Author: Murray Todd Williams

I live in Austin, Texas. I'm enthusiastic about food, wine, programming (especially Scala), tennis and politics. I've worked for Accenture for over 12 years where I'm a Product Manager for suite of analytical business applications.

Amidst a Plague of Web Designers

An online exploration for quality local web design companies leads me to a surprising realization.

First and most important, for anyone interested in improving their website design skills there are two books I would put on the “mandatory buy now” list:

I have spent the better part of a week carefully working through the pages of both tombs and feel already transformed in terms of CSS and design capability. I was inspired by these books to create (in Photoshop) a mock-up that is a million times better than the mock-up that I’d scratched together on a piece of paper only three weeks ago. I’m rather excited to spent the next few days actually encoding this into XHTML and CSS to bring it to a reality.

And so now with enthusiasm I’m in the mood to work as a web designer. As anyone who has read my blog will know, there are aspects to being the independent freelancer that have driven me to misery so this afternoon I went on a web-search to see if there were any web design companies in Northern Los Angeles for which I would want to work. My findings have been both sobering and hilarious.
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NeoOffice (OpenOffice for OS X) : Compeditors Watch Out!!!

NeoOffice is officially deemed Alpha-level quality, so I wouldn’t go whole-hog using as my primary document system quite yet. You could, just hit the “save” button frequently if you do. And I say this as a “cover-my-ass disclaimer” rather than a condemnation of stability. I haven’t gotten the app to crash yet, and I’ve been kicking the tires pretty hard now. Color-me more than impressed: I would call myself stunned.

If you’ve never heard of OpenOffice (and I’m not just talking Apple here) you should educate yourself. It is a full “office suite” that can compete fully with the likes of Microsoft Office, Corel Office, Lotus SmartSuite and Apple’s “iWork” suite. It actually has a rich and fascinating history, dating back to its origin as “Star Office”, a German product that was proudly touting advanced Object Oriented design and cross compatibility between Windows and IBM’s OS/2. We’re talking circa 1995 here.

I don’t remember the particulars, but Sun bought Star Office and did the split-personality part-open-source, part-commercial development thing, like Netscape had with Mozilla. Essentially they made it an open source application “OpenOffice” to attract a wide developer base while keeping a closed-license version they could charge money for. OpenOffice is really a viable product on two platforms: Linux/Unix and Windows. For a long time it has been a viable alternative to Microsoft Office, and some government agencies in the US and abroad have attempted to standardize on it in order to escape Microsoft’s expensive licensing. (To mixed results.)

“So where’s the Apple OS X version?” you may ask. Well, the answer to that is far from simple.
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Future site design: My Own Kind of Digg

My own streamlined RSS reading practices allow me to cull through 500 articles a day. I’m thinking of ways to share the 1-2 articles that I find profoundly interesting.

Thanks to the wonders of Safari’s built-in RSS viewing, I can scan through about 400 possible news articles from a variety of sources—Washington Post, New York Times, Slashdot, Digg—in about 5 minutes, not counting those articles I’ve launched in another tab for actual reading. I love how I can keep up on the sorts of news that I’m interested in while keeping my reading time down to 30-60 minutes a day tops.

There are probably 2-3 articles per day that I wish I could highlight in my own blog and comment on. For example, today’s Washington Post has an incredible article on the shrinking American middle-class neighborhoods. I’ve experienced this first-hand as my own condo has appreciated by 200-300% over the last couple years. This is great news for me since I own it, but that also means that over the last three years I myself could no longer have afforded to buy a home in Los Angeles had I not already done so. This is profound to me because in a way it means I’ve being downgraded from median-middle-class to the lower site of the growing class-separating gorge.

But that’s not really what this blog is about. As I’ve written before, I’m in the planning phase for the next revision of my web site. I’ve seen other web sites that have sections that automatically get filled (via some sort of feed) with links to other articles. I guess some service decides what new-and-cool article links to put on your site. It’s an artificial way of “creating fresh content” if you’re lazy. I’m going to create a section that just lists all the articles I find incredibly interesting but don’t have time to comment on. It’ll be like my own personal Slashdot. Hmm. Maybe I can create a special “category” in WordPress for those articles with the article URL as a special field and write my own template PHP code… (thinking to myself) Anyway, stay tuned for the changes. We’ll see how long it takes me to get to them.

WordPress Theme Design

I’ve got two big custom-WordPress-template projects ahead of me. One is spec work for a potential client and the other is my own (this) site.

Over the past week I’ve “graduated” to the level where I feel pretty confident modifying a WordPress theme, tweaking various PHP commands to display certain information, etc.
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