Communiqué

If you've worked with Apache much at all, you have probably used some Redirect commands, or even mod_rewrite. Every once in a while these nasty inifinite loops occur or you just get the wrong content from the server. LiveHTTPHeaders is the Firefox developer tool for exactly these situations.

To the right is a screen shot of the extension in action after requesting http://www.google.com. As you can see, it displays all of the http headers including cookies. The extension is easily activated by pressing Alt-L (on Windows, not sure on OSX) and can even save headers to disk.

For everyone upgrading from Firefox 1.0.7 to Firefox 1.5, make sure you get the new version, 0.11. You can download it from the LiveHTTPHeaders site, or from http://ftp.rz.tu-bs.de/. I wasn't able to get the version on the official site to work, so I grabbed it from the ftp server. Enjoy!

An article in this week's A List Apart is about my favorite subject:

Grids

Thinking Outside The Grid is the latest in a recent string of web articles pushing the use of grid systems as a tool for online design.

In traditional print design, learning about grids was taught right before, "Introduction to Pencils". Unless you were David Carson, you were thrown a copy of Josef Muller-Brockmann's Grid Systems in Graphic Design, and told:

1. figure out the page size
2. divided it into a grid
3. start designing

The problem with translating this philosophy to the web is, there is no step #1 How can I figure out the page size? Long pages don't cut off and spill over to the next page, they just continue down...forever. But help is on the way. 2005, besides being the birth year of my second daughter also saw a slew of a interesting publications about online grids.

[Resources] Using grids in web design:

• A List Apart: Thinking Outside the Grid
• Mark Boulton: Five simple steps to designing grid systems
• Subtraction: The Funniest Grid You Ever Saw
• Subtraction: Grid Computing...and Design
• Mezzoblue: Columns & Grids

Enjoy! And happy gridding...

A battle was never won according to plan and a battle was never won without a plan.
- Napoleon

In 1999, a New Zealand Habitat for Humanity chapter built a house, from scratch, in 3 hours and 26 minutes, after spending 14 months planning the project. 0.03% of their time was spent in execution, 99.97% of their time, planning.

Chris Hardwick also had a plan when he solved a Rubik's Cube blindfolded in 18.50 seconds. He spent 99.8% of his time planning his solution by staring at, and memorizing, the cube for 1 hour and 54 minutes. The remaining 0.2% of his time was spent executing the plan.

Do yourself a favor, spend just a little more time planning your next project.

I was just browsing around and saw some very, very good news.

Microsoft was looking for an icon to use for their Web browser to indicate that a site has RSS feeds available. They came up with a bunch of their own, posted in their blog about it, asking what the people thought.

The result? People said liked the icon Firefox already used.

It is at this point that things could go only one of two ways:
1: Microsoft does their usual; forging their own path, ignoring everyone else, creating their own symbol
2: Work with people and set up a standard

Oddly enough, this time they went with option two. As they wrote here, they met up with the Mozilla folk and have decided to use the icon Firefox is already using.

Simply awesome.

Standardizing is something that seems like it should be common sense, but has never come easily. There are so many proprietary formats and tangents away from standards that it makes developing more and more challenging. While this has less effect on the actual coding here, it's great to see cooperation among those guiding the way.

So kudos to both Microsoft and Mozilla for improving the user-experience. Stuff like this actually gets me looking forward to IE7, rather than dreading what my Websites might look like under the new rendering (and the thought of learning more hacks to make things look right).

Now available for play online! Thanks to everyone that attended the 8th annual Holiday Bash. It was wonderful seeing everyone.

Happy Holidays!

Wine City: The Game

It's been over five years since our move to downtown Newburyport. Over this time we've watched local artists capture Inn Street in every way they know how: paintings, photographs, quick sketches, even the occasional video shoot.

(A couple examples: Newburyport Downtown, Massroads.com)

We've always been missing from these paintings, at least until now.

The next time you're strolling down Inn Street, look up and you'll find a slick new 4' by 2' black and green sign that says:

iMarc
Interactive Media Architects
http://imarc.net

iMarc's 6th annual holiday party is just around the corner...

When: Thursday, December 8th @ 6pm
Where: iMarc's Newburyport office (directions)
Who: The iMarc team will be there. We hope that lots of our clients and friends come too.
RSVP: Send an email to rsvp@imarc.net if you're coming

This year's theme is Wine City (Wine and Sin City) - more info... Like last year, we'll have wine tasting, good music, and food.

Postcard Invitations

See you there!

The "Law of Unintended Consequences" states that when you change a system, there will be resulting changes that you could not predict, and did not intend. Read More

In an attempt to convey our different views, a couple of us iMarcians have started an art project which for now we're calling Hybrid7. (Mainly because we're squatting on one of Craig's domains.)

http://www.hybrid7.com Read More