KaiSchaller.com

I’ve gotta be honest with you, I’m starting to loathe this orange theme. I suppose this means it’s high time to redesign. That even sort of rhymed!

OpenID is a cool idea that’s worth checking into. [http://openid.net]

From the website:

“OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity.”

Happy to report that I was able to obtain my preferred ID of “kschaller” before it was snatched up by someone else!

For obvious reasons, I found this hilarious.

I have a couple of ideas of what I can be doing to practice my design skills.

1. Find a few designs I really like and try to recreate them without re-using graphics or looking at the source code.
2. Keep a running list of websites that I think are horribly designed (ahem, MySpace) and dream up a redesign for them.

Definitely good practice, methinks. Now it’s just a matter of finding the time… oh how I long for summer.

I’m currently working with the university’s web development team, as it is one of the only jobs I’ve found outside of freelance work that actively uses the knowledge I’m trying to gain. There are, however, some minor annoyances that come with not being my own boss.

The biggest of these is the team’s complete dedication to Microsoft FrontPage. I’ve never liked MSFP, not because it’s a bad piece of software, but rather because of its complete lack of support for things like web standards and PHP syntax highlighting. Oh if I could only count the number of FrontPage-generated pages I’ve had to correct on the university domain… You’ve never seen code like this! While I understand that Microsoft often must invent its own way of doing things because they are almost always one of the few big developers involved in new technologies, I just don’t get where they pull some of these ideas. On a somewhat related note, I find ASP (using VBScript) to be a complete nightmare, but this could be because I dove into PHP much earlier and am thus simply used to a different syntax.

Dreamweaver, on the other hand, handles things quite well, and as such I don’t have much to complain about. I’d say that completes the short rant.