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

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:

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

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.

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

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.

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 ....

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.