Miter Box Slider

I submitted a jQuery plugin to CodeCanyon before this past weekend started, and this morning I received an “it’s been accepted” email. If you’re not already familiar with it, CodeCanyon is a marketplace for code. It allows anyone to submit a piece of code to sell. If accepted, they set the price and take a cut of any profits. It’s part of the larger Envato marketplace, which includes areas for selling things like site designs and audio clips.

Miter Box Slider is my submission. It’s a jQuery ’slider’ plugin (i.e. when there’s a slideshow display of images at websites). What’s awesome about it is that it provides the ability to create truly unique animation transitions. With other sliders you’ll see a set of predefined transition effects, but with Miter Box, you create the transitions. It’s actually very powerful. One of the largest issues I had developing it was that I would often end up just playing with it. It’s a fun tool for experimenting.

Regardless of whether other people decide to use it, I really am pretty proud of it. Remember that those who run the site review the code and set the price? Right now, mine is the highest priced (one of only two at that price) item in the javascript section of code. I don’t know everything that goes into that price point, but I will say that I think it’s an indication of the power my plugin offers.

If you’ve got a site, or create sites, and are looking for some way to spice up the way you display your images, check out the Miter Box demo.

Calvin and Hobbes Documentary (make it happen!)

Calvin and Hobbes is without a doubt (and by a hefty margin) my favorite comic of all times.

My first car had a sticker of the two of them flying in a box.

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My only tattoo is a small one of Calvin dancing.

My oldest daughter started reading through some of my Calvin and Hobbes books, and seems to truly love it as well.

So here now is the Kickstarter (fund raising site) page for Dear Mr. Watterson, a documentary about the strip.

Dear Mr. Watterson is a film that will look to the readers and fans of Calvin & Hobbes to tell the story of the strip and its creator. As we explore the art and impact of Bill Watterson through this unique perspective, the undying appreciation and love of Calvin & Hobbes and the man behind it will be evident in the anecdotes, stories, and memories shared by readers of the strip and friends and colleagues of Mr. Watterson.

While the crew has been donating their time to make this project happen, we’ll be taking several trips to conduct interviews and collect footage, so the costs of air tickets, rental cars, meals, and motel stays will add up. The benefit of raising our goal of $12,000 all at once through Kickstarter is that we’ll be able to move forward on this film without the hurdle of funding, and the more we raise on top of that, the more we can do with the film.

I would love to see this happen and am working on my contribution as these words type to my screen. Consider doing the same!

I Missed the Guster Boat

This is a little convoluted, but it’s the journey not the destination. Apologies.

A couple months back, I came across Dewey (via Waxy, Feb 2, 2009). It offers a new, web-two-ohee method of navigating the music available at Archive.org. I wanted something to listen to at work and so started looking for some familiar names. I eventually stumbled on some Guster shows.
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A Thorough Video Tutorial for Slicing and CSSing

NETTUTS has an extremely thorough, step-by-step video tutorial that covers slicing a site design in Photoshop, coding the HTML, creating the CSS and then (briefly) adding a touch of Javascript.

I make this recommendation with a bit of hesitance though, as the total running time is a bit over 90 minutes. I actually skipped the last third or so of the first video (slicing the PSD). But there is something strangely mesmerizing about watching someone else progress through their work like this. It’s also interesting for me to see someone else’s work flow and tools use.

The presenter/author, Jeffrey Way, states that the tutorial is for beginners, but I’d say that it edges closer to the intermediate level. The CSS section, though long, progresses pretty quickly. You have to already be pretty familiar with the selectors syntax. And he moves right past terms like “inline” and “block”.

If you’ve got the time and the inclination, it’s an excellent howto for that area of web work.

Yahoo’s “Smush It” Image Size Reduction Service

A couple of days ago I came across various news items regarding the launch of Yahoo’s “Smush It” service. Point their web app towards any image online (or just upload one) and it will try its best to decrease the file size with no visible degradation of image quality.
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Cyanide and Happiness: Stick Figures and Dirty Jokes

Dueling Analogs linked out to a comic that I had never read before: Cyanide and Happiness. It’s fantastic. And best of all is that there’s no continuing storyline or set of regular characters. This is good news because now I don’t feel compelled to spend the next few hours reading through the entire archive to make sure I’m all caught-up.

The humor is mostly adult. Basically you gotta like dirty jokes. Also notice that there’s a Random button available, which is what I’ve been hitting the past few minutes. I’ll display a few of my favorites (so far) on the underside.
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MySQL Game

Know how I’ve wasted my time lately? MySQL Game.

It’s the type of thing where the barrier to entry (Firefox, Google account, SQL knowledge) is just small enough for me that I’ll jump in a give it a try. It’s also the type of thing that I tend to overly obsess over.
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Do More to Do Better

Coding Horror, a blog that I’ve started reading regularly, has some fantastic advice on how to improve your skills (regardless of the domain): Quantity Always Trumps Quality.

When it comes to software, the same rule applies. If you aren’t building, you aren’t learning. Rather than agonizing over whether you’re building the right thing, just build it. And if that one doesn’t work, keep building until you get one that does.

This is advice that I sincerely need to start following. I tend to have the debilitating problem of starting to work on an idea but never completing it because of constant tweaks and muddles and experiments and refinements ad nauseam. With an approach like that, your results are always incomplete. And when you feel like you can never complete something, you tend to move on to something else (i.e. quit).

When I used to create and record music, it was the same thing. The difference, however, was that there was always something to show for the effort, even if I wasn’t totally satisfied. No matter my perceived flaws, there was still a piece of recorded music I could share with others. But when the code isn’t finished, or the design still “in-flux”, it’s pretty difficult to call it a day and let the beast loose on the world.

I hereby resolve to…oh who am I kidding.