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Capturing a Domain

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After 4 long years, I am once again the owner of JOSEPHLABRECQUE.COM.

Let’s rewind to about 5 years ago. I’d been running my weblog for a while at http://josephlabrecque.com/ and things were going well. I was getting good traffic and this actually contributed to my nomination for the Adobe Education Leader program.

In 2008, I had a humbling experience. It was such a humbling experience that the very thought of having a domain name that matched my own was disgusting. I deleted my weblog – deleted the database, even. Then I went in and unregistered the domain. Canceled. Deleted. Gone.

I tend to react to things in extreme ways… and I felt really good about what I had done. Free of the trappings of the internet and so forth. Feeling as though I had gained some anonymity back. That I was better off without such self-identification. Here is an except of the letter I posted for visitors:

While the content of this website may have been useful for some, it is an unnecessary and fleeting distraction for myself. We have very little time on this earth with those that are close to us and we have to make the most of it. The entire idea of having a website domain bearing my name makes me ill, as the past few months have been rather humbling to say the least. While there is value in what I do- much of it is still dust and ashes and I cannot waste my time on trivial pursuits.

Of course, a few months went by and I started blogging again. I set up a new WordPress instance off of my memoryspiral.com domain and was actually able to reconstruct a bit of the data I found in backups. This is where that weblog has lived ever since, In Flagrante Delicto!

You see, I tried to get josephlabrecque.com back but it had been snatched up by a domain reseller. Apparently, there are companies out there that exist solely to snatch up domains as they expire (or are cancelled by crazy people) and then sit on them hoping that someone will want to buy the domain for some outrageous amount of money. In the meantime, they throw a page up with a bunch of ads to see how much revenue it generates. If enough money is made off the ads, then they renew the domain each year, else, they will let it go.

Apparently, josephlabrecque.com was making someone a nice chunk of ad revenue. After the first year went by, I signed on with GoDaddy’s backorder/monitoring system. The service they offer is that if the domain is released by the current owner, and passes through the grace period without activity, finally to be released for someone to freely purchase… that they will snatch it up for you. Well, the first year came and went with the squatter renewing registration. Damn.

The next year came and the same thing happened. On the third year, I had hope- but someone else snatched it up before my backorder service could. Another squatter. Damn.

This past year, however… was different. I started getting emails from strangers. Emails like the following:

Priority?

So genuine...

A lot of people huh? Doubtful.

You are?

Selling something that isn't yours huh?

Wow. Hadn’t gotten these before. After checking in with GoDaddy; sure enough the domain was pending deletion from the current registrar. I continued to monitor the cryptic domain status dashboard and these people continued to send me emails offering to buy the domain for me. I stuck to my guns with hope that the backorder which was in place would actually work this time.

On May 4th; I read this:

This damn thing updates like once a day is all...

And later that day, I actually got the domain back. Hot Damn.

Gotcha!

Verified through a WHOIS query!

GoDaddy let's me know a day later...

So I guess the moral of this story is that persistence pays off (sometimes) but it helps if you don’t shoot yourself in the foot to begin with. If anyone else is going through this waiting game- there is hope. You just might have to wait 4 or 5 years.

“Flash Rules”? <= Yeah, it’s pretty nice to work with :)

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"Flash Rules"

I’m duplicating my comments from the post “Flash Rules” over at QuirkeyBlog here, as I think they are a pretty good summary of my thoughts on Flash and “HTML5″ at the present time. Aaron makes some great points, and is really fair with his assessment of the current situation. most of the comments are pretty balanced too, aside from the usual injection of zealotry.

I strongly encourage anyone who feels strongly about these issues to go and comment over at his blog in support of his honest attempt at cross-platform dialog.

Great perspective article. Really enjoy reading a level-headed assessment of the current opinions surrounding Flash.

Flash, as a platform, reaches across a variety of devices and environments. It isn’t just ads, video, or even Web. A lot of articles critical of Flash never mention this. I’ve been working with the platform as my primary focus for over 10 years and have only made a banner ad with Flash once (and that was many years ago). Most of the Flash work I do these days for the Web is to build up modular functionality just not possible any other way. Most of my development projects are now done outside of the browser on desktops and mobile; all using Flash Platform tech.

HTML, on the other hand, is also beginning to seed across devices and environments. Already well beyond the traditional mark-up usage it was intended for. Now that HTML5 (along with CSS3 and JavaScript) is picking up some of the functionality that has been in the Flash realm for years- it can only be a good thing as choice is fundamental to the Web.

Flash developers have no need to worry as the platform has expanded to envelope much more than what it has been known for. HTML developers should be grateful to Flash for pushing the Web forward and encouraging growth in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It’s mutually beneficial :)

I’ll also note that most Flash developers are also quite well-versed in other languages and platforms simply because of the nature and history of Flash. We are no strangers to HTML!

