Want to try implementing a design with PNG graphics?

The glaring problem of PNG images is synchronizing color appearance with GIF/JPEG images & CSS colors. This is a well documented problem.

PNG vs JPEG/GIF color problems can be avoided by using PNG for all of the graphics in a site that must perfectly match.

Otherwise, the best path to PNG bliss is a shell command tool that strips out all that advanced color/gamma data (since it confuses different browsers in different ways) and tries each of the 130+ compression modes to find the most efficient one.

pngcrush -rem gAMA -rem cHRM -rem iCCP -rem sRGB -brute infile.png outfile.png

Get it at the pngcrush development site or as I did (for Mac OS X) via Darwin Ports.

Texas' premier Ruby Conference web site is now officially live.

The site is powered by RadiantCMS running on two Mongrels balanced by Nginx.

There's not much info yet, just a pre-registration form to help the plan the event. Plan to come on down to the Ruby Conference in Austin. It might actually drop under 100-degrees by September 7th!

My handwriting scanned & lovingly traced into vector art; the font is called Ludwig Fast. Post headers [h2 elements] on this site are now typeset in this face which I created in 1997 using Fontographer 4.1.

Thank you sIFR. Flash Player & Javascript are required to see the enhanced header elements. I've cross-browser tested in Safari2, FireFox2, WinIE6+7 & Opera 9. You folks let me know if the flashy trixies do naughty things in your browser.

Ruby programmers in Austin have a new face of organization & connection.

Now is the time for programmers to stand up for what is good & true in the internet world today!

The guts are a trendy full-stack-HTTP set-up, running Mephisto as a cluster of Mongrels.

The design was inspired by the beauty of the ruby, and love of edible brown things, like cacao & coffee.

Here are the rough notes and PDF of my presentation to the Austin on Rails group last night.

Keynote PDF: Web Apps that Mesh

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This project has been consuming me; it's my entry for the typo theme garden.

The dictionary says concomitant is:

A phenomenon that naturally accompanies or follows something.

In this context, concomitant is the name of a minimalist theme for typo that flows with your content.

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After months of weekend-afternoon cafe work & late-night development sessions, I'm pleased to present a new web site created for sword/knife designer, bladesmith & goldsmith Jot Singh Khalsa of Millis, Massachusetts:

Visit this new site which features almost 150 fine handcrafted knives & swords created by Jot Singh over the past three decades.

I constructed the site in Ruby on Rails, that new-skool web development framework that lets web developers gracefully build high-quality, sustainable applications.

The site is hosted at TextDrive using lighttpd/FastCGI/Ruby/MySQL.