Here’s some links I’ve discovered this month that provided me with some inspiration. Be it inspiration to code or to design or to just get something done, hope they provide the same to you.

http://www.uncontrol.com/ - Algorithmic art at it’s finest. I found this through a link to "#55 - Clock" but have found any other one I click on is just as fascinating. Best of all they graciously open sourced these projects and provide them for download.

http://www.firerift.com/ - Who knew a CMS could have such a cool commercial? Looks like a promising alternative, it’s coming very soon so we’ll see if it can live up to that commercial.

http://photosynth.net/ - I’m sure many of you are familiar with this 3D photo offering from Microsoft, I remember being wowed by it a long while ago. But it just got better, they’ve opened it up to the public so now anyone can register and upload photos that can ultimately be shared with those of someone else. Can’t wait to see what monuments are made ’synthy’.

http://fallingsandgame.com/sand/fall1.html - Not much for inspiration but it’s an awesome way to get away for a few minutes and clear your head. Deceptively simple game with no real point but still manages to be extremely fun.

It’s not too often that I find a good reason to make a site scroll exclusively horizontally rather than the easier and generally more accepted vertically but I’ve found myself in that situation recently and finding support on the subject was minimal at best so i felt it prudent to share what I’ve found to help those of you that need a horizontally scrolling site. Any searches I tried in Google were referencing how to get rid of the horizontal scroll, how to avoid the horizontal scrollbar and just how bad the horizontal scroller is in general. That is until I found a website dedicated to it called The Horizontal Way. Not only is it a showcase of sites that have used the horizontal way of display, it’s also a fine example of a horizontal display in itself. Definitely worth a bookmark for that rare occasion when you want to go against the grain of web standards.

Linotype Font Management - A free font manager that works like magic! Good Things Should Never End - I totally agree, fun site too. McCain Potato Parade - I never had this much fun with potatoes before. Opt Out PreScreen - Save a few trees and get less crap in the mail.

I recently had the opportunity to delve deeper into MySQL and how to optimize and generally better my database structure and queries. There’s a lot of information on this topic so I thought i’d share the top ten things that matter to me when creating and querying databases.

1. Make the fields of your tables as small as possible, if you know a varchar field is never going to need a value more than 10 characters, set it to varchar(10).
2. Always use auto Increment IDs in your tables, even if you don’t expect you’ll need them now they always seem to come in handy.
3. Index all the fields you will be querying directly, especially those that you know an exact value for.
4. Normalize the data structure as much as possible, duplicate data is just more for the server to wade through when running a query.
5. If you’re querying something against a number e.g.( WHERE x = 12 ) there’s no need to use quotes around the number value, this actually slows down the query because it needs to convert from a string to a number.
6. Limit the use of LIKE and the % wildcard e.g.(WHERE userName LIKE %Woods%) as this slows the query considerably. If you know that the value is always going to be at the beginning of a field, be sure to only use the wildcard at the end to speed up the query e.g.(WHERE userName LIKE Woods%).
7. Multiple field indexes are good at speeding up queries but be aware that the first field in the index must be the first item from that index searched in the query or the whole thing won’t be used the way you intended.
8. Be aware that there is a cost to indexing, both in time and space. Indexes speed up select queries but slow down deletes and inserts and basically any other queries that involve writing to the DB. The more indexes a table has the slower these write queries will be because the indexes have to be changed with the data. The indexes also take up disk space which may cause a database to reach its disk limit more quickly. The practical implication of both these factors is that if you don’t need a particular index to help queries perform better, don’t create it.
9. Use the EXPLAIN keyword with your query to get important information on the query including the possible keys and estimated rows that will need to be searched to find a result. Especially handy with multiple table queries with joins.
10. Be careful with joins, if used incorrectly they can slow down a query considerably. Values from the preceding table (as listed in the output of EXPLAIN) are used to find rows in the current table. So if you have three tables each with 1000 rows to search you’re actually returning 1,000,000,000 rows of data. Obviously this is too many and indexes should be employed to reduce this number to something more manageable.

