jonathan stegall

So An Event Apart Chicago is finished. Several things were new to me, and several were somewhat familiar, but for me, even the familiar ones were very relevant. In a way, these are the parts of the event that stuck out to me. Many of them were part of my design education, but, of course, things that are not used are easily forgotten.

For a time during the latter part of my design education, I spent a lot more time programming than I did designing in school, and in various work projects I needed to use different methods of design than I often would have liked, or was taught to use. Many of the design theories and processes had been underused for a while, and it was wonderful for these to be refreshed and re-emphasized, and also phrased in different ways than the ways I learned them.

So much of design, and particularly design on the web, is as much about continuing education as it is about a base of knowledge. When I was studying the Bible and theology for my first degree, I had a professor that I’ve quoted here and to anyone who will listen, and he said that if a person were to earn a PhD in theology, and not read a book for six months, they would no longer be relevant. Their field would have passed them. Obviously, the web is younger than theology, and this idea works on the web at least as well as it does in theology.

There is no Coke at a conference attended by 500 web designers. Only Pepsi.

I’m a big fan of the Last.fm music site. I listen to it all day at work. Lately, I’ve really gotten into one of the songs that it plays from the new Haste the Day album, Pressure the Hinges. I’m not a big fan of most of the album, as they’ve moved too far in an emo direction for me to like it, but the song Chorus of Angels blows me away.

As a unified piece; music, vocals, and lyrics, I feel that this song is an example of the best of what metalcore has to offer as a genre. I feel that there’s a passion and a voice in it that marks the point where metalcore takes hold of its potential to make a powerful statement and connect with the listener in a significant way. The creativity that’s there is an inspiration.

I love metalcore, but the fact is that the genre is oversaturated and doesn’t live up to this potential as a whole. There are several great bands that shatter that overall tendency and consistently release songs of this caliber that connect with me in powerful ways, but I wanted to mention Chorus of Angels as it’s been showing up on my Last.fm stream a lot recently.

Currently, I’m in the midst of a hunt for a Content Management System (CMS) to use for a client project. Basically, this hunt is occurring in the hopes that I can save time on the project by using something that is already in existence. The system I’m looking for would have to do the following:

• Create a directory of businesses, with support for international locations and a hook for and/or built in support for the Google Maps API.
• Allow for different levels of businesses, and also a hook for and/or built in support for ecommerce to create said levels.
• Allow for these businesses to be filed in categories based on the field of business where they practice.
• Allow for these businesses to be connected with the kinds of things they do. For example, an auto mechanic might be connected with replacing radiators. These things would have to be connected with the field of business. For example, a lawyer would probably not replace radiators.
• Allow these businesses to be searched by location, category, and things performed by the business
• Be secure, including form validation, user access, and blocking of at least the most common vulnerabilities (if I know about it, it should definitely be blocked)
  • I was researching Joomla in the hopes that it might provide such a solution, when the site I was looking at was hacked and taken down as I navigated it.

I feel like such a search may be a pipe dream, and that if I did find such a solution, it would probably have such a high learning curve that I wouldn’t save time over a custom built solution, which is the goal of this search in the first place. However, the search makes me wish I had already had the time to learn Ruby/Rails and Python/Django…

An Event Apart - for people who make websites, will be in downtown Chicago at the end of this month. And, so will I. If you’ll be in the area and would like to have a coffee or something, post a comment. I’ve never been to a web related conference. Exciting stuff…

So I’ve been successfully using Ubuntu for two weeks now. I have several initial reactions, and other thoughts. I’ll talk about what I don’t like first, and then about what I do like.

What I don’t like

My main issue thus far has been my graphics card. Which, of course, isn’t Ubuntu’s fault at all. I have my graphics card working very well with Ubuntu, so it’s not that my graphics card is junk, either. The issue is that it doesn’t seem to be able to run Beryl, which from what I hear is the eye candy of Ubuntu. I like eye candy, so I’d like to be able to run Beryl.

Other than that, my issues are with the software companies inability or unwillingness to make software that I use compatible with Ubuntu. One of these is iTunes. I love iTunes. I’ve been using Banshee on Ubuntu, and it’s a great player. It has a great interface, great organization, great everything. My main issue with it is that it doesn’t know about my podcast subscriptions, presumably because they’re in an iTunes formatted XML file. So this is a really minor thing.

A related issue is that there is not a 64 bit version of Last.fm for Linux. I’m a huge fan of last.fm, and use it all the time. When I play CDs in iTunes, the last.fm player knows what’s being played and adds it to stuff that I’ve played, and lets me recommend it, or tag it, or whatever. Banshee doesn’t appear to do these things.

Adobe is my other issue. I tried downloading gimpSHOP, just to play around with it and see if I could get used to it enough that I could occasionally avoid rebooting into Windows to use Photoshop. Nope. Can’t do it. I love Photoshop. As much as I sometimes hate it and am frustrated by it, I don’t want to imagine life without it. Flash and Illustrator are also things I couldn’t do without, but I don’t spend an incredible amount of time in either, so it’s a smaller issue for me.

I’m not very impressed with the text editors, and I think the default is better than the several downloadable ones I’ve tried. Sorry about that one. I think Notepad++, which appears to be exclusively Windows, is far better.

I’m sure there is a way to do this properly, that I just haven’t learned. If I’m logged in to my default account, which is not the root, and I double click to open a text file that is only editable by the root user, I’d like to be able to have a graphical equivalent of the sudo Terminal command, so that I could edit said text file without having to use the Terminal. I actually like the Terminal, and find it incredibly powerful, but sometimes I just don’t want to look up commands that I haven’t learned yet, just so that I can edit a text file that Apache uses.

What I do like

Ubuntu is a great operating system. I love almost everything about it. It has a great community on a number of different forums, all of whom were amazing in helping me through my various issues in getting Ubuntu working in the first place. It’s an incredibly powerful system, and it runs very fast for the power that it has.

Mozilla has been amazing for me. I can share my Thunderbird and Firefox profiles between Windows and Ubuntu without the slightest issue. FileZilla (no relation to Mozilla) has also been wonderful, as the beta version of my favorite FTP application runs very smoothly on Ubuntu.

Back to the Adobe thing, for a positive note, Dreamweaver isn’t a big deal for me. I like Dreamweaver, and I plan to use it whenever I have to do web edits in Windows that need a directory tree, but I’ve been using Eclipse, with some plugins for PHP, Python (which I hope to learn soon), JavaScript, CSS, and XHTML, and love it. It exceeds the expectations I had, prior to trying it out.

On a similar note, Apache on Ubuntu is far superior to any implementation of it that I’ve seen on Windows. I’ve tried several of the packages for LAMP development on Windows, and their weirdness is one of the reasons I wanted to try Linux. Initial setup, configuration, and changes on Apache and the development things on top of it are a breeze for me, compared to the way they were on Windows. This also exceeds my expectations.

The overall interface and methodology of Ubuntu is wonderful. I love the themes (in spite of not being able to use Beryl), the customizability, the ease of configuration and administering and all those other common tasks; many of which are not very fun on Windows. Not to mention the ease of adding software! The repositories are huge, and full of amazing software that can all be updated at once. I’m amazed by that one.

Other initial thoughts

For what it’s worth, I haven’t lost my Mac envy. My ideal setup, at this point, is to get myself a MacBook Pro (drool), get rid of Windows on my desktop, and use Ubuntu as the desktop system/home server. To use Ubuntu for certain development tasks, file storage, learning things, times when I need a desktop, etc. and use the Mac for design work, iTunes, other development stuff, and portability.

Until then, though, Ubuntu is easily the best system in my house.