Check out all the other great entries at SXSW Cards.

P.S.  I’m honored to be in such company… UserVoice is awesome!  We’re using it on Multiplex and The Daily Jar.  Keep up the good work Marcus.

Randy Schmidt and Chris (of Ümlatte) and I will be there to present iSepta. I have a tiny case of stage fright, but I hope that I’ll be able to relax enough to enjoy seeing so many creative people blow my mind with their cool projects. I’m really looking forward to this.

Pre-Ignite Coworking

Also, if you’re planning to attend Ignite, you should come early to Northern Liberties and join Lauren Galantner and me for a Cream Cheese Session. This will be the second coworking session in our new bi-weekly schedule. We’ll be setting up camp just a couple blocks from Johnny Brendas at Euphoria Cafe. Should be a good time. Follow @creamcheese on Twitter for updates early in the week.

www.isepta.org

Randy Schmidt and Chris Conley from Ümlatte came up with the iSepta project as an experiment. It presented a fun technical challenge, gave us a chance to collaborate with a small, agile team and offered the opportunity to solve a really frustrating real-world problem.

As commuters, Randy and Chris have had first-hand experience with the difficulty of finding train times using the gigantic-info-blobs that pass as SEPTA’s online schedules. They needed a better solution, and instead of living with frustration, they simply decided to build one. Their idea was to take the schedules to the iPhone web application platform so they could get the information easily from anywhere.

When they showed me their prototype, there were just two drop-down menus and a button. Pick your stations and it displayed a list of upcoming trains on any regional rail line. While it wasn’t slick looking, I immediately recognized the potential in this simple interface. It solved the problem of finding train times by asking the most basic questions: where am I leaving from, and where am I going?

I immediately offered to pitch in with user interface design… the project was just too cool to pass on. The iPhone platform for web applications presents a wonderful balance of features and constraints. The small screen, narrow bandwidth (of the EDGE network) and touch-only interaction mean that an application has to be pared down to its essential elements. On the other hand, with access to all the benefits of Safari, you can use some really cool stylesheet properties still unsupported by most web browsers.

Within a month, after several iterations, we had a great looking and pretty easy-to-use interface. I was overjoyed at the easy of working with Randy and Chris — both really insightful guys and excellent developers. They gave me consistently great design and usability feedback and were receptive when my design experiments suggested changes to the programming. Honestly, it was the most fun and most efficient development process I’ve ever been involved with. Serious kudos to Ümlatte.

We’ll keep working on the app, with the goal of making public transit more and more fun and easy to use. We’ve got lots more ideas, so keep iSepta bookmarked on your iPhone and we hope you never miss a train again.

So this past weekend I took a little time to look around the interwebs and re-evaluate what I like about other designers’ sites. In the end, I realized that I just wanted something simple. Not too many colors, not too much content. Realistically, I’m not going to update the site every day, and I don’t want my homepage to become a clearinghouse for all my digital drivel (tweets, bookmarks, faves, pokes, etc, etc). So I threw out everything extra.

…and here you see the result. Overall, I like it. As I grow into it, I’m sure I’ll add some extra gewgaws and whatchamacallits. But for now, i’m keeping-it-stupid-simple. I’d love to get your feedback (in leaving everything out, I’m sure I left out something important). Thanks!

I had hoped to crank this thing out on Friday, but I’m a little to obsessive about my own code to turn something around that fast. It’s justified, since I’m using this site to develop WordPress plugins and techniques for use on other sites. Totally worth it, even though it means a few missed hours of sleep.

Anyway, here are some features of the new redesign. I’ll be posting more about these on Big Big Technical:

• Thumbnail Galleries and Post Images — I’m using my yet-unreleased Thumbail Gallery plugin to create the galleries on the Case Studies pages. For this redesign, I added a couple new features too, including support for images in multiple groups and a way to designate a “post image” that can be displayed with each posts’s excerpt on the front page and other archive pages.
• Categories as Pages — something I’ve been tossing around in my head for a while. I finally thought of a reasonably simple way to include categories in the default WordPress menu.

Popular Music, 1850 - 1954 is the first in a groundbreaking series of online textbooks — The Popular Arts in America — written by William J Kelly, head of the Integrative Arts Department at Penn State. From the book’s FAQ:

THE POPULAR ARTS IN AMERICA: POPULAR MUSIC … covers the development of popular music from its origins in the early nineteenth century through the beginnings of rock and roll in the 1950s.

