Fresh and Responsive - SASS and Drupal 7 Starter Themes

Hey party people. I bet you were wondering what is going on in the life of Brian Danowski's website.

Well, let me fill you in.

I just shipped out an update with some improvements.

The site is running on drupal 7. I had some weird bugs from when I upgraded from 6 to 7, but this update finally fixed those.

I went pretty minimal on the theme. It still needs some work, but it's an improvement on what I was working with.

The base theme is a sub theme of sasson.

I am indeed using sass, but I'm a little weirded out that sasson includes a sass compiler in the theme. I did check out a decent number of starter themes.

Freaking Awesome Social CSS Buttons

I linked to these buttons in my first Web Design and Development Resources post, but I am going to devote a post just to these buttons because they are so sweet.

I love the simplicity and the colors. If only the buttons a little more "chunk". Like the pinterest "log in with facebook or twitter" buttons.

The icons are done with data urls. This is an ok technique, but depending on your situation you might also want to consider using a glyph font like Pictos or Font Awesome.

Link to fiddle: regular & full screen

Web Site To Do

I have a list of things that I would like to do to improve this website.

I thought it might be fun to make the list open.

1. Move nav to left side of screen
2. Make left nav static
3. Figure out what to do with front page
4. I tried to set this site up with vertical rhythm, but I didn't know what I was doing. Now I understand a little better and would like to go back and make sure I did it right (I'm pretty sure I didn't).
5. Integrate a framework like Zurb Foundation, Chico UI, or Bootstrap.
6. If I don't go with bootstrap, get some more icons poppin: http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/

Design and Development Resources

Zurb Foundation

http://foundation.zurb.com/
http://foundation.zurb.com/docs/

Nice collection of css and javascript specifically designed for rapid prototyping.

grid, buttons, ui and more

It's like a classier bootstrap with a few less features.

You can use it with just plane ol css, but it has some nice gems to use with compass and or rails (sinatra?).

I especially like their "nice" buttons.

CSS Deck

Collection of html and css based doo dads and thingamajigs that may or may not be useful. http://cssdeck.com/

It's like combination of css zen garden and dribble - sorta.

I think some of the pure css stuff is a little silly, but this has a lot of great examples of shiny buttons.

Here are a few of my favorites:

FCC Affiliate Disclosure

Hey Beautiful.

I wrote this blog post specifically to let you know that I am trying to make money from you.

On this website I may link to things that you might end up buying.

I'm going to make it clear (hopefully) when I am and am not sending you through affiliate links, but as a general rule you should assume that all of the links on my site are affiliate links.

I'm going to start out with Amazon affiliate links, but I will be pimping more stuff soon.

My promise to you is that I will do my best to only pimp good stuff.

Having said that, here is my disclosure that I ripped off from here.

5 Hour Energy is Suing My Favorite Generic Energy Shot Manufacturer

Aaron Dentel-Post for Bevnet

Reinvigorating the claims of a 2008 lawsuit that was dismissed by the Oakland County Circuit Court, the suit claims that Kevin Zwierzchowski, formerly Innovation Ventures’ controller and operations manager, took trade secret formulas along with a customer and vendor list when he was terminated from the company. According to Innovation Ventures, Zwierzchowski then shared them with Derrick George, the president and CEO of Aspen Fitness, when he was hired by George and received between $1,000 and $2,000 in consultation fees.

Podcast Watch: TBTL - Too Beautiful To Live

TBTL (Too Beautiful To Live) is a wonderful (somewhat mindless) podcast. I heard about this podcast when the host, Luke Burbank contributed a piece to This American Life.

TBTL started out as a talk radio show in Seattle, but was canceled. Now it lives on in the internet. The scrappy crew of the podcast includes Luke, Jen, and sometimes the lovable and zany Sean.

The show is a weird mix of quaint cult hit and culture commentary. It is a daily show, so there are a lot of hours to fill. Luke has enough connections that there are often fairly famous guests, but his self loathing keeps the show from getting too big of a head.

If you are looking for a lot of hours of entertainment I suggest you give TBTL a listen.

5 Free iPhone Apps for Thanksgiving and Black Friday

In preparation for my family’s Thanksgiving get together, I dove into the AppShopper App to look at some apps that have recently been price dropped to free for Thanksgiving.

It turns out there are a bunch of great app’s that have been temporarily price dropped to free for Thanksgiving.

Here are my top 5:

3do - The next generation of reminder apps By Cleversome


Regular price: $4.99

Price today: FREE

This is yet another to do list application, but the interface is pretty nice. You can easily add new tasks, and once you have captured them, you swipe the task to trigger a 3d animation to toggle between setting due dates, checking the task off as complete, etc.

Price of Apple's Potential Future Products Not Priced In

Horace Deidu at Asymco

The consensus is that the value of future, unknown products is zero. Not only that but the probability that there will be any products at all is equally zero. Not only that but whatever Apple does to create new products is not perceptibly valuable. The company is simply the sum-of-the-product-parts and nothing more. Cash flows from current products can easily be shown to be more than the current valuation so even these products are deeply discounted. If and when a new product shows up, it will be considered and maybe if it shows promise, the stock will reflect that, briefly.

Seeking Sexy Beta Testers - StackBrain GTD Web App

Greetings,

I am writing you today to ask for your help.

I am seeking members for my fierce pirate crew of beta testers. In my spare time, I have been developing a task management application to help in my project management duties at Benzinga. It's still fairly rough, but I find it very useful.

I took my inspiration from the beautiful and great OmniFocus, but this is a website so it is available from any computer with the internet. It will shrink down to a phone size, and you can sort your task lists into projects and contexts.

