Stekora Concept Design

Posted on July 31, 2010 by admin

Ok so take-one of creating my own business back-fired. That Ekora Studio was in fact still running, and they’re not just a music studio but they do web-design too…..terrible web-design, but the fact remains.

So the problem I was faced with was the name, but that was an easy fix. Since I already went with www.stekora.com as a kind of amalgamation of ekora and studio, I figured I could just use that. I went with Stekora Concept Design, and the new site is being redesigned because:
a) the original design I came up with sucked, I didn’t like it at all.
b) obviously needed a new logo. I came up with something I liked, and you can see it on the splash page.

So go have a look:
www.stekora.com

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www.stekora.com

Posted on July 28, 2010 by admin

If you’re looking at this website, and you think… “Hey that’s pretty nice, I’d like to have a dynamic flash-esque page without having to load flash!”, then you should bookmark www.stekora.com because that’s where I will be hosting my new web-design business.

So what’s the name going to be? It’s called ‘Ekora Studio’, but you’ll notice the url says ‘stekora’. This is because I wanted something short, and easy to remember when you’re giving people the address. It’s the ‘st’ from studio and ‘ekora’ smushed together. You might be wondering what Ekora is? It’s a character from my sleeping giant of a musical concept, Novellice. The character was designed for my son, Ethan, and this business is dedicated to him.

So go check it out, bookmark it because it’s not yet open but I wanted people to know about it now.

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2/3 of the way finished

Posted on July 25, 2010 by admin

Well the WordPress journal part of the website was the easiest to implement. I’m going to make all the links to individual pages load as blacked out preview windows. What does that mean? Well click on the artwork page, and then click the concept art, and that’s sort of what I’m talking about.

After that’s done all that’s left is to fill in data and get completed artwork done for the artwork section. It’s fully functional as I intended now, even in Internet Explorer. That’s no small feat, kids.

The last and most difficult part will be the music section, as I want to build my own player and get an album loaded in the squares, with lyrics in a window at the bottom. I’d love to have them fading in and out in time with the music, but we’ll see how crazy I want to go right now.

If this website already looks pretty awesome to you, and you’re dying to have one of your own design, you should contact me at moresco -at- mchsi dot com, and we’ll talk. Cheers.

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HTML5 wants things…

Posted on July 24, 2010 by admin

HTML 5 wants me to add the type attribute to my objects. But when I add a type attribute to the Facebook flash object, the video just loads a white screen and doesn’t actually play. Seems probably either I’m giving it the wrong type, Facebook’s code sucks, Firefox isn’t rendering the HTML 5 attribute correctly yet, or all or any configuration of the former. So I guess that means, until I figure out why that’s happening and can actually do something about it, my page will not be HTML5 fully validated. Meh.

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Internet Explorer makes me rage.

Posted on July 24, 2010 by admin

After many long and difficult hours, I have finally had enough with Internet Explorer. You there!! YES YOU! If you’re viewing this website on Internet Explorer…shame on you! It hasn’t been compliant with web standards since….oh right, since forever. And to think people just continue to use it because they don’t know any better…it’s just there when the computer is unpacked, and it’s how you get on the interwebs.

Well it’s 2010, and Internet Explorer 8 has made more empty promises at being compliant. All the other browsers are, so what’s the deal? It’s microsabotage at work. What can you do? Try one of these fantastic browsers, and be amazed at how much better this page renders after you do.

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Firefox is by far your best choice, you could get the others if you’re curious, they’re all fantastic…but do that later:
www.firefox.com

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Chrome is pretty good too, it’s different…I like it. I don’t know that it’s as fast as Firefox, but it’s way faster than IE. Anything is faster than IE:
www.google.com/chrome

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Opera is next, and to be honest I just know that it renders things properly, and not much else. I really should look into it more. Opera claims to be the fastest browser out, I can’t tell you if that’s true, but I don’t remember that being my experience when I used it a year ago. It does have mouse gestures, but so do all the others (when I say, all the others, you should know that I don’t mean that pile of BS called Internet Explorer). Either way it’s worth checking out:
www.opera.com

