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.

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.

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’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.

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.

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

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.

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