personal

Written at 17:56, on Monday 3 March 2008. Tags: personal website .

As the World Wide Web continues to evolve, people use it for increasingly personal and social purposes. The current social networking sites are quickly gaining critical mass, moving the adoption curve forward from an early majority to the late majority. In the Netherlands, Internet usage in is still rising, and the skills of surfers continue to improve. According to the Dutch bureau of statistics CBS, more than 2 million people have designed a webpage.
As we put more of ourselves online, our identity expressions become more and more shattered throughout the web. Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm and Hyves all represent a small piece of me and my online identity. Bringing these all together will take a couple of years, although with developments like OpenSocial, OpenAuth and OpenID the first building blocks are in the pipelines.

Anyway, the whole reason of this introduction is that I’ve made a small step in consolidating my Web presence – I have now merged my portfolio into my blog. I really liked the design of my portfolio so I tried to keep as many aspects of it as possible, and only made small tweaks as necessary (although there are many of them…). There are some big improvements to the design though, mostly fixing mistakes from my last redesign.

Written at 22:57, on Thursday 11 January 2007. Tags: personal webdesign .

Together with the launch of my portfolio, I decided this site needs a visual facelift as well. So here it is. I know redesigning isn’t as hip as realigning, but the changes are just too much.

I’ve ditched the three-column layout and used two columns (or even one) throughout the site. The footer is three-column though, and it has all the navigation elements to make it more useful. Colour-wise, I’ve tried to get the best of both the dark and light version of the previous version of this website, and of course incorporated the new logo. Furthermore, I bumped up the base fontsize to 12px Verdana (scalable, of course, in every browser). If that’s not enough for your , try the font-size controls next to the logo, which bump the base font size up to 18px. Finally, I’ve made sure that the main text has enough contrast, which goes a long way to a more accessible website.

Technically, this website is still built on Drupal 4.7 (will try to upgrade to 5.0 as soon as the Textile module is ported), and I also use the Yahoo! UI library for it’s CSS framework. I’ve also retained the moo.fx-based Javascript enhancements, although I may migrate them to JQuery once I upgrade to Drupal 5.0, since that’s built in.

All in all, I think this design greatly simplifies the website and makes it consistent in brand with the portfolio. It also creates a softer and friendlier face, despite the brown colour palette. What do you think?

Written at 15:57, on Saturday 16 December 2006. Tags: personal .

The freshly released Photoshop CS3 beta makes it fun again to do some work! The speed is simply amazing on my MacBook. Also, I really like the enhanced interface, which is a lit easier to work with. And it’s great to have filters act like adjustment layers, meaning that you can change their parameters at any time. The beta expires after 30 days unless you have a CS2, although the first cracks have appeared.

And if you dislike the new icon as much as I do, go over to Adam Betts to download a replacement CS3 icon”.

Also, if you’re looking for an excuse for why I haven’t posted in a while, check out these “ sorry I haven’t posted in a while ”. CMD, work and a very ill mother have been keeping me busy.

Written at 19:46, on Wednesday 20 September 2006. Tags: personal .

I’m now the proud owner of a white MacBook. My PowerBook was owned by the company I worked for, and thus I returned it when I quit. Here are my first impressions based on a week of use.

Written at 19:47, on Monday 3 July 2006. Tags: personal .

I’ve been meaning to launch this redesign (dubbed “Classic”) for the CSS reboot, but work and personal life interfered in a rather unpleasant and cruel way. Brown seemed like a good colour. Besides the obvious changes, some notable changes include the use of the Yahoo! UI library, which facilitates the 2- and 3-column layouts, the use of just 1 colour (aka a monochromatic pallette) and the use of graphics in various sections. Things that haven’t changed include the lack of more articles, the lack of frequent updates and the lack of a decent portfolio – sigh… On the bright side, my vacation has started and I’m looking forward to reading a nice stack of books.