It’s really too bad we don’t see more level-thinking along these lines from the big tech sites who always seem to make it an all-out war between Flash and HTML. It’s not a war. Not even a battle. More like a one-sided quarrel that’s gone on far, far too long now.

Simplified WordPress Theme for 2011

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I’ve been wanting to take control of my blog theme for some time in order to both simplify how everything was being displayed, and to obtain a greater degree of flexibility over time. There are a lot of great themes out there for WordPress, and I’ve been fairly happy with many of those I’ve tried – but they still were not exactly what I wanted.

I decided to come up up with something of my own by creating a child theme of the default WordPress “TwentyTen”. Seeing as how I don’t need many features on here, and that “TwentyTen” is a modern design that supports all the new 3.0 features, a child theme sounded perfect. I also tend to shift these around over time, and this would allow that as well.

Adobe Fireworks


The first thing I did is sketch out on paper a sample of the sort of layout I was looking to create. I then created a basic measured layout in Fireworks, followed by a number of textured image segments for the navigation menu, page background, and content area. Fireworks is great for stuff like this, due to the robust texturing system available.

Adobe Dreamweaver


Dreamweaver CS5 has extended support for PHP-based CMS and blogging systems like WordPress. During prerelease, I was playing around with these features quite a bit but had actually never done any work with the final release. It’s actually very convenient to be able to view and interact with the live website files (on my testing server, of course) while designing and tweaking elements of the theme. Dreamweaver can also be enabled to provide code-completion for core WordPress functionality, although I didn’t need it in this case.

Most of what I did was remove a lot of the header stuff I didn’t need, and create a custom navigation menu along the top of the page. The rest of the work was just a lot of CSS hack and slash to get things looking right, setting up new elements, and skinning everything with my exported images. It actually went a lot more smoothly than anticipated.

Adobe BrowserLab


Most of the cross browser rendering checks were done on my local machine using Chrome 8, FireFox 4 beta, and Internet Explorer 8. I have other machines I could log into and check browsers like Opera or the IE9 beta, but don’t have a way to test on OSX from my home. Anyone familiar with DropFolders knows the snails-pace I take when it comes to doing any Apple stuff… So I fired up BrowserLab and was able to check my basic design rendered on what must have been nearly 20 different browsers across Windows and OSX.

It is interesting to see how relatively similar the design rendered across browsers. The most trouble that I noticed was lack of support for my embedded fonts in older browsers. You can also see in the above image that we definitely have some shifting going on in regard to the positioning of elements on the page, but nothing so terrible to render the design unusable.

I’m very pleased with both the resulting design, and the simple, unified workflow involved in getting to this point. There are lots of little things that will probably come up which I’ll modify in the future… but it’s great to know now how very simple it will be to do so.

Adobe MAX 2010 Wrap-Up Part 2: MAX!

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This is a continuation of my previous post covering the MAX pre-conference events.

Joseph Labrecque, Adobe MAX 2010 - photo by Marc Dubois

Monday:

“Is that a grouse?” – Kevin Lynch

General Session, Adobe MAX 2010 - photo by Joseph Labrecque

This was the first actual day of the general conference, though it felt to me as if I’d been there for a week, already. This was the one day that I didn’t have any sessions to present and so was able to go most of the day without lugging my laptop around wherever I went. i generally was able to sit in on most of the sessions I had selected, but it was very difficult switching from a MAX session upstairs which ended at 3:00, for example; jetting down to the FITC unconference to grab a 30 minute session, only to have to run back upstairs at 3:30 to get to another MAX session. Everything was nuts that way- just running around all over the place.

Erik Natzke, Adobe MAX 2010 - photo by Joseph Labrecque

I tried to balance my sessions this year across the design and develop tracks with sessions like “Flash Sneak Peek: A Glimpse at the Future” juxtaposed with “Fusing Art and Technology with Flash Professional CS5″ – worked out pretty well without the massive code overload I’ve experienced in previous years. Not that code overload is bad- I’m also a designer and need to remember that!

John Schuman, Joseph Labrecque, and Megan Stewart, JW Marriott at Adobe MAX 2010 - photo by Jim Babbage

For the evening, I had planned on doing some “Meet the Teams” stuff but ended up going to the SoDA party at the Figueroa where I briefly bumped into fellow Denverite, Amanda Johnson  from RMAUG, followed by another great session at the JW Marriott bar. Actually met both Ben Forta for the first time that night. Seeing as how I’ve been going to MAX for a few years now… that’s an odd fact!

Tuesday:

Really bummed that I had to miss Lee Brimelow‘s session that morning but I just couldn’t get things together quick enough to make it on time. The rest of the day was filled up by the general session (muppets?) and a bunch of FITC Unconference presentations.

Probably the most unique event for me that day was an interview with Motorola about developing Android applications. In my specific case, AIR for Android apps for educational use. You can listen to the full interview above (it’s short!)

