EliHorne

For those not familiar with Likemind, the brainchild of Noah and Piers, it is a monthly meeting where web people get together for coffee and good conversation, all over the world. I’ll be attending the Brooklyn meetup, graciously hosted by Tina (aka swissmiss) and Katherine.

Last time I had the pleasure of meeting Liz Danzico of Happy Cog fame, and missed Jason Santa Maria by a hair. It was a blast to get to hangout with likeminded people (hence the name) and talk about things you wouldn’t necessarily bring up with friends or people who aren’t in the industry.

who: people like you
what: an opportunity to enjoy coffee and conversation
why: because drinking good coffee with likeminded people is fun
where: At Retreat, 147 Front Street, Brooklyn, DUMBO
when: friday, may 16 at 8:30am

Bonus: I just found a picture from the last event, and I can be seen twice. Can you spot me?

According to The Social, Brighkite was the single most coveted new service/closed beta at Web2.0 conference this year. If you haven’t heard/already received your invitation, Brighkite is sort of like twitter, but based more on geographic location. By using SMS codes, or the web interface (see: has iPhone web app as well), you can update your location to a select group of friends privately, or to the world publicly with the touch of a (couple) buttons. Then any friends within a set perimeter will get an alert saying you are nearby, arrange to meet you, and spend the rest of the day frolicking like little school children. Ok, I made that last part up, but it is a possibility.

For those who remember Google’s ill-fated geolocation attempt called Dodgeball, it is a very similar concept with better UI and an active/fervent user base. I recommend it highly.

As it stands, I have 4 invitations left. Leave a comment with your email in the email field (not the comment field), and I’ll shoot one over your way. I had a real post scheduled for today, but it looks like its going to need a lot more editing before the geek-speak has been pasturized and is fit for human consumption.

I’m shockingly new to the world’s favorite VOIP service, but while logging in today for my video conference call with swissmiss and co, I got the following almost instantly:

Hello Elihorne, the adult hottest singles online matchmaking service with full best features and over 6 million members. Free join now!

http://www.*****.com [domain removed because I refuse to support the bastard]

The fact that a free service is prone to spam is not a new concept, but I’m confounded as to how they found me, and why. Is there a public timeline like on twitter? I don’t list my skype username on my website (even though I suppose it wasn’t hard to guess if I were actually being targeted…).

Does everyone suffer from this? On the upside, I discovered the “block” feature. Yay for forced learning.

Check out this music video made entirely using Mac OS applications and utilities. I passed over this video as a couple of my favorite blogs posted about it, but it wasn’t until I stopped to watch it that I realized how amazing it is.

It is tough to even comprehend the time that must have gone into the final product.

Oh yea, the song isn’t bad either. via swissmiss and a small army.

While I work on the aforementioned forthcoming design that has a much more robust search/navigation system, I felt it important to note that this site does have a search bar.

I love to think that people use the tags on the left of each post to get to related content, but I know deep down it isn’t very efficient, and is a very uni-directional funnel into one type of content. After either striking gold or striking out, the visitor has to start back at the top, which can be very discouraging.

Before I release this theme to the public, I’ll add a readily available search bar. In the meantime, here’s the trick: Throw a 404 error.

Like this: http://elihorne.com/404/. Bam. Search bar.

Apologies for the after-thought nature of its location, but for the time being, it gets the job done!

Although I spent the better part of this weekend in Ayer, Massachusetts participating in a family-run 5k, I managed to squeeze some development time on my upcoming WordPress theme.

While the main goal was to facilitate search and encourage stickiness, I’ve decided that this theme is a nice time to stray away from my previously rigid “font-family: ‘helvetica neue,’ helvetica, arial, sans-serif;.” As it stands right now, I’ve got sans-serifs as the body text, and mostly serifs as the headings/titles. The problem is that I rarely use serifs. So rarely, that I’m not even familiar with their list of “readily available” typefaces to the online community. So now I come to ask you, “what do you use?” Sure I could google it, but I’d rather hear your tips, tricks, and opinions. Also, I’d like to avoid sIFR if possible.

Inspiration:

• Coudal’s Seed Conference (not for semantic or code purposes. Purely presentation)
• Jon Tangerine. That logo? Not an image.
• I Love Typography ‘cept not so honkingly huge.

How do you feel about mixed type? Are big sizes dead? How small is too small?

HTC premiered their new Touch Diamond handset today, and judging by the pictures, it looks like someone actually layered on a nice “looking” user interface on top of the crap-stack that is Windows Mobile.

Considering the wealth of talented designers that list their portfolios and availability on the internet, I’m always shocked by how rare it is to find consumer electronics (from places that don’t rhyme with “schmupertino”) that “get it.”

It is quite possible that my opinion would change upon closer inspection as it does look like it flirts with “too much detail” when minimalism is in vogue, but the engadget screenshots present a visually lush phone with enough eye-candy to displace the failed LG’s and Samsung’s of yesterday.

