SOLAERAWEBDESIGN

Yes, it’s been some time since I posted here and I need to confess to a terrible attack of lack of inspiration over the past two months. I’ve been feeling a little disconnected from the work I was trying to get done and it made it hard to post anything of particular import (besides the “I’m still not thrilled about the iPad” post that I considered writing several times).

In the last few days however, I finally got back some motivation to start doing things, and actually put together a whole pile of stuff for my Design 365 blog (which I was/am also behind on). This burst of energy didn’t come out of nowhere, though, and I can actually pin down precisely what caused it. I went over and took a peek at Dribbble, which has only just recently opened for public consumption. It’s a forum for designers and, as near as I can tell, pretty exclusive as to who can get in, and, while very intimidating to look at, also gave me a bit of a jolt. I was suddenly eager to get good enough to get these people’s attentions, and more to the point, I suddenly wanted feedback. (Read more…)

The iPad really seems to have the design and programming communities divided into two camps — “The iPad is God” and “The iPad is Satan.” These arguments are, for the most part, grounded in the question of who the device is targeted for.

Those who believe it is a bad thing are the self-proclaimed geeks, the ones who had hoped the iPad would provide levels of functionality not yet seen in the computing industry. They are primarily disappointed because it did not, in their eyes, live up to the hype that was generated for it, because it does not really seem to present anything new. (Read the rest of this entry.)

This was another WordPress issue which proved surprisingly hard to find information on — coding the WordPress loop for a Page template so that it only displays posts in one post category.

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With Solaera’s site design now (hopefully) settled for a little while, I wanted to take a second to offer some information on an HTML issue which was driving me stark raving bonkers a little while back because I could not figure it out.

WordPress is really not a big fan of letting you use HTML in your posts, but for those of us who regularly use their blogs to discuss web design, it’s useful to be able to post the language itself to be copypasted or discussed. This is, in general coding, what the <pre> or <code> tags are for — to display unformatted HTML code — and I had initially assumed that this practice could carry over to WordPress (in the HTML post panel, obviously, not the Visual one) without any particular enhancement.

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