do for each new project you start and creating a standards compliant layout takes just minutes using their included CSS classes and “the grid”.

TheSixtyOne

Jason — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 03:06:30 +0000

TheSixtyOne is a free music website that a friend of mine introduced me to. It’s a great place to check out new music/artists. It’s similar to Pandora but seems to feature lesser known artists and has a type of game aspect added into the service. Here is what the people who operate the site say about their service:

thesixtyone makes music culture more democratic: artists upload their work for review, but, rather than allow a stuffy suit in a boardroom to decide what’s good, thousands of listeners do. The best music automagically bubbles up on our homepage where you can listen to the most popular songs for any genre. It’s a quick way to find new music for your iPod powered by pure excitement as opposed to some contrived marketing budget.

Think you’ve got a good ear? Aside from customizing your experience, creating an account allows you to earn reputation, level up your influence, and collect badges for discovering and recommending good music that others may enjoy. On thesixtyone, tastemaking becomes fun, competitive, and trackable.

We’re on a quest to help people fall in love with something new while giving deserving artists an efficient channel for finding their audiences.

One of the more interesting things to me was that they offer a Creative Commons section of music. This just means the artists who release their music under this license allow it to be downloaded for free and used in various capacities without needing their express written permission. Open-Source music, pretty cool!

CSS Sprites

Jason — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 22:27:54 +0000

The other day while working on a web project for a client I was looking for an easy way to switch out images for the different button states (ie. regular, hover, and active) in a typical navigation menu. I’ve always taken what I thought to be the most logical approach and just used CSS to change the background-image depending on whatever state was currently invoked. But, this leads to lag in image load time due to the browser “calling” and waiting for the other image to be served by the web server and sometimes with Internet Explorer this method can cause a flicker effect. Not the end of the world of course but still not desirable.

So, I remember reading about CSS sprites a year or so ago but never used them until the other day. Basically a sprite is an image with many images inside it. Facebook for example takes this to the extreme. They utilize CSS sprites to round the corners of your profile pic and for some other uses as well. Take a look at the linked images and you’ll probably get where this is going.

Basically instead of having multiple images swapped in and out by CSS you create one master image and use CSS to reposition the background-image to suit your needs depending on what section of the sprite you want to display to the user. No load lag and no flicker. Pretty snazzy…

I found two tutorials online which were easy to follow and within minutes I fully understood how to use and manipulate sprites via CSS. The first one I read was written by Dave Shea for the website “A List Apart”. The second one was from “Well Styled”.

Check out both the tutorials above and I’m sure you’ll agree this is the best, most elegant way to do this type of image manipulation. This may be old news so to speak but I thought it was still worth looking at again. I hope you find the info as useful as I did.

Free Web Development Tools

Jason — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 20:49:40 +0000

Since starting my own web development company recently (more on that some other time) I needed a few hosted development tools to be able to do my thang on the interwebs properly. Basically, other than my Macbook and inexpensive web hosting I needed hosted Subversion access and some sort of project management tools.

I could of paid for Springloops Subversion and Basecamp for project management but those services aren’t cheap. After digging a bit I found XP-Dev. They offer subversion hosting and basic project management tools for free. XP-Dev’s product isn’t as “pretty” as the paid ones but it gets the job done and the service is reliable.

Anyway, if you’re in the market for inexpensive (i.e. free) web dev tools like Subversion and/or some form of online project management tools, check out XP-Dev.