A new blog, a new book

I'm writing a book. Actually, I've written a book, in manuscript form, and I'm in the process of publishing it. I'll be chronicling the process on my new blog. I'm just as intrigued in the process of book design as I am in the development of the story, so I'm doing everything. Everything. The manuscript has been sent to the editors, so I'm working on the cover and ordering the ISBNs. I'm not really interested in marketing the book at this time, but just to go through the process and feel the finished book in hand.

Stop on by my new blog to read the story behind the story. I've also posted the first chapter, for the curious. :) Read it below:

Swamp Monster—Chapter One

Open web mapping … and my first map Cloudmade style!

I've been so busy lately I haven't been able to keep up with the open web mapping movement—it seems to have really advanced in the last year or two. We're on the upswing where growth is exponential, with social media fueling an even-faster incline. This is great.

I made my first map style tonight on CloudMade, testing the water for a base map that will eventually underlie my thesis maps. I'm using Leaflet to serve up the map. Here's a sneak peek of London (which always looks good on a map):

I really love what OpenStreetMap and the whole open web mapping community is doing. The "giants" may have the resources to send camera-equipped vehicles down every street in the country, but the open movement has tons of human power willing to strap GPS units to their backs and hike around their own neighborhoods, just for the sake of the common good.

And with that comes beauty. The example below is a breath-taking example of what people are doing for people. Watercolor maps tiles … I'm still catching my breath. It's Salt Lake City, Utah, in watercolor. Temple Square, complete with the temple, tabernacle and conference center across the street. Now, what if this piece of art was pan-able, zoom-able map, like Google Maps or MapQuest? Well, it is—go ahead and drag it around, or jump to the full-screen version.

Minor cosmetics

The last few days have been somewhat taxing so instead of sleeping early this evening I indulged myself in a little cosmetic work on the site. After implementing Google web fonts on several sites already, I'm convinced that it is the best combination of convenience/reliability to use alternative fonts quickly on the Web. My preferred method is to use free fonts and convert them to web formats and manually embed them, but only when time permits. For tonight, Google wins.

I chose EB Garamond for text and Open Sans for display for one particular reason, though I think the fonts do relatively well on screen: they are the only two Google web fonts that support the Unicode Vietnamese character set. Apparently, Vietnamese presents a special challenge due to the stacked nature of accent marks, which may be the reason why Google offers Vietnamese as its own character set filter while searching for fonts. Either way, I chose these fonts for now and so far it looks comfortable. I'm still smiling at using 300 weight on the headings instead of bold, it looks so clean :)

Perhaps that the most obvious change is that I increased the font size from 10.5pt to a whopping 16! Based on a couple of articles on the value of using the browser default font size and re-creating the printer's "paragraph" on the screen, I am experimenting with 16px to see how it works. I think my body width is out of proportion now, but that's a structural change that will have to wait until another day. And finally, I'm taking advantage of Blogger's built-in mobile framework with a stock template, so when the time comes for more major changes, I'm sure I'll switch to the custom mobile template and tweak it to my liking.

There it is, blogging instead of sleeping. Now I may drift in and out of consciousness at work tomorrow, but a little design dabble before bed is quite relaxing for me, and I needed it. Plus there's the feeling of accomplishment and refreshment, even after such small changes as these. For all who are keeping track, this minor cosmetic revision is version 4.1, with no foreseeable major release in the near- and semi-near future. Someday I will, though, mark my word. The crumpled-bag side bar must go.

Web 2.0 Summit Map and Wooden Laptops

Here are two awesome things I found today. First, the Web 2.0 Summit Map, which is absolutely ingenious and engaging. Click the image to navigate through the data layers of today's internet leaders.

And the second thing was a wooden laptop/chalkboard. I'm so getting one for church.

Two very random and inspiring things today - it's nice to see creativity at work, on both the digital canvas and natural medium.

