MeyerBros

“dumb” isn’t even an option on this poll. you’re going to have to choose something else. make do, i always say. if you can’t say something nice, say something really really nasty, as my grandfather always said (or could have). a penny saved is a penny saved, and that’s god’s honest truth for you.

Ok, I think everything is moved over to the new server now, including the full email setup moved off zoneedit and onto our own server. Blog post-by-email (which I don’t think any of us have been using, but hey…) is now done via post@blog.meyerbros.org. And if this post appears, it’s working.
Not that anyone else will find any of this particularly interesting. Server maintenance, la la la…

GrayBit is an accessibility tool for testing color-blind accessibility of a website. i’ll bet you can’t guess how it works. IT TURNS EVERYTHING GREY.

check out our GrayBros - you can even follow links and try the various styles [style links don’t work, but changing via the Firefox ‘view’ menue does], all in monochrome. what more could you want?

how sweet is this?!?

(i thought you might need the exclamation points to give you a hint. the answer is pretty darned sweet. sweet enough to build a new design around, you’d almost think)

some more about reflections

Tim has been recruiting people for a new blog, and we just got it all up and running.

If you identify yourself as a young anabaptist radical (or ex-young, ex-anabaptist, or potentially even ex-radical) and would like to get your soap-box on, check it out at http://young.anabaptistradicals.org/ - feel free to register and start blogging!

(also, if you like that polling plugin i used on the sidebar, we could do some polling over here as well)

here’s another design for the meyerbros site. i moved the banner to the side to play with a new look, and to allow the content to flow right to the top. i think this is also the first full screen design.

feel free to comment on the usability of this design. i’ll still be making minor edits to it for a while to get it cleaned up.

1. sum up family vacation in france
2. review heartbreaking work of staggering genius (book)
3. review blue/orange (play)
4. list projects/books in the works
5. take a shower

If you search for “meyerbros” we’re hits one through eight, beating out such noteworthy competitors as, well, Meyer Bros. Construction.

And the seven Google searches which have led people here:

dilbert conceptual design
elephant s dream review
review and courageous conversations about race
rene steinke
walmart bad ethics
eric meyer resume
research paper on drive-in movie theaters

I feel bad for whoever was searching for “elephant’s dream review”, as I didn’t actually review it. Sorry, whoever you are.

the styles are now sticky across the site (www, blog and wiki). if it doesn’t work for you, try deleting your cookies and starting clean. i’d also like to take a little style survey of anyone paying attention at all. flip through the main styles (not commandline etc) and talk to me about which is your favorite and why. what would you like to see? what styles could be combined? what haven’t i been doing that i should? how do you like your links? sidebar? browser-compatability (ha)? level of graphic use? color palette? anything else?

that’s it. that’s the whole sentance. nothing good rhymes with “blogs” anyway (except maybe scrogs, but i don’t think that’s appropriate in this case).

WE WANT YOU TO REGISTER AND POST.

I’m serious. If you are friend or family or want to be friend or family (P/FFOMB (pronounced Pea-Foam (think PFLAG))), then you should be posting on our blog. along with that, you get your own customizable personal home page showing only your blogs, or only the categories you want it to show, or no blogs at all but links to something completely different - it’s up to you. but first you have to register. and then you have to blog. and then sometime (maybe next thursday) we’ll help you set up your own page.

please?

here’s one idea. comments?

This style isn’t really ready to go, but since you made it live I’ll talk a bit about it. firewheel design has a MAC widget called ColorBurn that shows me a color palette of the day - four web colors that they like together. i’m passing those on to you in my ColorBurn tree. I think right now it is stuck on the May 16th, 2006 palette until Carl gets the back end set up. (Carl, I labled each color in the CSS file /* color01 */ through /* color04 */ so you know what should be what color).

