In the first half of the year, I lent a hand rolling out a reservations system for Bojangles’, contributed to the new Mint Museum website and helped build out Ride Rock Hill.

The latter half of the year, I helped Need Supply Co. with a complete redesign and integration for their online store and blog. In December, Samantha Crain was in the market for a redesign. I rolled up my sleeves on some design work and then built out a nice responsive site that she can use for years to come. It felt good to see a entire project through from beginning to end.

Samantha's WordPress theme utilizes Sass to manage the site's CSS and makes it dead simple to completely change up styles to match the artwork of a new single, EP or full-length. That said, the site will be featuring her new record, Kid Face, for some time to come. Watch the ingenious video for "Never Going Back" on Spin.

On the home front, I ported this site over to Laravel 3 (and eventually to Laravel 4). Overall, the design and content needed a little sprucing up. More importantly, the site is now responsive, since it's a good idea to practice what you preach.

As always, I look forward to the challenges of client work in 2013. Of course, I'd be lying if I didn't admit to having my own plans and schemes for the year. We'll see what shakes out between the ideas and the time for execution.

At the end of 2011, I made conscious effort to consolidate my focus. Accordingly, I've dropped several of my half-baked side projects and languishing domains. For the projects that made the cut, there are a few minor developments on the horizon and some grander plans, but I won't get into those until the time is right. As well, look for Quasi Object Labs here soon eventually.

Finally, I will breathe some new life into the blog this year. I realized that what is posted here doesn't have to be anguished over or amazingly articulate (not that any previous posts were either). Basically, whenever Twitter's 140 characters don't cut it, I'll probably post those thoughts here. Expect some cross-posting from Forrst, too.

Accordingly, I rebuilt the logo based on a 4x6 grid, with each block as one unit. For the blocks with rounded corners, I further broke them down into a 4x4 grid and rounded the corner at 25%. Whether it needed to be done or not, it at least appeases the OCD gods (for now).

Of course, once I started fiddling with the logo, that made me want to take a look at the website. I ditched my homegrown setup for Kohana 3 and expanded the site out with dedicated project pages, an about page and a contact page. The plan is to keep iterating on this throughout the year, but I wanted to start fresh for 2011.

Last but not least, I added all my notable work from 2010 to the portfolio. Out with the old, in with the new. Here's to a successful, productive 2011, everyone!

Recently, I realized you can limit the authentication to GET requests only, which leaves POST requests completely open. As it does leave POST open, I would only suggest using it for a development or staging environment.

<Limit GET>
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Restricted Files"
AuthUserFile /path/to/htpasswd
Require valid-user
</Limit>

Since discovering the use of the <Limit> directive in .htaccess, I've seen this workaround mentioned several other places, sometimes using the <LimitExcept> directive instead. <LimitExcept> produced an Internal Service Error for me, so I can't vouch for it. Nevertheless, as the information is somewhat buried in comment threads and forums littered around the web, I wanted to post it out in the open for other frustrated developers out there to find and use.

Lately, I've been trying to be an active participant on Forrst, a new community for designers and developers. That community is motivating me to learn from and share more information with my peers. Hopefully, a steady stream of tips and snippets will again flow through these pages before too long.

How many times can I do these "it's been a while, I'll do better" posts before I'm the boy who cried wolf? I'll try not to make it a habit.

Apparently, it crops up if the elements are centered and if the browser window is sized to an even width. Thankfully, Mozilla now recognizes the bug, it's become a priority and is working on a fix. (Note: this is not an issue with 'focus' or 'outline' CSS properties.)

Indeed, this is a minor issue, but if you have any Flash elements that are width or height sensitive, chances are they're affected to this bug. I posted this note to save any of you Mac Firefox folks out there the headache of tracking down this issue.

I provided a little Flash and Papervision3D assistance to BigNoise on the NASCAR Hall of Fame home page. Then, I worked with my pals at Nice Outfit, handling development on a website for Los Angeles graffiti legend RISK. After that, I helped launch a website and partnership with Serious&Ly in Richmond, VA. Most recently, I built a website for African American string band Carolina Chocolate Drops and Crips founding member Greg “Batman” Davis (via R. Rock Enterprises).

On the horizon is a web app launch for Novelope. With Serious&Ly, there are projects ongoing for Work Labs' new, internal collaborative app, Lab Rats, and the launch of a digital media label, The Acme Thunderer. As well, I'm gearing up for a few in-house projects and will make an effort to keep the blog fresh with content. 2010 already sounds busy — I hope I can keep up.

I recently browsed a year-old article on Interaction Elasticity that contained this:

A path with 5 easy clicks is vastly superior to one with 3 difficult clicks. And a menu with 10 easily understood items is better than a menu with 7 obscure ones.

To put this in context, I was debating the use of a dreaded drop-down menu when I came across said article. For me, Nielsen's quote argued against things like drop-down menus, since providing a clear logical navigation path to subpages (even with 2 to 3 clicks) would be usable, clean and better for information architecture.

Note: I'm downplaying the traditional drop-down. I think rollovers that are more akin to widgets or what Nielsen calls a Mega Drop-Down aren't so bad.