Another scam - Weekly Health USA: Tip of a Flat Belly

Last year, I made a somewhat lengthy analysis of an internet scam ("Google Money Masters"), so I won't go into those details here (plus, I'm at work).  But I thought this was too fun to pass up.  I was looking for a grunge font for work at urbanfonts.com and when I clicked on the category name, my browser opened another window to "Weekly Health News" showing an article on the "1 Tip of a Flat Belly: A Surprising New Way to Burn Fat Quickly."   I have to say, this is a pretty good looking scam.
The first thing that made me wonder is the picture of the supposed reporter lady person.  I've seen her all over the web, in suspicious-looking ads.  The second indicator was that the article supposedly originated in (guess where?) the city where I work, as well as the example of the woman losing 46 pounds.  Try it out - go to the article and I'm sure you'll find that the article magically originated in the city in which you are currently sitting, too!  My third source of suspicion came from the comments section.  They were all from the last two days.  Fantastic. Then last but not least, all of the links on the page lead to an advertisement for AcaiMax.  Scroll to the bottom and want to read about football? Too bad, it's AcaiMax.  How about Travel, or Racing (which is interestingly enough accompanied by an image of a mountain scape... I guess "mountain racing?")? Nope, AcaiMax again.  Then I pulled up the source code and had a good laugh.
The article purports to have been published on July 13, 2010, two days ago.  So I look at the code and find a little (messy!) bit of javascript that ends with this:

mydate.setDate(mydate.getDate()-2)

See the "-2" at the end?  Yeah, that says to set the date to two days before the current date and show it on the page.  This happens several times throughout the page, and is obviously dishonestly reporting the date to make it appear as though the article (and comment section) is recent.  Want to post a comment?  Too bad, because based on the source code and script, there's nothing actually submitting your comment anywhere!
There's more, but I'll stop.  I just find it incredibly entertaining to see how the "scam" continues to evolve.  This one looks pretty real, if you ask me.  But that's the idea - looks are deceiving, and now that we, the Web 2.0 generation, have such short attention spans, the marketers now that we look at the page for 5 seconds and then act.  Try to make it 10 and I think you'll see a lot more than they're showing you.
PS To the authors of this page, may I suggest a faster way to build an array, since it looks like you were in a hurry:

var month = [
  'January',
  'February',
  'March',
  'April',
  'June',
  'July',
  'August',
  'September',
  'October',
  'November',
  'December'
];

Batch IP Locator - New Home

Ok, just wanted to announce that my little project has a new home (because the other one is about to expire):

Batch IP Locator
Geocode or map multiple IP addresses - free

Batch IP Locator - Official Launch

A week or so ago, I launched the very-beta version of a new app I'm working on. Today is the "official" launch of a greatly-improved product. After a week of poring over code and markup, the back-end has been revamped, UI is more functional (and looks better, too!), and an API has been added (with documentation). Now I just need to add content. Ugh. Not what I want to do after a week of coding. If I can get homework done early I'll shoot for that at the end of this week.

Stop by and visit, and leave me your thoughts (feedback) on what needs improvement:

Batch IP Locator ~ Geocode and map multiple IP Addresses - free!

ps. I made a new twitter account for it, too. lol

Design inspirations

I've had some positive feedback regarding the redesign (many thanks to my wife who is full of patience and kind words even when she wishes her husband would spend time with her instead of the computer :) so here's my reply.

I don't do designs for hire, yet anyway. haha I'm just starting school again so time is limited, but I think it would be fun to do a little project once in awhile. Let me know what you've got in mind and maybe I can point out possible ways to achieve it.

For those of you thinking about web design but maybe "dragging your feet," here's some inspiration:

• Best of CSS Design 2008: The websites we use everyday seldom invoke an emotional response deep within out heart. Here are 50 that did for me late last year. Especially true for Viget Inspire (just beautiful!), Carrot Creative (smooth use of jQuery navigation) and Nine Lion Design (dark texture, bold contrast and warm ambiance)
• Nature Inspired Painted Background: This was the tutorial that got me "painting" again (see my attempt above) and generally interested in art once more, this time in the digital sphere.
• 17 Techniques for Creating Designs Inspired by Nature: Interestingly enough, I started looking into my designer feeds (I subscribe to 15 rss feeds on design that provide constant inspiration) and found this article, posted one day after my redesign launch, that outlines many of the principles I used this time around. It's a great starting point for someone who's thinking about being interested in learning more about maybe playing around with design :), especially if you're into nature photography.
• Web Style Guide 3: This book (yes, the entire text of the book in available for free online) is for those who already have design experience, but are looking into web standards and SEO and creating complex corporate websites. It takes a very conservative approach to web design, but is a good anchor and balance when your design needs to meet usability and interaction halfway.