I agree with lots of what’s being said about the blog currently being the main selling point of this website, and it’s a lot of fun. So let’s make that our frontpage (as it already is). But there are other things I want from this as well, such as a place to easily post my papers for others to read–and I don’t want to do that in the main blog. Can we integrate the wiki for this purpose, and create a structure like Eric was talking about? The blog is our main page, but then we also have links to games, author pages, about us, projects, etc. And can there be a way to sort by both author and category at the same time? I know I’m not posting much, but I’m not motivated to do much until we have a working structure that will be semi-permanent. I started posting regularly on the wiki, and right then we switched to the blog. Give me some time to get used to this more public (all posts jumbled together and it piles up quickly) and less organized (in my opinion) setup.

So, this blog thing is a good deal. And I’d like to start promoting it a little bit - like at least let our family, some friends know that it exists. But there’s one problem - lots of people, unknowingly and against our better judgment, are still using Win IE. Some of them are even people we know. And like. And while we have four or five really nice CSS layouts for this site, we still don’t have one that actually works in Win IE. Black and white is mostly OK, except the header is funky. The two bird designs (my favorites) push the sidebar down below the main content. (Ok, so the Emacs design works in IE).

So - are you (eric) up for fixing this? Do I need to dig into the CSS? Right now it’s all that’s holding me back from spreading the word more widely.

we don’t have one. this page doesn’t have one. i think that, at this point, is probably it’s major failing. People see the site and wonder why it exists, what it does for them, and why they should come back. we have stuff about/by us. we have interesting design tricks. we have a wiki with personal portals and papers. a blog where we rant about this and that - but no structure and no purpose.

that’s fine if we want this site to be the meyerbros personal playground and nothing more (which might be part of what we want from it (i like using it as a playground)), but i wonder if we could simplify and focus it upfront. what is it for? what do we have to offer to the surfing public or even our friends? why should anyone besides me check out this site more than once a year? how can we push that to the front and move the playground to the background - or even just put the playground in playground context: ie ‘hey - this is a playground. here’s what we’re playing with’.

can we get some discussion on this one please?

it’s a bandwagon! let’s all get on it! yay! we can ride it around the block!

everyone is doing it - and not just your average WP-user or table-based layout-er, i’m talking about the big name designers. it’s all over the place. this design is taken directly from Starting Small dot info only because that’s when i thought of it. it’s nice because i was going to link to them anyway for content. two birds with one bandwagon!

look, the content is all about starting small. that’s us.

very cool. from Mike Madaio at Digital Web Magazine.

Maybe we should also set up a blogroll - so i’m not always posting these one-line links as full posts. at the same time - i want them to be noticed. maybe there’s a third way to do it. i could just set up a ’sweet links’ category that the main index ignores and another column picks up…?

check out the bird. i think i really like this one. it would need some fixing up for the wiki i’m sure (and i haven’t tested it on IE yet*), but it’d get my vote for default style at this point. of course, i may make a better one tomorrow.

style choices are also sticky now - so you can pick your fav and keep it with you. feel free to comment on any of them.

*so something in the JavaScript is blowing IE for WIN and MAC clear out of the water. I get blank screens on both unless I comment out the script include. otherwise, there’s a few layout kinks on IE that I’ll have fixed in no time. what a bother.

idealists drive… BMW?

well, whatever. it’s a good ad. i like the idea, i like the copy, i like it. i think it’s the angle we’ll have to play as meyerbros design - we build it right from the bottom up. that’s why i added ‘cynthia says’ validation to our site. i’m going to buy a honda though. if i can find one. do you have a honda you want to sell me?

there’s now a wiki page for planning our design company idea. feel free to add questions to be dealt with - or deal with what’s there. also - use this post for discussion of anything that needs discussing. i’m going to bed. tomorrow i will perfect the ‘picture window’ style, complete my JS for CSS-switching, add all the styles to the wiki, fix the IE bug in the ‘black and white’ banner and begin working on a new meyerbros unified, bright pink and blue happy fun style (or maybe the colorBurn dynamic style if I’m so lead (or even the rainbow style (you never know with me))). Cheers, chaps.