Joseph Labrecque, FITC Unconference at Adobe MAX 2010 - photo by Vicky Ryder

Immediately following the interview was my FITC Unconference session “’Emergent Collective One’ – All the Little Pieces…”. This was my third session for FITC since 2008 and I always attempt to get in on the unconference since it is such a great format. Shawn Pucknell does a great job organizing this and other FITC events around the globe over the entire year and to be a part of that is something that I find quite special :) My presentation went very well and I was able to finally meet Vicky Ryder from CodeBass after having collaborated with her on a number of related items.

Tuesday evening consisted of the Awards, Sneaks, and Bash! Quite a heavy evening schedule considering the flood of information over the course of the day. During Sneaks, I bumped into Michaël Chaize and had a brief conversation with him (be sure to check out RIAgora!) The evening ended (once again) at the JW Marriott with good Adobe and AEL friends! Had the opportunity to meet both Rachel Luxemburg and Aaron Houston at different times over the evening. Great people to chat with!

Wednesday:

Things seemed really quiet on Wednesday as a number of attendees were leaving that day. This was the final day of MAX and also the day I presented my large session on going beyond the desktop with AIR.

That morning, I attended an interesting session on Flash Platform Runtimes – then immediately had to jet over to the Westin to check out and grab my luggage. In doing so, I missed Serge Jespers session on how the MAX UnAwards widget came together, but there wasn’t much that could be done. Remind me to stay at the JW Marriott next year!!!

Joseph Labrecque, Adobe MAX 2010 - photo by Marc Dubois

My session, “Progressing beyond the Desktop at Universities with Adobe AIR”, went quite well. Good attendance and they were all apparently very kind in rating me and my session :) Not enough evaluations were turned in to be considered a MAX Master… but my score is definitely up there!

Joseph Labrecque, Adobe MAX 2010 - photo by Marc Dubois

During the session I was introduced to a lot of people I’d previously conversed with only through email, telephone, or Twitter: Duane Duxbury, Dan Florio, and Randy Troppmann, to name a few. The attendees seemed quite interested in the content and I stuck around for quite a bit after the session ended. This should have been followed with some time in the community lounge but that never happened.

Adobe AIR for TV, Adobe MAX 2010 - photo by Joseph Labrecque

My very final session was a lab for AIR for TV. I have to thank Liz Frederick for tipping myself and others about this great opportunity to really get in on the bleeding edge of AIR. I actually pushed my flight back just to attend this session and it was so worth it. Everyone who attended the lab got a hardware development kit and a good start on developing applications for this medium. Very cool.

With all the giveaways oh hand, it was actually difficult to cram it all into my luggage! Adobe MAX 2010 will be hard to top. Full confidence that Sandy Balzer and the MAX team will be able to make Adobe MAX 2011 truly epic :D Applause and respect to all involved!

Overview:

This was my third MAX and each time I bring back a bunch of new ideas and lessons to implement in the future. This year was no exception:

  • Announce session giveaways EARLY next time!
  • While the Westin is a great hotel – shuttles are a pain in the ass.
  • Plan on meeting with a specific 25 people? You are lucky to get away with actually chatting with 10.
  • Do not overbook yourself. MAX is insane and the schedule is grueling.

Special thanks to ActiveTuts+ for requesting that I live-tweet events throughout the conference! It was an interesting experience.

During sessions, I was able to meet with a bunch of other people I had previously only known through pre-release or Twitter. Great to see you all, even if only for a few moments!

Addendum

DIA, Adobe MAX 2010 - photo by Joseph Labrecque

Upon returning to Denver, I noticed that DIA was all decked our for Hallowe’en with cobwebs, skulls, graves, and all sorts of spooky stuff all over the terminal. Not half as disturbing as the demonic stallion that guards the airport, the creepy baggage claim gargoyles, and apparently apocalyptic murals all over the terminal… just very… interesting.

Just a Quick Word on Apple and 9/9/10

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Firstly, congratulations on finally being somewhat fair to developers. Seriously- I commend you guy and girls at Apple for making this change (even though the DOJ and EU investigatory committees probably had something to do with it).

So… what now? I imagine a bunch of Adobeans are huddled about right now trying to figure out what this means for resources and roadmaps… future feature sets… will resources be put back into AIR for iPhone (Packager for iPhone)? What will happen to the whole WIRED publishing workaround Adobe is building on top of InDesign? What about removed? ;D

Apple. If you are serious about users having a good experience on iDevices when using Flash Platform technologies, the only logical next step is to join the Open Screen Project and help make AIR on iPhone the best it can be- and work toward getting a solid implementation of Flash Player 10.x on your devices.

Tired of hearing that 19/20 statistic? Let’s make it 20/20 and help restore faith in the Apple brand from developers who have been rightly fire-pissed at you all year… a statement like this is good, but there is no real commitment as you can change it back tomorrow if you so wish. Let’s change that. Get rid of the skepticism once and for all.