Some of you fine professionals may already know of this new Adobe approved IE fix, but if you don’t, this is the post for you! Let’s start with the JS file you’re going to need. Create a new document in your favorite web editing tool (ie. Dreamweaver, Zend, NotePad). And you’ll need to past this in as your JavaScript File: Download Here: swfObject If you want the specifics on what this file does, let me know, or just drop by adobe’s site and search for swfObject. Now for where you want to embed your flash file. You’ll be using the SWFObject to insert the .swf of your choice with the following: <div id="flashFix">
<script type="text/javascript">
var so = new SWFObject("Style-85-P-E-cp.swf", "flashFix", "631", "526", "7", "#fff");
so.addParam("wmode", "transparent");
so.write("flashFix");
</script>
</div> (be sure to remove the spaces) A quick run down: “flashFix is the div in which the .swf will be embedded. 500 is the width of the movie, 250 is the height. “7″ is the flash player you’ve published your movie for and the #fff is the background color if one is desired. What so.addParam(”wmode”, “transparent”); is is the ability to display the .swf file without a background. Besides being very search engine-friendly, SWFObject degrades gracefully, can be used in valid HTML and XHTML 1.0 documents (that is, when pages are sent as text/html instead of application/xhtml+xml), and is forward-compatible. It should work for years to come. It’s so nice to have this “Fix” validate and work in all browsers. Test it out, feel free to drop any questions. Enjoy! -T

Found these sites through a friend, they really take the concept of ‘wall design’ to the extreme. Check them out! WallDesign Blik

A free online ‘zine worth checking out, http://www.websitemagazine.com/

Absolutely loving all the links over at http://www.kayodeok.btinternet.co.uk/favorites/webdesign.htm. It seems that some were broken when I tried but all in all another great bookmark resource!

Icons are a great way of sprucing up online applications by adding that little bit of intricacy and design to an otherwise boring site full of text links. Creating your own icons are great but what about those of you (oh who am I kidding, us) that are uninspired or pressed for time? Lucky for you (us) there are quite a few resources to gather icons from such as The Iconfactory and HybridWorks to name a few

We’ve always been told that you can find the beauty in and draw inspiration from anything. Well here’s one interesting place, Japanese Manhole Covers displays tons of simply beautiful manhole covers. Another resource to draw inspiration from is Speak Up’s Word It. According to them Word It is…

your opportunity to express in as many words, and as many other graphic elements as you need, what best describes each monthly topic. Each month we will choose a specific topic, idea or theme. For example: the first theme was “inspiration.” So you would go home, or do it at work, and find words, images, artwork, whatever that best describes what inspiration means to you. It could be anything: music, cats, chocolate, museum, love, laundry. Anything that reflects what inspiration is to you. You can do whatever you want to it: vectorize it, photoshop it, scan it or build it and then send it to us.

A few sites to draw inspiration from… http://www.okaydave.com/ http://www.mylkhead.com http://www.starvingeyes.com

FINALLY! The hardest browser to code for is one step closer to being dead. microsoft announced that as of the new year they will not issue new security updates for the mac Internet Explorer. They suggest, rather, that people start using “more recent web browsing technologies such as Apple’s Safari”. All us hardcore coders that try to design and code for accessibility in all browsers can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I’m not going to stop testing in Mac IE but I will start to put less weight on making everything pixel perfect in the now defunct browser.

I just stumbled across this site Level Ten Design in my random web browsing and really liked the way they organized their portfolio. It’s got a map legend kinda feel so it’s not only a familiar organization but easily viewable as well. Check it out and post a reply on what you think of it as well.

Displaced Designer is a resource for those in the creative industry recently displaced by the on-going situation in New Orleans and the surrounding region. On that site, designers without jobs and design firms all around the country can connect with eachother. Any design firms with empty seats can offer it to someone who needs to get back on their feet. If you or someone you know has an opening, go on over to Displaced Designer and fill out the form. After seeing all the coverage of the devastation, I think offering someone this kind of opportunity is better than anything else one person could do. You’d essentially offer someone a chance to get back on their feet and become self sufficient again.

I’ve been keeping tabs on a great site called LironBot for well over a year now. It’s run by a clever 23 year-old American Israeli named Liron, who is currently living just outside of Tel Aviv, Israel. First I was pulled in by her blog and more recently by her new Lironbot Podcast. She just so happened to start it approximately the same week I got my iPod so it seemed only fitting that hers would be the first I would subscribe to. After just 5 podcasts she’s already amassed a following of devoted listeners (myself included). Give both a shot and let her know that D3 sent ya!