Well, I finally got around to officially launching SparrowVisual.com. It was originally due in January, but my heavy workload wouldn’t allow for it…and I’m thankful for that.

From here on out, I’ll be diverting design-related posts to the Sparrow site, and reserving this blog for more personal stuff. Nerdliness and matters of faith will be imminent in both sites because I can’t deny those things.

So, of the 2 of you who subscribe to this RSS feed, I would imagine that at least 25% of you would also enjoy the Sparrow Journal.

Back to work.

I’m happy to announce that I’ll now be doing business as Sparrow Visual.

December 1 marked my first day of being a full-time self-employed designer, and so far its been a great week. I’m currently working on a custom website for a photographer in Arizona, which should launch before Christmas. You can check out the landing page at lyralyra.com.

It’s been exciting and humbling to see the Lord provide for us. I’m sure that our faith will be stretched all the more as the months and years go on, but it will be good to be reminded that He is the one who feeds the birds of the air and clothes the lilies of the field. And if He says that we are more valuable than the sparrows and flowers, then we will be well provided for.

The Rissington Podcast is one of the nerd podcasts I listen to regularly. It’s hosted by Jon Oxton and John Hicks, two well-respected and talented designers from the UK. Their show primarily relies on questions sent in from listeners, and they often plead with their audience to send in questions. Until this last episode (12), I hadn’t heard them specify that they wanted good questions that related to design or technology. So I wrote the following email to see how desperate they truly were.

Greetings gents,

I am considering picking up a British accent because they have become quite popula’ here in the states. Are there any books you have read that have helped you refine your own accents, or did you take private lessons? Also, why is it that in sci-fi films, people from other planets always speak with British accents? Also are there any differences in the written languages of American English and Englandish English? For example, when you folks across the pond say, “Darling, would care for more sugar and mustard in your tea?” would you spell everything as I just did, or would it be more like “Dahling, would you caiah foh moh sugah and mustahd in yoh tea?”

Thank you for your helpful insights and have a lovely day.

Nate Sees

P.S. My father lived in England for a couple years when he was about 5 years old. His is called Larry. Do you perhaps know anyone who knew him? He doesn’t have a British accent.

I was very pleased to have my question(s) answered in detail by the Jo(h)ns in Episode 12. (Mom, if you don’t want to wade through the vulgarity that sometimes crops up, fast forward to about 9:13 and you’ll hear my name broadcast on the Internet in a grand British accent).

Tally ho!

I’ve never been good about consistently backing up my hard drive. Hence, I have lost a fair amount of files due to crashes. Now that I work at home on my own equipment, I’ve been searching for a reliable backup solution. My first thought was to get a massive external hard drive, specifically a gigabit network attached drive that I could plug into my wireless router and access it from multiple computers. But those proved to be pretty expensive, and external hard drives (in my experience) have proved to be less reliable than internal drives.

I’m really glad I never bought anything because I recently purchased JungleDisk, a utility powered by Amazon S3. First of all, S3 is a fairly new service for storing and serving static content. JungleDisk is a simple tool that lets you access your S3 bucket from your local file system, and shows up as a network drive on your computer. Since all the files are stored on S3, the reliability factor is a googilian times better than an external hard drive. Cost is another plus. Jungle disk costs $20, one time. They also offer an upgraded service for $1/month with some added functionality. S3 has it’s own separate pricing, based on file usage and bandwidth, but it’s dirt cheap, too. I think my bill last month was like $0.44.

So, even if I ended up spending upwards of $3/month, it would still take years to equal the amount I would pay upfront for an external hard drive…which would probably fail in a couple years anyway.

I just found this video on waxy.org. If your a nerd, I guarantee you’ll enjoy this. (If you don’t enjoy it, rejoice in the fact that you’re not a nerd).

Based on the lingo and production quality, I would have guessed that this video was from the ’80s. But it’s actually from ‘95, which doesn’t seem that long ago. Maybe that’s a sign of age.

Well, one week into my initial test, none of the search engines have indexed my secret word. Maybe I need to be more patient. But if my patience is in fact sufficient, I would venture to say that the first two test pages I built are unsatisfactory to Google, Yahoo, and MSN. So I added 2 more pages with some altered code. I’ll give it another week and see if the big 3 will be nicer to me. Speaking of being nice, maybe I was not being cordial enough to their spiders in my first post. Here’s another go:

Dear Google, Yahoo, and MSN,

I bid you good tidings. You are hereby invited to partake of the scrumptious content of Nate’s Testing Grounds for Search Engine Optimization for Flash Websites. Index as much as you please.

Your BFF,
Nate

My apologies to those of you who only check this site for the latest gossip on your favorite superhero. But, in an effort to further conceal my secret identity, here is some stuff that should reinforce my civilian-like career as a nerd.

I’m testing to see if the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) will recognize and index different types of HTML markup. I’m am entering the realm of what other nerds call Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

So far, no search engines (that I’m aware of) recognize any text or content inside flash movies. Therefore, if I create a super-fancy, all-flash website, it won’t be ranked on the major search engines as high as an HTML site with the same content. Fortunately, Geoff Stearns’ SWFObject offers a great resolution to this issue, but there are still some things I would like to find out with respect to the different indexing algorithms used by the search engines at hand.

So, without further adieu, I would like to invite the spiders from Google, Yahoo, and MSN to get on your marks…get set…go!

I’ll be checking the ranking of a made-up word on each of those seach engines to see how they rank the test pages. If you’ve actually read this far, you will probably be interested in a fantastic test by Mike Davidson on Google’s ranking results.

Live long and prosper. And go pound another Mountain Dew…you deserve it.

Through an email from Sitepoint, I recently discovered VectorMagic, which is a tool to convert bitmap images to vector graphics. (For those who are not nerds and/or graphics enthusiasts, you will not hurt my feelings if you stop reading right now.) Vector Magic is a vector conversion Flex application built by some geniuses at Stanford. Though this is not a new idea, the Stanford guys have really stepped up the quality of output, which happens to be leaps and bounds about Adobe Illustrator’s fairly new LiveTrace feature (arguably the best tool for vectorizing bitmaps…until now).

The samples prove the quality. And best of all, it’s a free online app! I can’t wait to actually use it.

Yesterday, Todd bought me an iPhone in exchange for some design work. After a few unsuccessful attempts at updating my blog, I found a Wordpress admin plugin for the iPhone and so far it works great.