It’s a land fill.

There are few places that are full of nothing but fond memories. Places that inspire a shit-eating grin (see right). Places that can do no wrong, have no negative energy, and lead to no bad times. The cave at Mt Hood Meadows is one.

A bent over tree stump, hewn logs, and rotting evergreen branches come together to form a very lackluster shelter in the summer. In the winter, however, snow sifts through the top structure at first, and then packs hard across the roof, forming a perfect wooden igloo high on the mountain.

Sitting on top of a rocky, banded cliff, slightly back, and surrounded by dense forest, the cave is completely hidden, despite it’s relative proximity to the top of Mt Hood Express, the main lift out of the base area at Meadows.

On New Years Eve, I popped my head into the cave to go drink beers out of the wind with a couple friends. A single white LED light hung from the frosty roof, shining a tiny beam of light on a knitted bag sitting in the snow—with a pot leaf on it. This is a noble gesture, leaving behind one’s illegal drugs for random others to enjoy should they find or know about the cave. They obviously felt inspired enough that they had inspiration to share, so to speak.

I left their present where it was when we left the cave.

Photographic evidence than I’m better than all of my contemporaries at burying my face deep in snow. This particular faceplant was brought to you by the number ten foot high cornice, and the color white.

Great article by Michael Parsons putting into words what I’ve discussed numerous times with friends; with the internet in your pocket, you don’t need to conjecture, guess, or bet any longer.

Having zero patience, I love it.

I have a soft deadline of Spring Break 2008 for the beta test. Stay tuned!

Sunday

Last week, a coworker and I were looking at entering Kittelson’s recent advertising landing pages for the Webby Awards. We began by looking at the previous years’ winners in the professional services category, of which we’d be entering under as an civil engineering consulting firm. The results? Well, here’s a screenshot:

The 2007 winner is an over-engineered, inaccessible flash abomination, chock full of animations and video clips, superfluous movement, and music. It’s fantastic for what it is—a movie showing high-end flash development that looks beautiful in a screenshot, but for a professional services firm? This is when I realized that there’s no point in entering the Webbys.

Web Design Isn’t Graphic Design—Does David Bowie Know That?

The Webby Awards are judged by an illustrious crowd of political columnists, singers, musicians, and personalities, including David Bowie and Beck. It should come as no surprise then that sites like the one above win; people outside of this industry view web design just like graphic design—taken at face value for aesthetic purposes.

This struck my coworker and me as very broken, and it appears that Jeffrey Zeldman in A List Apart’s most recent issue agrees:

It’s hard to understand web design when you don’t understand the web. And it’s hard to understand the web when those who are paid to explain it either don’t get it themselves, or are obliged for commercial reasons to suppress some of what they know, emphasizing the Barnumesque over the brilliant.

…

The winning sites look fabulous as screen shots in glossy design annuals. When the winners become judges, they reward work like their own. Thus sites that behave like TV and look good between covers continue to be created, and a generation of clients and art directors thinks that stuff is the cream of web design.

…

The trouble is, web design, although it employs elements of graphic design and illustration, does not map to them. If one must compare the web to other media, typography would be a better choice. For a web design, like a typeface, is an environment for someone else’s expression.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe my work deserves to win, but it’s rather disheartening knowing the biggest and most well-known award in the web industry is missing the mark almost entirely. Outside of some special categories—notably, Best Visual Design - Function and Best Practices (Both of which, by the way, went to Flickr)—the vast majority of all winning sites were flash-based.

Is that really where the internet is headed?

Here’s hoping.

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November 15th: Rain on the lenses, barely any white in the photos. Arrrgghhh.

November 17th: Rain still on the lenses, no snow at all at the base.

November 18th, night time: SNOW SNOW SNOW SNOW SNOW

After Timberline, we went on a hike from Meadows’ lodge to Heather Canyon:

My guess of November 23rd opening is obviously going to be wrong.  There’s no snow, even at ~7,000ft, where those pictures were taken.

As I was writing this site, trying to create my own blogging platform, I noticed that my perma-links were not nearly as pretty as any of the big-name blog engines like WordPress and Blogger. My posts were looking like:

	http://www.kylemeyer.com/index.php?post=34

It just looks awful, and search engines (besides Google) can’t index them. But, I couldn’t find anywhere on the web that had a concise tutorial for how to set up the much more attractive and search engine-friendly links that look like:

	http://www.kylemeyer.com/post/my-blog-is-so-pretty-and-awesome

Here’s how it’s done:

Note: mod_rewrite must be installed on Apache for this to work. Verify with your host if you don’t know if it is.

Step One

Index your post titles. In most gui database managers like PhpMySql, its as easy as checking a box for the appropriate column. This is to speed up the queries so the database isn’t doing full text searches for every post. The following is to do it via SQL command at the terminal.

