Beast-Blog.com
2007 April

On a recent site I made I created wooden frames around most of the embedded and stand-alone images. Doing this, while somewhat time-consuming, added a nice “finished” touch that may be worth doing in some cases. Bear in mind these are wooden frames, but the technique described herein can be used for all sorts of materials: metal, marble, plastic, etc. In this tutorial I will be using Adobe’s (Macromedia) Fireworks. Even though I have a variety of image-editing software, like PhotoShop, Fireworks is my absolute favorite.

Continue reading “How to Make a Wooden Picture Frame” »

I don’t usually go for doing the meme thing, but with so many around me partaking in this one — Stephen, Jack, Gill — I decided to be a lemming today and leap off the cliff with the others. In this meme I have to name three events, two births, one death, and one holiday that occur/occurred on my May 15th birthday. I also added one unofficial prehistoric event and one future prediction… to spice things up a bit. Here goes:

Continue reading “Wikipedia Birthday Meme, Plus” »

To better understand this post’s curious title, you must understand design and recognize it for what it is — what it really is. Immediately you might think of colors, images, and patterns, but design is so much more. Design is something that touches our lives continuously, day in and day out. From the subtle touches to full-out implementations that, if done properly, are unappreciated, taken for granted, and go unnoticed unless absent.

Continue reading “Usability is Design” »

As most of my readers know, one of the things I do is make themes and templates for WordPress web logs and stand-alone sites. The themes and templates I make are accessible, universal, standards-compliant, and strictly valid. I take a lot of pride in what I produce and I try to turn out nothing but the highest quality stuff. Once users download the fruits of my labor, my responsibility of quality control ends and the users take the reigns. That’s when things sometimes go awry. But in many instances, it’s not the users’ fault.

Continue reading “Stop Writing Garbage Code, Please” »

I’ve written about the natural marriage between WordPress and Search Engines and what to do to enhance it before, but I wanted to offer something a bit more definitive and specific this time around. I think I have finally tweaked my practices to the point I don’t think they can really be improved upon. I think so, anyway. I will provide copy-and-paste scriptlets in order of importance — especially useful to WordPress theme developers. But before I do, there are some things you need to know if you don’t already.

Continue reading “Optimizing WordPress for Search Engines” »

If you were to ask your typical business owner if they plan to add a web log or “blog” to their web site the last answer you’d probably get is an emphatic “yes.” Instead you might get a quizzical look, a frown and a scoff, or even an emphatic “no” instead. That’s a shame because a blog has the power to increase the main site’s traffic, page rank, and general appeal — it can even stand alone and be the site. Blogging is a powerful communication medium if the right software is used, it’s properly designed and maintained, and it’s put to use. Let’s take a closer look:

Continue reading “Blogging and Business” »

The latest music device, the Sony “iMind System,” invented by Sony with the assistance of German neurologist and technologist, Hans Frieh, goes above and beyond what I consider acceptable tech. I think this new tech is invasive and irresponsible. I don’t know what they could’ve been thinking when they decided to move forward with this project but I urge you all to blog about this in hopes of putting a stop to it before things get completely out of hand. Already there have been isolated incidents worth worrying about.

Continue reading “New Tech Goes Too Far!” »