In no particular order, my reading list includes:

• The Illuminatus! Trilogy : The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, Leviathan, by Robert Shea, Robert Anton Wilson
• Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco
• A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson
• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, by Malcolm Gladwell
• Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell
• Tracing Genres through Organizations : A Sociocultural Approach to Information Design, by Clay Spinuzzi
• On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism, by Jonathan Culler
• Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud
• D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself, by Ellen Lupton

• The Little Schemer, by Daniel P. Friedman, Matthias Felleisen

Besides reading, I’m looking forward to some rest & relaxation, clarity, perspective and perhaps the realisation of some long-term ambitions. What are your plans for the summer?

Written at 08:23, on Thursday 9 March 2006. Tags: drupal personal website .

This website is now powered by Drupal! I’ve tried to keep as much of the old content, theme and functionality as possible so you should see little difference, besides a splashing new homepage and various little tidbits. Learning about Drupal, getting to know how it works, reading the documentation and scouring the fora took a couple of days. Setting up the content, the menu’s and the taxonomy, and migrating everything took approximately a day. Migrating the stylesheet and creating a new theme took another day. Finetuning every little bit of Drupal to fit exactly the way I like it took approximately a week. —(Yeah, I’m a perfectionist. I wish I had this much time to finetune client websites!)— Old links should still work (well, most of them, anyway) and I’ll probably make some URL aliases for the most common broken ones. Some of the things which I noticed while working with Drupal.

Written at 17:25, on Thursday 12 January 2006. Tags: personal .

We did good last year, and my iBook was getting old, so my employer rewarded me with a new PowerBook G4 (thanks Eric!) It arrived just before the end of 2005. I let my employer order one with a 7200 RPM, 100 GB hard drive instead of the 5400 RPM 80 GB drive, because in all my laptops, the hard drive was the main speed bottleneck. And while I waited for it for just over 6 weeks (apparantly because of some crazy schedule in the assemblation process over at the factory in Dublin), I don’t regret that I didn’t wait a bit longer for for the newly-announced MacBook Pro

Written at 01:20, on Tuesday 8 November 2005. Tags: personal .

Ever since I started with Getting Things Done, I’ve found it so convenient to have a “Next Actions” list, since it saves you from actually having to do things. Instead, you can lay back relaxed since all the “stuff” is captured and thus “under control”. In other words, it’s great for not getting things done! It has been disastrous for my blogging, for example, making the numbers of drafts twice as large as the number of published posts.

Written at 17:19, on Wednesday 2 November 2005. Tags: personal usability webdesign .

Just wanted to say all those all two of you feedreaders that I’ve restyled my site a bit. I created it with Halloween in mind, but of course I managed to be a day late with this launch. I’ve achieved the worn look thanks to a set of brushes (via).

Also check out my new contact form, which is now more or less unobtrusively enhanced with asynchronous javascript (aka AJAX). Thanks go to Dustin Diaz for sharing his ajax contact form after much begging and threatening. There are some improvements to be made to make it fully accessible and unobtrusive, for example, it doesn’t handle errors with PHP now, and there’s some hidden text in the contact form which is read by screen readers. But still great work for a 0.9 version!

Written at 19:26, on Sunday 2 October 2005. Tags: personal .

The upgrade to Dreamhost is now complete. Besides a far greater disk capacity (4200 MB!) and bandwidth limit (120 GB per month!), this migration has also solved some annoyances which I had with Lycos.

Written at 17:40, on Sunday 2 October 2005. Tags: personal .

Yesterday, I signed up at Dreamhost and will transfer this site to them. That will mean the end of a three-year long relationship with Lycos. I was pretty satisfied at first with their services, but compared to other hosting companies, their plans are pretty meager. Above all, I regularly experienced website outages, something which Dreamhost has experienced recently as well, but at least they’re being open about it. They even have an off-network status blog for easy on-demand notification.

Written at 17:03, on Wednesday 21 September 2005. Tags: personal .

This article was originally published on the 9th of December on my old blog. I’ve republished it here to prevent linkrot.

Today, I announced my retirement as the Linux From Scratch website team-leader and as maintainer from the FAQ. It was a hard decision, but now that I made it, I know it was the right one. I had been neglecting my work for months now, always promising to myself and to the community that it would be better when the CMS came. However, I began to realize that the CMS would not come.