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Mysterium is a small, independent convention organized annually by fans of the Myst series of video games. The games are very heavy on book-related themes, and I wanted to bring some of that into the design of the site, while still featuring the “falling man” graphic that serves as the logo for the convention. This was a replacement for the convention’s old site, which was a very basic WordPress blog.

For this rebuild, I wanted to improve the accessibility of important convention information, which had previously been buried on sub-pages, and eventually placed in a tacked-on header above the blog content on the homepage. The tabbed collection of convention-related items and the prominent placement of the location and date – Mysterium is in a different city every year – rose out of this, as did the multi-column approach to the homepage. This design vastly improves the immediate accessibility of critical convention information and surfaces several social media components, while its spacious design ensures that the increased information density isn’t overwhelming.

I also wanted to more prominently feature the various community involvement aspects of the convention, including the annual t-shirt design contest and various planning feedback polls. This led to the Contribute section on the homepage, which could be easily updated by maintaining the links collection in the WordPress system.

Finally, previous years’ Mysteria had attempted to better integrate into social media through an initiative at my.mysterium.net. This never took off, and the concepts were instead folded back into the main site in the form of the enhanced Twitter and Flickr integration.

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Riggz was a fun project to work on. The subject matter called for a graphic, energetic look with bold colors and an edgy feel. The site itself is fairly straightforward, but takes advantage of web fonts from Kernest to carry the look established by the logo through the rest of the page.

The site is built on WordPress, using the WP e-Commerce plugin to provide a way for the skate park owner to list products available in the park’s skate shop. Shopping cart and checkout functionality have been removed, as the client only wanted to provide a list, rather than a full shopping experience.

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Latah Partners is a business cooperative in the greater Spokane area (Latah Creek, to be exact), which contracted with me to redesign their website. The new site is clean, professional, and easy to navigate. It takes advantage of some less common but still broadly-supported web technologies such as web fonts, using files provided by Kernest.com.

Latah Partners is built on the gpEasy content management system, which was necessitated due to the site’s older installation of PHP.

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May Contain Nuts is my personal web log, powered by WordPress.  Please be aware that content on this site may offend, as this is where I go to speak my mind.

This redesign was built in part to experiment with creating web designs in Pixelmator, and to play with a grungier design, while taking a different visual approach to the blog title’s play on words.

Save for Later is a Safari 5 extension that allows you to add pages to your Read It Later reading list.

Installation

Download Save for Later and double-click it. Safari will ask if you want to install the extension. Click “Install” and then bring up Safari’s Preferences again. Select the “Extensions” tab, click on Save for Later’s entry in the extension list, and fill in your Read It Later username and password.

Once the extension is installed, you should see this new toolbar button in Safari: 

If you don’t see this button, right-click the toolbar and select “Customize Toolbar”, then drag the button to where you want it and click “Done”.

Features

Current features include:

• Save the current page to Read It Later.
• Right-click a link to add it to Read It Later.

Planned Features

New features will propagate automatically once they’re implemented, since I’m utilizing Apple’s automated extension updating process.

• Allow user to access their Read It Later list through the extension. – 1.2
• Google Reader integration – 1.3
• Allow user to tag the entry after saving it – 1.4

Release Notes

1.16 (July 11, 2011)

• Fix for non-latin characters being caught up in the URL encoding of page titles. Now I’m only encoding ampersands.

1.15 (July 9, 2011)

• Not quite an emergency update, but some more bug fixing I missed in the last release.
• I have an icon! Check it out!
• Corrected an issue where the “Saved to Read It Later” dialog would not disappear if the save feature was invoked more than one time on a single page.
• Safari 5.1 feature: The extension will now generate a popover window prompting you for your Read It Later account information if you have not yet entered it. The context menu action still generates the modal dialog, and Safari 5.0.x users will still see the same modal prompt as always.

1.12 (July 9, 2011)

• An update! Thank goodness!
• Fixed the right-click menu item so that it will actually save links. I’ve tried to be as intelligent with this feature as possible, so that it will pick up on the content of the link’s text as the title to be used, but failing everything else, it will use the URL itself.

1.11 (June 14, 2010)

• Replaced modal JavaScript dialog with floating auto-dismissing notice. This will get some additional love in future releases.
• Added a contextual menu item for adding links to Read It Later. The item is “intelligent”, so it won’t appear unless you right-click a link.
  I’ve tried to accommodate for anchor tags with additional HTML embedded in them (like <i> etc.), but there may be some edge cases where the link detection breaks. If you run into such a situation, please let me know, and include the page and link you’re trying to save.

1.01 (June 10, 2010)

• Updated confirmation message for saving link to Read It Later. No more “Data Saved: 200″.
• Added more detailed error messages if saving a link fails for a server-related reason.

1.0 (June 9, 2010)

• Initial Release, allows for saving the current page to Read It Later.

Legalese

Legalese: Read It Later is copyright Idea Shower. I’m not affiliated with them in any way, I’m just using their APIs.

Save For Later is copyright 2010 Revision 1 Studios.

If you like this extension, please consider donating to fund future development.

I really like Safari 5′s extension API. Since it’s built on HTML and JavaScript, I was able to roll up my Read It Later extension in about an hour. Right now it just supports adding the current tab to your list. There’s no tagging or list reviewing right now, but this fits what I need it to do about 99% of the time; I’ve actually got a Fluid instance that I use to display my list. I’m also working on a full-featured Delicious extension for Safari 5 since just adding bookmarks isn’t sufficient for me with that service, but that’ll probably be a few weeks out. I’m trying to work out the best way to group bookmarks by tag using HTML controls and a 30-pixel toolbar space. More consideration is needed.

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Elite Salon is one of three sibling sites built for a local company called Elite Spokane. The site is built on WordPress, and utilizes a number of plugins, as well as some custom programming for a PayPal-based instant gift certificate program.

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The All Fur Fun website is a design built on a pre-existing back-end that serves the content and manages users. Its visual style was determined by the theme of the convention, “Ancient Greece”. The illustrated characters at the top of the site’s header graphic were created by Samantha McGunagle.