My Wardrobe

*This post might get updated with more details like socks and shoes*

I have gotten rid of almost all of my clothes.

**The wardrobe contains:**

* 3 Moose Jaw brand blue polo (golf?) shirts.
* 2 pair Element brand grey pants.

older posts ->

A Few Notes On Taking Drupal Mobile

Here are my updated thoughts on mobile and drupal.

Recently I one of my blog posts about my Drupal 6 mobile theme instillation has been getting a few hits every day.

I have been doing a lot more coding sense I wrote that blog, and if you can manage it, you should write your own mobile theme... sort of.

Nowadays I would suggest you take a look at what the cool kids are calling Responsive Web Design.

Responsive web design is a paradigm shift away from binary mobile and non mobile thinking.

Responsive web design uses css media queries to serve up certain styles to certain devices.

This empowers the web magician to craft his or her app/site to provide the best experience possible on the ever increasing range of web capable devices.

For example, you might want to specifically target Apple's Retina screen to serve up higher resolution pictures to keep your site looking spectacular on high dpi screens.

Offline Web Apps - Cache Manifest Madness

I'm studying up to make superpostr work offline.

Here are some notes about the cache manifest. Still figuring out how I'm going to store the task data.

http://kentbrewster.com/backchannel/

Important: Why This Didn’t Work the First Time I Tried It

Unless you’ve been reading ahead, chances are excellent that your Web server won’t send main.manifest with the proper content type. If your server sends your manifest as text/plain, it is guaranteed to silently fail. What you want is text/cache-manifest. To make it work, I added the following directive to my Apache .htaccess file:

AddType text/cache-manifest .manifest
To make sure it was working, I used Web-Sniffer to make sure my Content-Type was being set correctly:

http://diveintohtml5.org/offline.html

drupal recipe - simple and powerful photo blogging with drupal 7

*disclaimer* This tutorial isn't quite done. I wrote it after figuring out how to setup a way to post a blog with pictures and multiple sections. I am possibly going to be too lazy to go in and finish this up with pictures and a few links. It could also use a good edit, but for now, I am not worrying about it :)

I would say that if you are super concerned about clarifying screenshots, you should leave a comment, but I don't have comments turned on. Instead, tweet at me.

Also, the irony of a pictureless blog post about how to setup a picture blog is not lost on me.

Allright. Now let's get down to it.

**step0**

One of the big deals about drupal 7 is the improved media handling. This is great, because I have always had trouble posting pictures into my drupal blog ... until now.

Theme Update

*update*: 7/23/2011 - Ok I updated the type a little. My next step is to do some work on the drupal site building front.

Ok, so today I designed myself a new webpage.

It is a little over the top, but I like it.

It is still a work in progress (I don't think spacing will show up between these paragraphs at the time of publication), but I was too excited about the new design to wait until it was perfect.

The site is running on drupal 7.

It is a little responsive, but not really. Fine tuning the snap points for the different resolutions will be fun, but I need to wait until another day for that.

I am most pleased with the "get to know brian danowski" box. I though of putting a follow button in at the very end, and I have to say looks so good you would think I planned it from the beginning.

Depending on how wide your browser window is you should see the box at either the bottom of the page or in the right sidebar.

Drupal 7 oh my

I have updated to the newest version of Drupal.

In the process I did some much needed clean up.

When I updated, part of the process is removing all non essential modules.

This took down my portfolio.

I will probably put it back up at some point, but maybe not.

Now that I have gone through the process once, I am comfortable that I could do it with my other Drupal sites at some point.

I will probably fancy the site up eventually, but for now the bartik theme reigns supreme. I like the simplicity.

Also I will want to move from bluehost to linode eventually and at some point I would love to get down and dirty with varnish.

For now, I will declare victory and sign out until another day.

Some Random PHP Notes

php notes

for a self referencing form, you can use this:

<form method="post" action="" <?php echo $_SERVER('PHP_SELF') ?>">

Foreach is useful for looping through elements in an array.

foreach ($customers as $customer) {
echo $customer;
};

In that example, the loop goes through each element n $customers, and inside the loop, the actual piece of the array can be accessed by whatever you set with the as. In this case, that is $customer

Veggies, Weeds, and Writing

So I have started (again) to develop the writing habit. At first I thought the best way to make it easy for myself would be to break this thing down into two steps.

I thought, first I would get in the habit of writing, and then after that habit was firmly implanted, I would get into the habit of editing my writing.

I got this trick from Leo from Zen Habits. One of his sites talks about building 6 habits a year so you can really focus on developing just one new habit at a time.

In theory that makes building the habits realistic .

This makes pretty good sense because in the past I have tried to cram an enormous load of new stuff down my brain hole all at once, and the results never justify the amount of energy that is input.

The one huge flaw with this plan that I developed of breaking this thing into little pieces, is writing and editing are inseparable.

Drupal 6 Mobile Theme

I just installed a mobile theme.

It is working ok out of the box.

On my iPod, it works well in portrait mode, but less well in landscape mode.

Here's how I did it.

Note: I am running Drupal 6.

The first piece of this puzzle is the mobile theme module: http://drupal.org/project/mobile_theme

This module lets you choose a different theme for mobile visitors.

It has a dependency on the browscap module: http://drupal.org/project/browscap

Next I needed to choose a mobile theme. I went with the nokia mobile theme: http://drupal.org/project/nokia_mobile

Enable the 2 modules and the new theme.

Choose the theme that should be used for mobile users on this page: your_drupal_site/admin/build/themes/settings

Pages

Subscribe to Brian Danowski RSS

Privacy Policy