Ok, these are just too cool not to mention.
Today is Halloween and to commemorate the event here are some really awesome Star Wars t-shirts that can double as a costume.
For instance…be Darth Vader.
There is Darth, R2-D2, a Stormtrooper, and Chewbacca. The only one that is missing is Boba Fett.
Happy Halloween!
For the few people out there that don’t read A List Apart, they have recently come out with their first “Web Designer Survey” results.
If you ever wanted to see how you fit in the web professional industry in terms of education, salary, etc. it is an interesting read.
Ok so you have all seen them: “8 million tools for web development”, “5 gagillion tools that if you don’t use you are stupid”.
So of course you click on them (after all that is why people write them) and you find out that the tools are for Mac lovers, Ubuntu gurus, or some other niche that you are not a part of. You find a couple of doodads worth looking into, but overall you find yourself disappointed…again. As a .net developer it can be frustrating because it seems the blogiverse thinks you are “eat the paste special” because you don’t use Ruby.
I am here to tell you…you don’t eat glue. You may have chosen to develop .net web apps because your employer is a Microsoft shop and you don’t have a choice, or you chose it because you want an IDE that is actually useful. Either way there are a lot of tools out there for you whether you are a .net novice or ninja.
So here is your list of tools that if you don’t use them as a .net developer then you obviously are a contributor to the “Baby Seal Clubbing Foundation”.
Have you ever read a book and once it was finished you thought “that book would have been so much better if it was 100 pages shorter”?
Some authors like to “hear their own voice” as it were and don’t know when to stop. There are a lot of web designers/developers who do the same thing. I definitely have fallen into that trap from time to time. You just get so excited by what you are working on that you add a little thing here, another piece of flair over there…before you know it, the point of the design gets lost under a pile of textures.
In recent months you have probably noticed a new trend…the minimalist look. Now when some people hear that term they think “boring”. In some cases they are spot on. If you go too far with it, it can be boring, but it doesn’t have to be. Take a look at A List Apart to see minimalism done right. Its clean, but not boring. Basically instead of using colors and textures to add interest, you make the layout do the heavy lifting of catching the user’s eye. Whitespace can be beautiful when done right.
Design Meltdown calls sites that follow this trend “super clean”. They have a four page showcase of sites built with this technique if you want to see some examples. Some are better than others obviously, but there are some great sites on that list (Protolize, mkdynamic, spacemaker).
I have found myself jumping on that train with some of the things I am building. To me it is just a completely different way of building a site. Instead of thinking of what textures, effects, and dohickies I can add to make the site stand out, I go through a mental process of stripping out everything that takes away from the core of the design. Its like cutting out those unnecessary 150 pages in a novel. Once they are gone, the narrative is crisp and flows the way it is supposed to.
In the design/development world, the final product gives the user a clear, easy way to understand and use the application. In my experience, I have found that it takes a good bit longer than I thought it would. Initially it seems easy and that having a lot of whitespace is enough, but when you take out gradients, shiny-effects, and whatnot, all you are left with is the content. How you make that interesting is what separates the proverbial “men from the boys”.
Rainfall Daffison is a “strategic design consultancy” based in Europe. Their thing is to design sites with a minimalist design and feel. They are quite passionate about it and think you should be too. They have an article that runs through 24 “moments” of minimalism” over the last decade. Its a great article that shows examples of some of the best minimalist sites out there today.
If you are thinking of how to wrap your head around minimalism, its not a bad place to start because you can see how some of the best in the business make it work.
What do you think? Have you jumped on the bandwagon, or do you think it is gonna go the way of the dodo? Did you find it easier or harder to create a super clean site?
Earlier this week I started a series on the old workhorse, .Net Membership that was introduced with ASP.NET 2.0 waaay back in 2005. Why drudge it up? Well, simply put, it is really useful and can save you a lot of development time. Also, it isn’t sexy so it doesn’t get a whole lotta press (like say…Ajax) so I figured this series could serve as a nice “reintroduction”.
The first part of the series introduced the functionality and explained how to set it up for your site. Today I am going to go deep and explain the LoginView control. This is definitely one of the more useful controls developed by Microsoft when it comes to user management and it bears a bit of time to look at it.
In addition to the basics of the control, I will also get into some of its “quirks” so you don’t beat your head against the wall in frustration the first time you use it.
So with my little CMS client I am building, I have decided to use the .NET Membership functionality that has been a part of .NET since 2.0 (it is also being used in 3.0 in case you were wondering like I was). This isn’t some new fangled javascript library. This is an old workhorse that has been around a while (since 2005) but a lot of developers don’t know much about it. As I worked with it I noticed that it is pretty nice, but it has some funkiness that needs to be worked around. In the end I figured it would be helpful for new and old devs to get the lowdown on this functionality.
So what is Membership? Basically it is MS’s way of getting rid of the tedious stuff that is part of every functional website. Stuff like creating and managing users, logging in and out, user roles, etc. How do they get rid of it? Basically they have built a system of database goodies and server controls that do most of the heavy lifting for you. Notice I said most…
Over the next few days I will go over what it is, why I chose to use it, and how to get it to be useful for your app. Today’s goal is to give you an overview of the functionality and explain how to get it up and running on your site. Read the rest of this entry »
