Willa Cline: Webgrrl

2009-12-27T13:44:00.005-06:00

I just put a newly-designed site live for Missouri Foot & Ankle Clinics:

2009-10-07T07:40:00.002-05:00

I recently redesigned author Susan Wiggs' website:

2009-07-03T13:39:00.002-05:00

I finished up a new website today for my friend Kelly Lampton: kbellboutique.com

2008-12-22T12:48:00.002-06:00

A site that I designed for The Ahearn Agency just went live:

2008-03-12T11:08:00.002-05:00

I just heard that the Phantom Stallion site won a Silver Addy from the Advertising Association of Northern Nevada.

2007-11-21T18:04:00.000-06:00

Gosh, I haven't posted anything here in forever, have I?

It's not that I haven't been doing anything, but I guess I've been doing mostly maintenance on existing sites, and not a lot of new site designs. Well, here's a new site that just went live today. Terri Farley writes The Phantom Stallion series of books for young adults, and wanted a new site that would be fun to explore:

Programmer Challenge: Stop the Blinking Ads - Pogue%u2019s Posts - Technology - New York Times Blog

2007-04-26T10:43:00.000-05:00

Oh, I'll tell you what -- I totally agree with this! We got rid of the ubiquitous "blink" tag, but then Flash came out, and it seems like every ad or banner now has to be animated, flashing, blinking . . . I don't have anything at all against Flash, but when I visit a site--especially something like a news or newspaper site--and am trying to read something, having eight different animated things on a page all competing for my attention drives me crazy.

I find myself trying to make the browser window smaller, or scrolling down just enough that I don't see the distracting animations. I don't even look at them, so unless they're subliminally influencing me, they're not getting my eyeballs.

Programmer Challenge: Stop the Blinking Ads - Pogue%u2019s Posts - Technology - New York Times Blog

2007-04-26T09:47:00.000-05:00

I just put a new client site live last weekend:

It's simple, but I think it's effective. Jennifer -- a jewelry artist -- wanted a simple ecommerce site where she could display her jewelry and sell it through Paypal without going through the process of being able to take credit cards directly. She had a couple of shows coming up at the end of the month and needed something up quickly so that she could put the URL on her business cards to hand out at the shows. I think it turned out nicely.

2006-11-07T08:00:00.000-06:00

David Knopfler on the importance of a website:

You have your own website - www.knopfler.com - which you run yourself. How important a platform is this to you?

About as important as remembering to brush your teeth, put the bin out or keep your workspaces free of clutter. It's just one of those things I encumbered myself with in the pioneering days and it's now just another facet of marketing and promotion that, if neglected, becomes a liability.

The Sun Online - Celeb Interviews: No more Dire Straits for David

2006-10-10T21:15:00.000-05:00

I was coding a printable form, and was searching for a way to make a little box symbol without making it a graphic. I figured there must be an ASCII code somewhere to do that, and I found it (⇑) here: ASCII - ISO 8859-1 Table with HTML Entity Names. Not an exceptionally pretty page, but a very extensive list of codes that I immediately bookmarked for future reference.

2006-08-24T21:23:00.000-05:00

I can't remember what I was originally looking for when I found these Safari bookmarklets on the Apple site: Scriptable Applications: Safari Bookmarks.

Down toward the bottom of the page are two very useful ones -- one that resizes the browser window to 800x600 and one that makes it fullscreen. I'm working on something at work that has to be 800x600, so I'm finding that first one very useful in testing.

Oh yeah--this is what I was originally looking for: Safari Buttons. This add-on replaces the "Bug" button with a "New Tab" button, which I use constantly.

And this one gives you a warning when you attempt to close Safari if you have more than one tab (or window) open. Another very useful one, since I do that all the time.

2006-04-01T10:13:00.000-06:00

One of my very favorite things is CSS. I love how you can change one thing on a stylesheet and automatically change a million things on a website. I'm just crazy about stylesheet stuff. My boss bought me CSS Zen Garden because he saw it at the bookstore and said it "looked like a Willa book," and it does! (The website that came before the book is here: CSS Zen Garden.

My new favorite CSS site is CSS Insider. I read it in Bloglines, and I end up leaving the articles all marked as "new" so that I have them when I ever have time to try them out ....

2006-04-01T09:38:00.000-06:00

Fontcraft's Scriptorium has a lovely new script font out, Veneto. There's a free demo version you can download and try out before buying the full version.