A year ago, my wife started getting into food blogs, and I was blown away at how vastly enormous the food blog network is and how I had never seen a glimpse of it until then. Design blogs are the same - it's a whole new world out there and once you're in, you're in for good. Life just becomes one big design.

xanghe redesign! (yes, again)

It started out as a sketch. I was bored at the fair so I scribbled up a little scene I had in my mind. That night I scanned it and played around with it in Inkscape and then the GIMP. That was last Wednesday. The 6 following days have been pretty much wasted with me in front of the computer, but I have to say, this is my favorite design yet.

Enjoy. I promised my wife I this one would last at least a year.

Google Money Master: The art of designing web scams

"Google Money Master" - sounds cool, huh? And $5000 a month from home (working only 10 hours a week!) doesn't sound bad either. Oh, and this author is from Orange County, too! Great, where do I sign up? Obviously these underlined, blue words are links, so I'll click on one of these. Uh oh, this new page looks like a scam... but Mike Richardson from Orange County said it's legit!

Haha, that's what went through my mind this morning when I hopped on the article from the "Los Angeles Tribune" about a way to make $5000 a month. After sheepishly collecting my wits upon realizing that I had been scammed (no I didn't sign up), I turned back to the page to find out how I was so easily deceived. I looks like scammers (yes, those people capitalizing on unemployed people) are listening in web design class. Here are some ridiculously true principals that I should have caught off the bat, but that seem to catch me (us?) every time:

• 

  Localization

  First and foremost, the scammers localize the content. The page was created in PHP, which means everytime it's served from the host, it can look at your whereabouts and figure out where you're located at the time of viewing. Mine says "Orange , CA" (notice the extra space after "Orange" - a sign of hasty coding) in two places. And the "Los Angeles Tribune" is not a real newspaper... I'm sure if you're in Houston it will say the "Houston Tribune." We are prone to believe something if it's happening in our back yard.



• Content

  They employed typical hoax content, using a fictitious name, realistic circumstances and a reputable entity (usually a media outlet or law enforcer, this time it's Google). It gives us a creditable source, or at least uses words that seem creditable. It even gives his email: "Tom Chilton@www.Financial-Weekly.com" - It's the first time I've seen "www." in an email's domain. lol This scam even holds true to form in its grammar - poor.



• Layout

  photo from Web Style Guide
  Here's my favorite part. We as web surfers behave very differently in many situations, but in some ways we act exactly the same. Like how we scan documents. As the images above illustrate, our eyes spend a lot of time at the top-left area of the page, and the scammers capitalize on that. The bold, alluring title, the photo of a young work-at-home millionaire... look at the little social networking icons! Looks just like the real thing.



• Reader Feeback

  At the bottom of the page, as all news articles or blogs should, we see a bunch of user comments. Some are skeptical, some affirm our hope that Google will truly send us a check within 48 hours of signing up. What better way to include non-obtrusive peer pressure! Notice the date of the comments happen to be before the "Created At" date, and they all were posted at the same time. And "Created At?" Is that English?



• Functionality

  No no, this is actually my favorite part. Click on the news tabs at the top. Go ahead and login, or post a comment. Or reply to a comment or favorite it, or hover over anything that we web surfers know so well to be links or functional buttons. No little pointy hand, no subtle animation. Not a single link on the entire page, except the handful they want you to click that lead to their trap homepage. Ha! This should have been the first warning that this was a fishy site, but just like a skilled magician, they distract you from what they're really doing by directing your attention to a little trick.

And so it goes. The hoaxes are still hoaxing people. Especially when we are in a financial rut. Hopefully we can take a look at this page and laugh, then take a deeper look at what other imitations are designed specifically to deceive us. When designed well enough, we may just scan our way into a trap without even knowing.

