Fire and Gold BETA

Fall 1996 - These are a couple of sketches that eventually lead to the Fire and Gold Photoshop piece. The first was a back view of Shadow Dragon and then the front view that I eventually went with.

Double Rainbow

WIREs Water

The scope of WIREs Water is at the interfaces between five very different intellectual themes: the basic science of water, its physics and chemistry, flux, and things that it transfers and transforms; life in water, and the dependence of ecosystems and organisms on water to survive and to thrive; the engineering of water to furnish services and to protect society; the people who live with, experience and manage the water environment; and those interpretations that we, as a society, have brought to water through art, religion, history and which in turn shapes how we come to understand it. These interfaces are not simply designed to be ways of looking at water through what necessarily must be interdisciplinary perspectives. They are also designed to be outward facing in terms of how water can help to understand wider questions concerning our environment and human-environment interactions.


Coming in 2014:
http://wires.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-811578.html

Pfeiffer Custom Redesign

PfeifferCustom, a service selling custom training material went up about a year and a half ago. Just last Friday, it had its first redesign. Previously, the homepage was a splash advertisement. The new one is more functional and provides a lot of "help" instruction based on experience over the past year. With the growing list of franchises, a more complete top navigation was also created. Now, the user can get to any franchise from any page. The old site had "about" links in the topnav.

Changes include:
- 5 new franchises
- Homepage with instructional rollovers
- Step-by-step videos
- User-friendly top navigation
- Testimonial interviews

Dummies Author Widget

The Dummies author widget was recently redone and went up this Monday. The old version was a very static one where the book was overlaid on a GIF image. This worked up to a certain point because it required the book to be a certain height. The newer portable guides had a taller aspect ratio that would break the widget. So I based the new widget on the Wiley one that went up a couple of weeks ago. The widget now stretches with the height of the book cover, making it compatible with all Dummies guides.

Wiley Author Widget

One of the things that went up in last weekend's build was a new tool that generates widgets like this for authors to use. With it, they could simply enter an ISBN and the little app will generate the code for use on their personal sites and blogs.

It has a clean neutral look so it will fit in well with any page design. It was coded to have a flexible vertical dimension. So it accommodates the wide variety of aspect ratios across all brands and series. Clicking any part of the widget will take user to Wiley.com's multi-retailer page where they'll have several options to buy the advertised book.

Mobile Detection for Android Tablets

Any website that had device detection + redirection created over a year ago will now run into the issue of sending Android tablet users to the mobile version. Detection scripts usually look at the user-agent for the device type, which isn't a problem for Apple because they distinguish "iPhone" from "iPad" for iOS. Android only has a device type of "Android" since they had all phones back then. Even the early tablets were really just phones with larger screens as they shared the same exact OS (2.x) as their smaller siblings. Over the past year Android evolved into a dual device operating system and several manufacturers released popular tablet models. Their device type was still "Android" in the user-agent for everything rather than moving to "Android Phone" and "Android Tablet." Fortunately, they started distinguishing tablet from phone in 3.1. The browser portion of the string has "Safari" for tablets and "Mobile Safari" for phones. So an Android device should get sent to the mobile site if "Android" + "Mobile" are both found in the full string. "Mobile" can't be used as a catch-all term because that word in Apple lingo refers to phones and tablets. Both the iPhone and iPad use "Mobile" in their user-agent strings.

Of course, all of this may change soon as pixel density continues to increase in newer screens and manufacturers release devices that fill in all sizes between 4" phones and 10" tablets!

Crocus Bed SOLD

AARP Bookstore

Here's the address of the new AARP Bookstore by Wiley:

bookstore.aarp.org

So far, we have travel, health, cooking, money and technology e-books available as well as FREE content.

Etsy Feed Update

Previously, Kimengyeo.com was taking a feed for products the artist was selling in her Online Etsy store, SketchyCards. All items used to have the same template and introductory paragraph, so I had ColdFusion strip it out so it wouldn't look repetitive on the page that was parsing the RSS. Just recently, Kim added some new products that no longer followed the template. So the truncation and processing has been removed. Check out new products for sale on SketchyCards by Kim Eng Yeo.

Additionally, the homepage has also been updated with 2012 events.