2006-03-09T12:55:00.000-06:00

This seems like a really useful utility: Wi-Fi Hotspot Directory on Your Favorite Mobile Device. I downloaded the dashboard widget, and it shows wifi hotspots within the area that I specify, whether they require a password or not, whether they're free or pay, etc. It shows me that I should be able to take my laptop to the local library and camp onto their free network, for instance, and I didn't know that before.

2006-01-09T09:58:00.000-06:00

I just ran across this page of useful Safari utilities. There are bookmarklets to make Safari full screen, print a page with a click, create a new browser window, and email a link through your default email client. J.Y. Design

2005-11-15T16:43:00.000-06:00

I just went through Macworld's November 2005 issue and downloaded a few useful things:

Safaributtons replaces the Safari "Bug" button with a "New Tab" button, so now I can open a new tab using one click rather than having to CTRL-Click in the tab bar (useful when I only have one hand to use on the mouse because the other one is captured by a cat).

SafariSource is a plug-in that gives the "view source" option context coloring, very helpful for reading source files when you're trying to find something specific.

Taboo gives you a dialog box that asks you if you really want to close Safari, and all the tabs that you had open, if you try to close it when multiple tabs are active.

Cliplite is a dashboard widget that lets you store multiple clipboard items -- text, images, all kinds of things.

And finally, TreetopLights puts a Christmas tree on your desktop and holiday lights around the screen edges. You can remove the lights, which I did, and just have the Christmas tree.

2005-11-15T09:44:00.000-06:00

Paparazzi is a small utility for Mac OSX that makes screenshots of webpages. That is, the whole webpage, not just the portion that you can see on your screen. So when you have a really long page that you would like to capture, rather than making several screenshots and sticking them together in Photoshop, you can make it in one fell swoop, and save it in any of several formats. Very cool. It can also make a thumbnail automatically (below).

2005-06-11T13:14:00.000-05:00

Mike Duffy reminded me about this site this morning: css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design. I haven't looked at in awhile, and there are some great new designs up. It's one of the sites that I visit when my brain needs a new challenge--unfortunately (or fortunately!) I've been too busy lately to spend much time working on things like this, but I really should make time for it.

I have the book, too, which I also haven't had much time to look through, but it looks wonderful, and it's really a beautiful book.

So much to learn.

2005-05-21T10:42:00.000-05:00

This looks interesting: BrowserCam. I haven't tried it yet, but there's a free 24 hour trial period. It says you enter a URL to a site, and BrowserCam creates screen captures of the pages in multiple operating systems and browsers that you specify. They have a list of available browsers--certainly more than I could come up with on my own.

2005-05-01T23:29:00.000-05:00

It's been a busy month. I put three new websites lives this month. The first was one for Terri Farley, who writes the Phantom Stallion books; she has a new book that isn't part of the series, so wanted a new site separate from that one.

The second was for Melinda Rucker Haynes, who writes paranormal romances and wanted a redesign of her current site.

The third, for Sari Robins, was also a redesign, very different from the kind of designs that I usually do, but I like it a lot.

2005-02-23T17:39:00.000-06:00

My friend Gard Gibson has a technology column in the current issue of Ingram's Magazine.

2005-02-13T09:25:00.000-06:00

I really need to do something about this site, don't I? Originally I set up the front page as a weblog because I couldn't think of anything else to put on it; I didn't really want a splash page. But obviously, if it's going to be a weblog, I need to post a little more often! Most of my writing is done over at the Journal. Anyway, just posting here so there's something current, if not earthshaking.

For some reason, this blog (and not my others, at least so far) has become a magnet for comment spam. For the time being, I'm leaving comments enabled, but I changed the settings so that only users who have a Blogger username can comment. We'll see if that helps.

2004-12-08T12:08:00.000-06:00

Fonts For Flash - Some nice fonts, including some free ones -- mostly tiny little bitmap fonts -- plus some interface icons like shopping carts, etc.

2004-12-08T11:43:00.000-06:00

There are some excellent Flash tutorials at kirupa.com, including the falling snow script that I used for my Christmas card last year.

2004-11-27T11:06:00.000-06:00

Great comments thread about what software to Load up [on] your USB drive before you visit your parents for Thanksgiving. And just in general, a good list of software to keep in mind when you have to clean a PC.

I have Macs both at home and at work, but my husband uses a PC, and I also have a PC on my desktop at work for checking websites, and they've both gotten viruses and spyware/adware that had to be cleaned off. It's not just clueless parents that install these things, some of them are very insidious.