Just when I think I couldn’t love Textpattern any more, it gets better. I spent some time this week implementing the newly created live comment preview plugin by Nils Herrmann. This in itself is an important milestone: I now have a perfectly hack-free Textpattern install, that’s doing everything I’ve been able to throw at it with the help of a few mighty plugins. While I was in there messing with the comments, I also shamelessly ripped off Jon Hicks and used a plugin to remove some of the fields from the comment form for folks who have commented previously and...… →

This week has been an interesting one for animalia and the Arbogast family. The Big Brian achieved 15 minutes of fame, since a dead 70-foot fin whale washed up on shore about 30 miles north of campus. This is the second largest species of whale in the world, after blue whales, and is relatively rare in our waters. In the HSU vertebrate museum, which Brian curates, they only have one fin whale skull from a juvenile. This was a prefect chance for them to salvage the skull of a full grown adult for the collection. This is easier said than...… →

You know you’re in trouble when Vic Chesnutt perfectly sums up your mood. My motivation is gone, and I have too much to do. Today I had two cups of coffee, then went out to breakfast and had three more. When we got back, the dog had eaten all the cat’s food again, and I couldn’t even yell at her, because I had big plans to take a nap cuddled up with both of them. Which I proceeded to do for two hours. Now I am drinking more coffee. It has seemed like dusk all day, which isn’t helping. I...… →

Well, now that I have your attention, I’m going to wow you with my full-on bio geekiness.* Some of you know that in a former life, I was a biologist. I have a Master’s degree in Biology, which I earned after 3 grueling years studying charismatic birds (masked and blue-footed boobies) in a tropical paradise (the Galápagos Islands). I also happen to have a scientific publication about Waved Albatrosses. Then for some reason I morphed into a web designer. That, however is a post for another day. I also married a biologist who makes his living studying mammals, preferably rodents....… →

At the risk of starting a font size holy war, I wanted to take a little survey about your browser’s default font size. The first thing I do whenever I update or download a new browser is go into the preferences and change the default font size from 16px to 14px. I don’t even think about it— it is a hard-wired behavior for me. I started thinking about whether this affects my view of the web world. I make sure my designs work at default font sizes, but after checking and verifying that things are acceptable that way, I am...… →

The new design of this site relies heavily on boxes of equal height. I did a lot of thinking about how to accomplish this, and a lot of playing around with different methods during my design process, so I thought I’d share with you the ones I chose to use and why. …