Google Money Master: a bona fide folk tale. Pass it on. ;)

Graphic Design - My 2009 Hobby

I've always loved art. I remember painting landscapes for my friends one year for Christmas. I remember listening to Hints, Allegations and Things Left Unsaid and furiously drawing
characters from Final Fantasy or Metroid, or whatever Nintendo Power was highlighting at the time. I remember sitting for hours in my room carefully studying each page of my Michael Whelan or Alan Lee books, wondering how in the world did he get so much detail on that spaceship wall, or how did his stroke void of any detail at all still capture exactly the form of the dragon. I remember sitting in the basement at the computer for days on end, scrupulously writing and rewriting POV-Ray code and patiently watching as the the rays were traced one by one and my screen became a three-dimensional parallel universe. I loved it, but over the years other priorities have taken - well - priority, and I've lost a lot of the experience I built up as a child and a younger-than-I-am-now person.

I've lost so much ground in my technical drawing skills so I get easily frustrated when I'm trying to draw or paint freehand anymore. Luckily, over the last several months and because of my deepening passion for web development and design, I've been re-introduced into the world of art. Art infused with information and seamlessly presented on a canvas of HTML and CSS. Moll's clean vintage look with just enough texture to make you feel like you're reading a book; Spooner's mixture of bold vectors and calm browns; Inman's striking minimal mathematical approach; Nick La's explosion of motion and flow and contrast - it's all amazing and delightful to me, from the markup to the stylesheets to the javascript to the polished, shiny finished product it's all beautiful to me. So, I'm re-applying myself to art, this time in the form of graphic design which allows me to be creative without getting stuck on the fact that I still can't draw an anatomically-correct tree (so I borrow someone else's).

Want to see my new favorite site? This changes by the day, but at least for yesterday and today I'm submitting Viget Inspire as the most visually appealing blog in the whole world wide web (or "WWWW" for short). Isn't it nice? Well, it was this blog and a tutorial based on that blog that pushed me over the edge last night. After an hour of homework and a handful of Dove Blackberry Carmel Dark Chocolates, I plugged in my wacom and downloaded some watercolors and trees and GIMPed up a painting (the one at the top). It turned out ok, but more importantly, it's my start. From today until 11:59pm December 31^st 2009, I am officially... ummm... doing more art stuff. I'll post it to my flickr so stop by occasionally and take a gander.

Thanks to mom and dad and Morgy and Jennie and Harmony for being my inspiration.

Web Design Ledger - 10 Amazing Designers

Here are some of the big dogs in the web design world. And yes I have to put a picture of Moll here since he's my idol right now.

10 Amazing Designers that Influence the Community

Chúc Mừng Năm Mới! Happy Lunar New Year!

Happy New Year
To all our friends and family
Near and Far
We wish you the best for 2009
May you find happiness, success and good fortune
In the Year of the Ox!

-----------------------------------------------------------

Chúng cháu xin chúc các bác, cô chú, anh chị em
Một năm mới tràn đầy hạnh phúc và thành công.
Mong rằng năm Kỷ Sửu sẽ mang lại nhiều may mắn.


Hội Tết is this weekend so prepare for pictures!

Greepit Post - Long Exposure Pictures

Greepit is a design blog I've been frequenting lately. It mostly posts about web design but once in awhile drops some inpsiring photos. Thought I'd share this one.

Cameron Moll (pronounced Mull or Mall but not Mole)

I first ran into Cameron's work several months ago when I was reading a snap2objects article on how to destroy the web 2.0 look. Little did I know who I had found! That was when I first started dabbling in actual solid web design instead of just screwing around with my blog, and since then I've seen his name pop up over and over. Today I hit the jackpot - an interview with Cameron on UIE.com. I haven't listened to it yet, but after break I plan to spend the next 29 minutes and 52 seconds listening to Spool pick Moll's brain while I calculate stats from the Nov election for work. Wonderful.

Oh, and he did a letterpress of the temple. He's so awesome.

Earlier today I found found his wife's blog, as well. Suzanne has a delightful sense of humor and made my day with her post about her boys. 4 boys. Phew.

Needless to say, I think I've found a new role model.

UPDATE 01/22/09: Lookie what I found today: Chatting with Cameron Moll on Nettuts.com

The Best CSS Design of 2008

Wanna see some of the best CSS designs of 2008? This site has a terrific collection of websites that use rock-solid CSS markup to break the Web 2.0 look. I love these sites - someday I will design like these people.

The Best CSS Design of 2008