The real moment of judgment occurs when you have to use these things. Too often, phones trade responsiveness and intuitive controls for glossy images and over-the-top animations. I got to play with HTC last generation Touch while at dinner with JS-developer/globe-trotter Chris Heilmann, and what stood out the most for me was how hard and repeatedly I had to swipe at the screen to navigate. This is diametrically opposed to the user experience of the iPhone and iPod touch, where it isn’t pressure but intent that the software seems to detect.

Check out the full Engadget review with photos here, and tell me what you think.

First off: I would never be building a page without a doctype unless I had no other choice. Let’s get that clear. In all honesty, I don’t think I’ve ever had to suffer through Internet Explorer’s quirks mode because I’ve always built my sites using HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0 (both strict).

I’ve been working on building the new header and footer for one of our larger properties at work, and it just so happens that this site launched on a flavor of Vignette that wasn’t conducive to a doctype. So here we are years down the road, trying to update pieces of it without breaking others. A little investigation would probably allow you to narrow it down to 2 or 3 properties, but I’m not going to name names.

For those who aren’t familiar with web development, if you lack or have an incomplete doctype declared at the top of your page, you will trigger quirks mode as opposed to standards mode. This little omission causes stuff to go crazy. No, really. Even after pulling in the YUI CSS reset, I’m encountering an amazing bug in IE 6 and 7. It is as follows:

I have a form. Inside that form, I have an input. That input has a background: url(images/input-bg.png) no-repeat left top;. Note that I intentionally didn’t declare the attachment. Also note that this input has a fixed width in hard pixels. And it is within another container with a fixed width, only big enough for the input, a button, and a span of descriptive text.

Normally (as it does it Safari and Firefox), when you insert more text than the width of the input field, your text begins to scroll, but the background image stays put, creating the illusion that you are typing “inside” of the image container.

It is a swell effect. Except that in quirks mode, the entire background-image begins to slide off to the left and slides behind the fixed width container it lives within. And yes, right top causes it to slide off in the opposite direction.

Eli, you are an idiot. Why didn’t you set the attachment? Funny you should ask. Turns out, if you set it to fixed, the ENTIRE background disappears in IE7.

Oddly enough, this fixes it in IE6, but that only serves to aggravate me further. I’ve tried triggering hasLayout with zoom:1, and just about every other trick I could think of.

Sam, who had his first day at the office today, pointed me to a comment on Zeldman’s blog where someone else was having the same problem, although nobody proposed a solution.

I’m about 2 *hacks away from making IE7 just show the form elements in their default state and calling it a day, except that now my curiousity has really been piqued and I want to say that I squashed this bug once and for all. So now I turn to you, fellow web peoples. Have you seen or heard of this before? Know of a fix? I’m dying to close this case.

Bonus: Meet Sam!

A quick perusal of TUAW today yielded an article about how Apple might be working on an iPhone app that would be able to play shared media from your other computers. I found it particularly funny because I had been pondering a similar feature late last night and was even going to post about it. But now I have to.

This is so backwards it isn’t even funny. I mean, yea, being able to play local media on your remote device is cool because then you don’t have to bog down what limited storage space you have, but the order of control is going the wrong way.

Remote controls take effect on something out of reach, and change that device’s activity. Having a 200gig music library on your iPhone is only useful if you are within your home network, at which point you could probably just set iTunes to a playlist or Party Shuffle, and then ideally, pipe the music through your Airport Express.

Now it seems we’ve stumbled across something. The music is now playing across your whole house, instead of just in your little headphones or iPod-compatible speaker product. This is way better, but wait.. in order to change that track I have to go all the way over to the computer, shake the mouse and click through to the next track. Wouldn’t it be great if we had an Apple-compatible device with a nice screen and intuitive controls that was network-enabled and it was already in our pockets? LIKE THE IPHONE??

We’ve already got “screen sharing,” a Cupertino-refreshed flavor of VNC, and I’ve used an iPhone port that worked great back when my Touch was jailbroken (living the straight and narrow these days). Now imagine being able to get track information, remix playlists and increase the volume all with a swipe of the finger, from anywhere on the network. Apple TV functionality would be a no-brainer.

In all honestly, my original post was just that you should be able to play music from your portable Wifi device straight to an Airport Express, negating the need for physical cable hookup, but the backwards nature of this rumor got me worked up.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about being able to watch my movies and play my music on my iPod without having the sync it. But we can all agree that the bits are flowing backwards in that scenario. It’s manipulation of the mothership, the server, that we want remotely.

Please, Steve?

This is what MySpace has come to? I found this gem while doing some internet sleuthing (which has been known to occasionally and unpleasantly lead to a profile).

Tom even blogged about it. Turns out he blogs about phishing too. Gotta love his conversational tone. Too bad he’s an artificial creation.

The sweeping statement this makes about the site and its users says more than I ever could about why I deleted my account almost a year ago.