—-

Finally we’re at the end, or at least the end as I know it. There are likely other browsers that are web-compliant and worth your time, but I don’t know about them. Anyway, this is Safari, by Apple. You can get it for the PC or Mac, so it doesn’t matter if you’re a PC user. I’m not really a huge fan of the browser, but mostly because I just couldn’t get into it after being so pleased with Firefox. If I did ever choose another browser other than Firefox, it’d end up being Opera.
www.apple.com/safari/

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And that’s it. So quit it, you have no more excuses to be missing out on a better web experience. I shouldn’t say that Microsoft has been promising web-compliance in IE 9, because I’ll be pretty shocked if it happens. However, Mozilla, Google, Opera, and Apple have been way ahead of the game for a long time now. So not only is web-compliance a factor, but also speed, usability, reliability, plugins, themes, the list goes on and on. Still, it would be way easier on us web designers if IE didn’t destroy our code in mysterious and unexpected ways. Internet Explorer is not your friend.

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Three days off & Rainmeter Icons

Posted on July 21, 2010 by admin

So I won’t have to go back in to work until Saturday….well unless I get called in to cover for someone, that happens a lot. You know, teenagers find it difficult to work their shifts. That’s ok, I like money, and I need to save for this big move to WA.

In the meantime I am designing and drawing up some snazzy, diagonally stackable icons for Rainmeter. They’re basically black rectangles with gray-white images inside, and they’re all uniform that way. There is a small circle at the bottom-right which is color-coded depending on the category of the icon. Like internet-related programs get one color, while art or music get their colors, and system-applications are just gray. Then there is a chunk taken out of the top-left of the icon as well so you can align the circle from one into the niche…aligning them diagonally. I’ll flip them all so the user can pick and choose how to stack the icons and in what kind of pattern.

Here are the icons for Firefox and Thunderbird at full-size (they are 64×64 on the desktop):

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Content coming soon-ish…

Posted on July 20, 2010 by admin

Almost there, but for right now I just wanted to point out a small defect for those unfortunate enough to still be using Internet Explorer. Here’s the thing, IE 8 is not your friend. Oh I know, they’ve fixed the bugs and bad coding that plagued IE 6 and 7….right? Wrong, chappy, and here’s why.

When you do a Jquery fade affect on a png image in all browsers except for IE, it works as expected. But in IE 6, 7, and even 8, the transparent areas reappear after the fade-in as solid black with jagged edges. It’s kind of ugly and defeats the purpose of using transparent png images.

Now if life were good, we could just use the old-tyme gif instead and ditch the drop-shadow transparencies. Ye olde gif can go jump in a lake, however. In IE 8, when you use a gif after a fade out / fade in, you’ll be greeted to what appears to be success. But as you try to scroll your page (as is the case with a blog like this where scroll bars appear), the images and text repeat themselves and you’re left with a mess that can only be sorted out by minimizing and then restoring the window.

So the unfortunate bottom-line is that if you’re using IE, there will be none of the fades and fancy effects that users of say, Firefox, are presently enjoying. Sorry….I seriously sought a solution for about six hours, but it can’t be fixed at this time.

Not enough hours in the day. I’ll try to have some content on the art page very soon.

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New jquery-driven website

Posted on July 19, 2010 by admin

You’re looking at it.  Actually, it’s a jquery website built as a wordpress theme.  Well, so far so good.  I will tell you not to click on the wordpress links, because I have no idea what will happen, but I’ll say this…it won’t be pretty.

Go ahead and try the navigation at top-right.  Should work for you, if it doesn’t…ACK!  *choke…cough…wheeze….grasps spleen…..sudden death.*  It’s ok, I deserved it.   But seriously, it should work in all browsers that support jquery (that’s all of them, I think).  Oh and you have to turn on javascript or you”ll get jack.  So turn it on.   If you’re using no-script, you can trust me, click allow and then you’ll have nom noms.

There’s more to come, which should be obvious if you’ve navigated to the other sections.  If you haven’t, well they’re empty.  I’m still coding the jquery animations for the art page, and then I still have to implement the rest of the wordpress features before I can get to the music page — probably the most complex section of them all.

So stuff is coming…but listen to me on facebook for now:

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