	ALTER TABLE `table` ADD INDEX ( `column_name` )

Step Two

Rewrite your links. I decided I wanted to preface my titles with “post/” so as to denote an individual post, and add hyphens where spaces are in the titles. This is the most common way I’ve seen used, although you could get creative and do whatever you’d like. I simply parsed the links differently out of the database, and used str_replace() to swap the spaces out.

For instance, instead of doing the normal parsing of

	<h1>
		<a href="index.php?id=<?php echo $id ?>">
			TITLE
		</a>
	</h1>

Generate whatever you’d like to use instead. We’ll accomodate your choice later on in steps three and four. In this case, I chose

	<h1>
		<a href="post/<?php str_replace(" ", "-", $title) . "\">");?>">
			TITLE
		</a>
	</h1>

In the example above, we replaced the spaces in the title with hyphens, and are sending that instead of the id to our code to give us the correct post.

Step Three

Accomodate using Post titles as index. This is where the Php (or whatever language you’re using) comes in. Instead of pulling posts out by id, you’ll be using your post titles as the index. Here’s an example class in Php to show how we might go about this.

	class PostByName {
		var $post_id;
		var $post_title;
		var $post_body;
		var $post_date;

		function PostByName($title){
			$header = str_replace("-", " ", $header);
			$header = mysql_real_escape_string($header);
			$this->setItem($header);
		}

		function setItem($title) {
				$query="SELECT * FROM `posts` WHERE `post_header`='$header'";

				$result=mysql_query($query) or die("Oops. SQL ERROR LOL");
				$result_obj=mysql_fetch_object($result);

				$this->post_title			= $result_obj->post_title;
				$this->post_body			= $result_obj->post_body;
				$this->post_author			= $result_obj->post_author;
				$this->post_email			= $result_obj->post_email;
				$this->post_date			= $result_obj->post_date;
				$this->categoryId			= $result_obj->category_id;
		}

	}

In the example above, a class is created with all the variables of our blog posts. In the constructor, we remove the hyphens we used in the URL in step two, to get back to the original, indexed title. We then escape it and set up and use a very simple SELECT FROM WHERE query using the title to assign our object its attributes. We now have an object we can instantiate and read the attributes of, simply by passing in a hyphenated blog title.

Note: During development of this, I had trouble using certain characters such as ampersands in my post titles. Be wary.

Step Four

Modify or create your .htaccess file. If the file isn’t already in the root directory of your web directory, you’ll want to create it. To get my links to look like…

	http://www.kylemeyer.com/post/my-blog-is-so-pretty-and-awesome

…I used the following .htaccess addition:

	Options +FollowSymLinks
	RewriteEngine On
	RewriteRule ^post/([a-zA-Z-]*) /index.php?post=$1 [QSA,L]

Explanation

Options +FollowSymLinks turns on, guess what, symlinks in the directory and allows the rewrite engine to work its magic. Which, of course, the next line turns on! The RewriteRule is a bit more complicated. It uses regular expressions for wildcards. ([a-zA-Z-]*) is the wildcard I’m using. It allows lowercase and uppercase a-z along with hyphens. $1 simply denotes the first wildcard used. Finally, [QSA,L] tells the server that this will be the last rewrite rule used, and allows variables to be appended (like ?get=lol). You could rewrite your URLs into a number of different ways, such as

	RewriteRule ^post/([0-9]+)/([a-z]+)/([a-zA-Z-]*) /index.php?post=$3 [QSA,L]

Which allows you to insert the year, followed by the month, and finally the post title. It would end up looking like the following:

	http://kylemeyer.com/post/2007/may/my-post-is-so-pretty-and-awesome

Clam Gulch Lodge is a small fishing lodge and vacation destination on the Kenai peninsula in southern Alaska. Owner Gary Katsion wanted to update his site to bring it in line with the services he was offering. This is important, considering two thirds of all people planning travel will use the internet as a major resource in the planning or purchasing of their trip.

The resulting site showcases Gary’s photography, and has driven approximately 25% of his business in the last six months, business that didn’t exist before his updated web presence.

I started at Kittelson in the summer of 2006. I was tasked with heading up the redevelopment of their website, which was, at the time, a framed site published from Frontpage, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks.

The resulting site, launched September 1st, 2006, is a major update to the image and brand of the company, and represents what Kittelson really is—a youthful, progressive firm at the forefront of their industry.

Over time, there have been many additions to the site on the back end, including a content management system for the update of staff, news, and projects. On the user-facing side, Kittelson Movie Clips is a recent addition that shows more of the youth of the firm, and a series of blog-like landing pages for advertisements published in various magazines in the engineering industry.