Now Hiring: Web Designer
March 16th, 2006
The University of Guelph is looking for a Web Designer.
We’re looking for someone with formal education in Graphic Design, Marketing or Media and 3 years’ working as a full-time web designer. Qualified candidates must demonstrate advanced knowledge and ability with graphic design, as well as current web design and development trends and techniques. The individual should have a solid understanding of web standards, online culture, and be adept at using online resources for continuous self-directed learning.
Located in southwestern Ontario, the University of Guelph is about an hour’s drive from Toronto. The campus is known for its green space and blend of contemporary and traditional architecture. There are excellent recreation and sports facilities and running trails in our 408-acre arboretum. The City of Guelph is surrounded by rural areas and has an eclectic mix of rural and urban amenities. The city hosts internationally recognized folk, jazz and writer’s festivals, and offers cycling and hiking trails, a performing arts centre and a new sports and entertainment centre.
If you’re the person for the job, but feel a little rusty with resume writing and preparing for interviews, here’s a great article to get you started: How to Get a Job in the Web Industry.
Rob Schrab’s Crooked Teeth
March 14th, 2006
Directions is a series of 11 Short Films inspired by the 11 tracks on Death Cab for Cutie’s grammy nominated album Plans. This week features Rob Schrab’s video for Crooked Teeth—a DIYtastic mix of cardboard and rubber band puppets, stop-motion animation, and post-production graphics. When you consider it has dragons, pirates, mummies and robots, what more could you really ask for?
In the mid-nineties Rob Schrab wrote, illustrated and self-published the cult comic book Scud: the Disposable Assasin. Along with Dan Harmon, he also wrote and produced the TV pilot “Heat Vision and Jack” which starred Jack Black and Owen Wilson, with directing by Ben Stiller. Unfortunately the network decided to pass on the show, something about it being “too funny”, and it was never aired.
This led to Rob and Dan creating Channel 101, a monthly competition to create 5 minute pilots for fictitious TV shows. Rob started mixing puppets and greenscreen to create his shows in a technique he calls “Draw-less Animation”.
I’ve been a fan of Rob’s work since I first saw his short film Robot Bastard, a carboard robot sci-fi epic. However, Crooked Teeth is close competition for the title of best cardboard robot film ever. I’ve probably watched it about a dozen times already, and each time I see something else I want to ask him about.
Fortunately I’m going to be doing some work with Rob over the next few weeks, and might be able to trick him into sharing some of his secrets with me. I will of course, share those tips with you.
Stay tuned!
Lowdown Plugin for Movable Type
March 10th, 2006
While this blog uses Wordpress, at work I still have a few sites built using Movable Type. One of those sites is an events calendar, and I had been working on a iCAL template so that I could easily import the events into other calendars. Getting the file to work with iCalShare was pretty easy, but one of the older systems at work was a bit fussy. It didn’t like any of the special characters, like accented vowels or curly quotes that invariably crept into the event descriptions.
I spent quite a while looking for a way to remove all of these characters, but all the existing plugins and filters seemed to leave some of them behind. I spent some time thinking about using Brad Choate’s Regex plugin, but after double-checking Movable Type’s Global tag attribute filters I found what I was looking for. Sort of.
dirify also converts certain high-ASCII characters (accented characters, etc) to low-ASCII characters, meaning that something like crudité will be converted to crudite. For example, if the value of the tag without this attribute were Foo “Baz” is< br /> Bar!, the dirified version would be foo_baz_is_bar.
Yes—that’s what I wanted, but without the underscores, and usable for much longer blocks of text.
Fortunately Adam Kalsey and Crys Clouse had written code to improve the dirify feature, and using that as a starting point I made the changes to create the new global filter I needed. Something that would convert the high-ASCII characters down to low-ASCII, and strip out all the extra characters and line-breaks I didn’t need.
Lowdown.pl
Version 1.0
Lowdown removes extra information to displays plain text in Movable Type. It converts certain high-ASCII characters (accented characters, etc) to low-ASCII characters, strips HTML tags, and changes line breaks to spaces.
Installation: save Lowdown.txt as Lowdown.pl and upload it to your Movable Type ‘plugins’ directory
Usage Example: < $MTEntryBody lowdown="1"$>
This can be helpful when generating some types of feeds (eg. iCAL, RSS). If anyone is interested, I could also post the iCAL template for Movable Type that I developed that uses the Lowdown plugin.
Update
You can now get the lowdown directly from Six Apart’s Plugin Directory.
X-Ray Update Displays ID and Class Attributes
March 3rd, 2006
It’s been a couple of week’s since I posted an update—and time to get things back in gear.
Here’s another update to the X-Ray Extension, bringing us up to version 0.7 and adding display of class and id attributes for elements. This was a frequently requested feature, and now that it’s added I think it really adds to the extension. X-Ray will show the tags, class and id names for content generated by external javascript files, which makes integrating generated content like news feeds into your site’s design a bit easier.
The update.rdf file seems to be behaving a little unpredictably, so if Firefox doesn’t tell you an update to the extension is available you can install from here:
Install X-Ray Extension for Firefox
X-Ray is now available from the official Firefox Add-ons site as well, for the people who only install extensions listed there. As of this post they’re still showing version 0.6, but 0.7 should be available soon.
Thanks again for all the support. 
X-Ray Extension Updated
February 12th, 2006
For everyone who has been patiently waiting for the X-Ray extension to be updated to work with Firefox 1.5.0.1—here it is! This new version includes several enhancements:
- Support for a wider range of XHTML elements
- Can now be toggled on and off without reloading the page
- No longer interferes with the keyboard shortcut to cut text
Install X-Ray Extension for Firefox
Thanks to all the people who emailed with suggestions for improvements or offered code optimizations. “joh6nn” and “dragonchaos” deserve special acknowledgement for their help.
Donations to The X-Ray Tip Jar are greatly appreciated.
Features to be added in future versions:
- display self terminating tags correctly
- identify deprecated elements
- identify elements incorrectly placed on the page (head content inside the body)
- possibly display additional information about the tag such as class and id
Weekend Update
February 4th, 2006
Two quick updates you might be interested in:
Most of the people who have updated to the newest version of Firefox will have noticed the X-Ray extension reports that it isn’t compatible. I’m going to update the file to make it work, as well as include support for a wider range of tags. That should be ready in the next day or two.
I’ve also been helping Dave at OntarioFilm.com get the site updated and adding some new features to the message board. If you’re a filmmaker, or would like to be involved in a film project in Ontario, visit the site and join the community. We’ll continue adding content and features over the next few weeks.