Professor Kelly asked me to develop an elegant, and easy-to-navigate new textbook interface for the book’s publication with Kendall Hunt. We wanted to establish the scholarly tone of the text, which covers serious cultural themes, while still allowing the grass-roots origins of American music to show through. In addition, the book had to be easy-to-update, and the code simple and portable enough to be delivered through a variety of content management platforms.

We tried several options for integrating music directly into the textbook before we arrived at a simple an effective solution by integrating with the Rhapsody® online music service. Every student who buys the book receives a semester-long subscription to Rhapsody. With Rhapsody’s extensive catalog, students can now listen to all the music discussed in the textbook at the click of a link.

Popular Music, 1850 - 1954 is now taught at Penn State and will soon be available at other universities.

www.wcdish.com

West Chester Dish (WC Dish) is an online foodie community centered in West Chester PA run by Mary Bigham, local foodie and hard-to-miss personality. WC Dish began as a humble blog about dining and dating in West Chester, but Mary had much bigger plans in mind. She didn’t want to just talk about food, she wanted to provide a place where the local foodie community could share experiences, compare notes, and spread the word that West Chester is a fantastic culinary destination.

Since then, we’ve grown WC from a small blog to a multi-author online magazine with a lively following. The site runs entirely on WordPress, a popular open-source blogging platform written in PHP — make that WordPress + lots and lots of plugins. Basically, I could never have built it without the amazing resources provided by the WordPress community — documentation, tutorials, themes, plugins, etc. I owe a lot of thanks to a lot of developers out there.

Of course, looks count too. The current design evolved from a design by Shamlian Advertising in Media PA (shout out to my hometown, the “first fair trade town in the US”). I’ve heavily modified the design as we’ve continued to massage the content, but Shamlian gave us that great Louis-Vuitton background and most of the other basic elements. Great work guys.

Keep your eye on WC Dish in 2008… were going to take things to a whole new level.

Longish break taken for dinner and TV.  Now back to work.

(wow, writing these posts really slows down this process)

I needed a simple, looks-nice-out-of-the-box template to use while I begin designing my own, so I went to the site I consider the go-to source for finding quality resources fast — Smashing Magazine. They’ve published a few great articles cataloging free Wordpress Themes:

• 83 Beautiful Wordpress Themes
• 21 Fresh, Usable and Elegant Wordpress Themes
• 10 Fresh, Elegant and Clean Wordpress Themes

I found a bunch that I liked, but I was most taken with:

• Simplicity Bright, by Karsten Kuhnen
• Upstart Blogger Modicus, by Robert Ellis

I ended up going with Modicus, because I liked it’s three full-column layout, which is the basic format I’m planning to use in my redesign.

In the midst of my theme search, I was distracted by a newer Smashing Magazine post called 45 More Excellent Blog Designs. That was really the inspiration I needed to get psyched up about working on my own site. These four designs are really beautiful, and have something atmospheric that I’m looking for on my own site:

• ISO50 – The Visual Work of Scott Hansen
• Evan Eckard Design
• Cameron I/O
• The Shaun

Only difference: all of these are dark background designs, and I’m leaning toward something a little more old-paper, weathered and natural feeling. The actual graphic work on ISO50 feels something like what I want. This’ll be a fun challenge… I’m going to have to keep reminding myself to KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID.

Core plugins have been activated and Wordpress mostly configured. Wordpress automatic update worked brilliantly. Took about 30 seconds, and caused no problems. It probably helps that I’m starting nearly from scratch. WP-Cache is still disabled since I’m going to be template hacking soon, and I don’t want caching messing with my head.

The Textile 2 plugin blanked my front page, so I’m considering using Text Control instead. For now, I’m just gonna write full HTML straight into posts :-/

I decided to use a /year/month/postname/ format for permalinks. I wanted to give some date context in the URL, but didn’t think including the day made sense. Also, this exactly mirrors the file structure of uploads when you allow WP to automatically organize them. That may come in handy some time.

Since this is a client-facing site, I elected to turn on comment moderation… again, not that I’m worried about being inundated with comments.

Next step, to install a bare-bones template, then start deciding what content to include.