joelkuehn

CMS Collection

There are most certainly more beneficial hobbies out there, but I find myself using little bits of “surf the internet” time to dig up content management systems and tinker with them.  

Very little gets built (no actual websites), but I have developed quite an understanding of CMS best practices, including great install processes, module management, and theme customization.

Un-Tweeted

I started a note today titled “Un-Tweeted” to catalog all of the tweets that I censor myself from tweeting.  For various reasons, I just don’t tweet them, but they are my personal thoughts.

I have noticed a huge shift in thinking for our generation where one of our first reactions to most situations is to post a status update about it. This has become so normal that our first mental response is, “How could/should I phrase this for a tweet?”

I read something recently about how many of our status updates are time-oriented and reactionary. If you were to write it down and look at it in a couple days, would that tweet really matter?  

Also, inspired by a book that I recently purchased (which, by the way, must be so good that I am inspired by it but have only read the cover - ha. Just kidding, my wife has started it and shared this thought…), I am going to begin actively writing down my thoughts. Writing well starts with writing down your thoughts, keeping a journal/idea book, etc. I want to do that. To be able to review my ideas and build on them if I like. 

All this raises even bigger questions about our thoughts, the validity of our feelings and making that public, and about the public image we present as we filter the things we post online.

Writing it down on paper may also help break the gadget-dependency. We’ll see…

In the meantime, you should follow me on twitter.

-jk-

College Sports and American Culture

It is interesting how the Penn State scandal has exposed some of the underlying ramifications of “big college athletics” on our culture. More so, that mainstream writers are actually writing about it.

Here are a couple of examples:

“By error or event, every so often the curtain of our little theater of human delusion is pulled aside, and we’re made to look at the machinery backstage.”

- Coaches’ decisions, football mythology, Jeff MacGregor

“It happens because institutions lie. And today, our major institutions lie because of a culture in which loyalty to “the company,” and protection of “the brand” — that noxious business-school shibboleth that turns employees into brainlocked elements of sales and marketing campaigns — trumps conventional morality, traditional ethics, civil liberties, and even adherence to the rule of law. It is better to protect “the brand” than it is to protect free speech, the right to privacy, or even to protect children.”

- The Brutal Truth About Penn State, Charles P. Pierce

SASS/CSS Plugin Idea

A themable sass/css plugin for a custom dialect. For real semantics. Potential names: Paddin’ and Marrr!gin.

.example {
paddin’: zeeero!;
margin’: zeeero!;
position’n: ab-so-lutely;
width: your mom;
}

.pirate {
marrrgin: yarr+1 yarr-1 yarr+10;
padding: yarr;
position:starboard;
display:blackspot;
}

Of course it would all compile to valid css. This would just be more fun to write.

Max100Project Website

I was privileged to work with Matt Stevens to build the website for his Max100 Project. His successful Kickstarter project needed a new web home.

We chose to build the site in static html; hand-coded, no content management system. This is something I had been wanting to do after reading a few posts from web designers who did that for their personal website.  It was refreshing to not think about modules, widgets, and admin-tool integration and just write a page of code.  Since nothing is dynamically created or database-driven, it was a good refresher in minding the details and keeping multiple files up-to-date. 

The store is built using Big Cartel. They have a lovely product and it made integrating the site and the store seamless. I learned a lot about using the Big Cartel system and customizing it to meet our needs - I definitely recommend it.

Laying out the gallery was the trickiest part. I wanted the online gallery to match the grid poster, with two different size thumbnails. Much easier said than done. I figured out a cool trick with only using 2 class types (so two sets of styles, plus the default), to achieve the look. It felt like a brain development / critical thinking puzzle like a tangram. At first, it seemed like I was going to need to give each thumb a unique identifier and then position each by hand (which would have been a nightmare (x 100) - so I was glad to develop another solution!

You can view all of the 100 illustrations and order your own book and poster at max100project.com