Graphic Euphoria

Please come in, make yourself at home..

This is the personal website and project of Simon Donaldson. It's still early days but things are picking up in pace. I have installed this basic theme, which I created from scratch, it should do till the main theme is complete. I'm still working on customising the backend and the navigation. Hopefully I will have a portfolio section up very soon as well as some more mumblings and information about me. Until then, I hope you find my posts interesting or maybe useful, come back again soon!

Firefox - a compliant browser

After months and months of hard work the peeps over at Mozila.org have released the latest copy of Firefox. If you haven’t heard of Firefox before WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? It is the best independently developed compliant browser in the world.. FACT!

In a world dominated by Microsoft, and their policy of ignoring any web design standards, Firefox offers a breath of fresh air. It is fully compliant to W3C standards and fully supports CSS 2. Version 3.1 will offer even more and will start supporting CSS 3 selectors!.
It also supports open source plugins, themes and of course add-ons such as Flash or Java. It even now supports things like the Turntool Viewer. Added together with the auto-install and update features it is easy to keep up to date with the newest releases.

Basically to sum up… Firefox works and it makes the web look beautiful again. If you’re not a fancy dan with your lovely purrrdy mac then you need to install this!

Plugins - browser heaven

One of the best features of Firefox is the ability to install plugins which enhance your net use. As a web developer these plugins are even more fantastic as they can cut development time, help find bugs and generally make your day to day job easier.

Some of the plugins that i use include:

Web Developer - This tool bar is so useful i almost forgot it was a plugin. It has an amazing array of features, too many to list, each one is super useful. I guess the best ones would be disabling CSS or Javascript or Flash, cookies, forms, images, displaying meta info, clearing the browser cache, outlining elements, resizing the window, viewing source code in colour and validating your code.

Firebug - this plugin allows you to edit html, CSS, Javascript ‘LIVE’ in a web page. The results are show in the browser and if you have ftp support you can even save the edited file. This is great for correcting CSS bugs or layout issues. Another great feature is its debugging tool, if you write any form of JavaScript you will find this feature irreplaceable!

ColorZilla - This tool has more features that you might think! The two main ones that I use are the colour dropper tool which allows you to sample a colour from anywhere within a web page, and the outline tool which displays a dashed red line around all elements. This is especially useful when designing CSS layouts as you can view divs and other elements.

Screengrab! - Anther simple but great tool! It simply allows you to screen capture a web page and either output a png file or copy it to your clipboard where you can then paste it into your authoring software. This is especially useful as it can screen grab the whole web page and not just the visible partition.

ViewSourceWith - A simple idea but nether-the-less immensely useful. View the web pages source directly in your authoring software ie Dreamweaver!

Live HTTP headers - This plugin displays your web sites live HTTP header requests are they are sent and received.

Tamper Data - If you should want to do such a thing as tamper with your HTTP headers then this is the plugin for you. Just start it up and it intercepts all the headers, you then edit them and submit away!!

FireFTP - Turn Firefox into a ftp client

GSpace - You will never need your USB key fob again. This uses gmail as a ftp remote folder. You can upload anything directly to your gmail inbox. It will use the gmail mp3 player to stream mp3’s and you can view images by thumbnail. One downside is gmails 19mb cap per upload but you can split your files. One bonus.. my 6gig gmail account!

English Dictionary - Speaks for itself. Right click a misspelt word and just select the right one. Bing bang bosh

PicLens - A 3D virtual wall for displaying photo albums and videos. The sites have to be compatible but with flickr, facebook and myspace in the loop it’s a winner already

Download Status Bar - If the download pop-up annoys you this is what you need. It integrates the download status into you status bar and has many extra features to make downloading a neat and tidy business.

So first impressions are good. The interface is smart but clean. Everything seems to work. I guess this is what it must be like to own a mac!

Cosmicbug is a wordpress blog written by Gain Lee and dedicated to his two passions in life, photography and astronomy.
Gain has been a professional photographer for years and his blog gives you a small glimpse at the vast range of pictures that he has taken. His subjects include stars, comets, galaxies, nature, landscape and portraits. Gain has had several shots published in international magazines and had a small global fan base. There are some really nice shots there!

Check out cosmicbug here

One of the best things about the internet is it’s ability to entertain and inspire. Today abduzeedo.com published a post about My First Band CD. Ages ago i saw a few sites which generate random band names, Eiffel 65 who released ‘Blue’ was commonly known to use one, but this post goes further. It gives you three links:

Link 1 returns a random wikipedia article and your new band name..
Link 2 returns a page, the last four words of the last quote make up your album title..
Link 3 returns a flickr page, the third picture is your album art..

You then use these links to create you first band cd! As you can see from the post on abduzeedo.com there have been quite a few entries!

My bands name is: Sousville which is a small town in France

My album title is: misfortune or be miserable which is a quote by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

My album art is: a picture of three ladybirds from a photographer called Cajita Dorada

This is what i came up with…

What do you think?

If you want to see how i mocked this up you can download the psd file here (comment me back please)

Well that’s me done, i quite enjoyed this post PLUS it meant i didn’t watch Big Brother like the rest of the UK, never a bad thing!

Wow this digital magazine really rocks! Issue two has just been released so it’s still in it’s infancy. It is packed full of creative montages, illustrations and photography. Sadly i can’t read french but who needs to, the content speaks for it’s self.

So if you have a spare 20 minutes, check out Digital Temple magazine

Do you ever see something and think ‘why didn’t i think of that‘?

I came across this fantastic portfolio site, Jennifer Maestre, where the gallery displays an array of creatures and scupltures made entirely out of coloured pencils! What a fab idea. They look really cool and are simple to make (if you have the creativity)

Sometimes it’s the simplest ideas which come out best!

Ignore the gruesome title and, if you can, ignore the fact this is about feet..

New York magazine recently had an article about how we are all walking badly and it’s affecting our feet.

The article makes for an interesting read but what caught my eye was the amazing painted feet. Someone has took a great deal of time and effort to create realistic shoes on naked feet. I can only admire the skill it must have taken. They really are a work of art!

You Walk Wrong - New York Magazine

This composition was created after my sister, Fiona, sent me her latest coursework. She is studying photography at Derby University.
The original photo was a clever experiment with light and a long exposure film. I saw the opportunity for some photoshop experimentation so I drew some shapes and then used the filters to create the glowing effect. I also changed the tones within the picture, highlighting the background and the tree.

Hopefully i will be creating Fiona a full portfolio site in the non-to-distant future so keep and eye out for more of her work!

This little composition was created from a series of pictures I took when I went to see Arsenal take on Newcastle in the Carling Cup 2007. I used panorama factory to sew them together to make the panoramic. The resulting picture came out quite well and it inspired me to edit it into something a little bit different. I experimented with colour and photoshop filters to create this dynamic effect. I hope you like it!
(ps we won 2-0)