Blurzine.com: Secret project revealed

Published 21 April 2005

Hi! You've stumbled upon a blog post by a guy named Ryan. I'm not that guy anymore, but I've left his posts around because cool URIs don't change and to remind me how much I've learned and grown over time.

Ryan was a well-meaning but naïve and priviledged person. His views don't necessarily represent the views of anyone.

Tax day was not the only milestone for April 15th. After a whirlwind of work (both during and after my day job—don't tell my boss!), Blur magazine became revamped, relaunched and rebirthed as blur::zine/media. I'm very proud of the new site which, despite it's spartan design is already chock-full of good book, film, art and music reviews. Some highlights:

Text-shadows for Safari

Although dropped for the revisions of CSS 2, I think the text-shadow property looks very good, and would like to see other browsers implement it. The addition of shadows adds to the blurry nature of the layout.

Headlines in Firefox and Safari, respectively.

While only a fraction of our viewers will get that bonus, every little detail counts.

Hand made iconography

Thanks to some advice from Dan Cederholm's site, I was able to hand-craft some icons. You may recognize some of my icons as inspired by common web images, but unlike Dan, I like my icons to be vector-based, so I can scale them easily. By the way, for web designers, I highly recommend his book.

Really nifty button-pushing

Dreamhost, my web hosting company demonstrated why they are the best for this project. Their form mail application allowed me to let our readers send email to authors without having to worry about having their email addresses harvested by spambots. Their One-Click Installs would allow a monkey to implement a WordPress blog (live, but unblogged). And, once we get a little bit more ambitious, we already have a live QuickTime Streaming Server, ready to send you, fair reader, some lovely tunes you might not be able to get otherwise.

The site still has some kinks to work out, but all told, Blur Zine is an exciting venture.

This blog should have run on 15 April 2005. Unfortunately, a nasty case of forget-to-save-and-crash took down a two-hour write up. My apologies.

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