Vitaflo v6 has finally launched, and ahead of schedule. Think of it as an early Christmas present. Of course, now the cover will be up for a month and a half since it's January's cover, but why not, I'm in the giving mood. Overall though, I'm pretty happy with the way things turned out. Are you?
With that said, the site is still a bit lite on content. Expect that to change in the coming weeks and months as I add more Projects, Docs, and new sections to the site.
I see that Netscape has redesigned their front page. There's something to be said about websites with 500 unrelated links on one page, and that something is "unusability".
Uploading keeps redesigning. Is co-op design not working, or do they have something big in the works? Hmmm...I can tell you one thing, they could fill a museum with all the "coming soon" splashes they've put up. Not that that's a bad thing.
Rather surprisingly I got an article posted to Slashdot about the eToys vs etoy debate. Now NSI has stepped into the fold and taken away etoy.com's email as well. This just keeps getting worse and worse.
What you can do: Email eToys, email NSI, and most importantly, email those you know telling them about this and that you disaprove. Please be constructive in your criticism. Nothing kills a protest like "you suck!" messages. Also there has been talk of starting "electronic warfare" on eToys. Please do NOT participate in such activities. Besides being illegal, you open up the doors to this potentially backfiring on etoy.com during trial, which is who we (or at least I'm) trying to protect in all of this.
In lighter news, it seems that Adobe is finally going to start supporting Linux. No word on when (of if) Photoshop will be ported over, but my guess is that if the inital programs take off, the big apps like Photoshop and Illustrator will be soon to follow. My fingers are crossed.
I was reminded of an interesting website today when I did a search on Google for "vitaflo". About 2 years after I started vitaflo I did a similar search and found out about "Vitaflo Dual Purpose by Gustafson".
Now, lets think about this for a minute. I hack together the name "vitaflo" from some things from my past, start a website w/ the same name, and then 2 years later find out there's some company with the same name as my last name selling fungicide with the same name as this website. Eerie to say the least.
Last night I stayed up until 2am working on CERN, my latest project. Now it's finished. I must say, it is totally a 180 from where I was going with it. I was so dead tired last night that I just mindlessly was adding all sorts of crazy stuff, and plopping on effect after effect. The result is a mixed bag. One minute I like it, the next I hate it. Perhaps in that sense it's sort of like the web, which was invented at CERN and which this project was about.
As for v6 progress, well, I'm pretty much complete with the inital site (at least with the way it'll be for launch). It's so nice to have something done ahead of when you wanted it done for a change. Now I have time to relax and take in the holidays without too much fuss. Ahhh...
"Hyperbola", which is basically my first tinkering with Flash (I know, I've been stuck on Javascript too long) is starting to come along. Flash isn't as difficult as I thought it would be. The problem now stems from coming up with ideas. However, I think I have a good start.
A few Plan posts ago I was complaining about my Javascript navigation and how it didn't function the way I wanted it to. Well, while at work one day I suddenly came up with a solution, and it worked. Now, regardless of where you are in the site, the navigation should be correct. "Intelligent Navigation" is back.
version 6 progress:
*Nav JS improved.
*Project RCM done.
*Backend now offers previews.
*Index layout done.
Late last night I got the relaunch cover design, done by Mike Young. Since it was done mostly in yellows, I had to then go ahead and change the color scheme. Because of the way I implimented the site, it took me about 20 minutes to change the entire sites scheme. Overall I'm happy, especially now that I know what this thing will actually look like when it's all said and done.
Screwed around doing another cover design for the current site announcing its arival. A lot of people have told me that the image on the cover is fantastic, but don't be fooled. Those who have KPT 5 know its just the FraxFlame filter. Sometimes a designers "secrets" are actually just smoke and mirrors.
Well, vitaflo has taken the plunge and finally been trademarked (™). I mainly did this because of the recent happening between etoy and etoys, and because two other companies exist with the name vitaflo in Sweden and England. Luckly, I was able to grab trademark rights first.
version 6 progress:
*cover page done.
*new color scheme implimented.
*vitaflo name trademarked.
*new project started "hyperbola".
Yet another example of the little guy being hurt (in this case killed off) by Mr. Big-Rich-Online-Bully. In this case, eToys.com has decided to take etoy.com to court and got them to take down their website or face a fine of $10,000 per day. Normally this is a clash of business to business, but in this instance, etoy.com is simply an experimental design site, and eToys thought that they "dimished their brand" since the names were similar, even though etoy.com was around over 2 years before eToys.com. I've already sent my email of disgust to Jonathan Cutler, Public Relations Manager at eToys.
I've went ahead and made one of those nifty IE 5 icons that will appear next to your URL if you bookmark it. Try it out and let me know what you think. For those who want to find out more, and make one for their own site, Favicon has great info, along with a snazzy Java applet that will make one for you.
version 6 progress:
*starting new project, "CERN".
*favicon.ico file created.
*perl pre bug tag workaround made.
I had a real problem today with setting up the subscription scripts. Now, the actual subscribing part was easy, but then I wanted to write a script that would send out all the emails through a form on the web. Well that ended up not working, because if any of the emails bounced, I wouldn't get them, the server admin would.
So I spent the last 4 hours figuring out a workaround.
Turns out that because Sendmail doesn't know who's sending email if you use it through the web, it will just send it back to root. So in order to fix it I had to make my Perl script into an actual application, and run it from the command line. Not as simple, but it gets the job done.
version 6 progress:
*href page and scripts completed.
*covers template almost done.
*subscription scripts done.
*alias via telnet needs fixing.
