Category: Featured

CSS Day 2019 Conference

Posted on | by Ken | 1 Comment on CSS Day 2019 Conference

As a web designer and almost a frontend developer I am always interested in hearing what established web designers are doing. This year in Amsterdam, NL the world of CSS designers/developers came together to discuss what else? Cascading Style Sheets. I guess to most non-web people this may not sound like the most fun place to be, but to me I can only hope someday I’ll be able to partake in the festivities. I sometimes feel that I’m all alone when it comes to working on the web, mostly just me and my computer. The thought of mingling with like-minded people would be great fun. Officially, the conference is over, but according to the web site, https://cssday.nl/2019

“Make no mistake, this is an advanced conference. We ask our speakers to treat CSS and UI topics that they themselves, as well as the attendees, can geek out on.”

Some of the speakers that were featured were some of the designers Continue reading →

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The Mark Zuckerberg Deepfakes Are Forcing Facebook to Fact Check Art

Posted on | by Ken | Leave a Comment on The Mark Zuckerberg Deepfakes Are Forcing Facebook to Fact Check Art

Alright, we’ve all been hearing about deepfakes lately. For those of you who haven’t heard, deep fakes, by my understanding, are computer generated fake imagery, usually in the form of videos, of people doing or saying things that they wouldn’t normally do or say. This video is the perfect example.

When it comes to deepfakes the more important element is that it’s believable. Does the person sound right, look right, and what they’re saying come within the realm of possibility? That’s what makes this video so great. When I watched it, it felt like I was watching the real, “Mark” who wasn’t trying to hide anything. Like he was telling the truth. It was just perfect.

I guess that the result of this video was a change in the way Facebook vets the posts that it allows on the site. I’m not a big Facebook fan, so this is so funny to me. Here’s the video and serious props to the artists that created it.

When the “fake” Mark Zuckerberg says, “Spector showed me…” I swear I laughed out loud.

Link The Video

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I Broke Down and Conformed.

Posted on | by Ken | Leave a Comment on I Broke Down and Conformed.

You know those banners that are on the bottom of most web sites you go to? You know, those annoying banners that block content because you refuse to accept any cookies? If you’re like me you find those things annoying and wish you didn’t have to deal with them.

So last night I decided to join the herd and install the code on two of my sites. I didn’t want to do it but due to laws in the European Union, any web site that expects to work in Europe is supposed to have them. In fact if what I’ve read is true, they will get stricter as time goes by. At the moment a site must inform the visitor that they set cookies. In the future they’ll have to state what cookies and give you the option to opt-out.

As a visitor to many sites, this sounds really good on the surface. I don’t want to be tracked or to have the site do things to my browser just because I don’t know what they are doing. More info is usually better. If you agree with me, step back a second and imagine every site you go to requires you to tick a box, or maybe tick several boxes to choose what cookies you’ll accept before you actually get Continue reading →

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Recent add-ons, including a new redesigned RSS feed.

Posted on | by Ken | Leave a Comment on

Recent add-ons, including a new redesigned RSS feed.

I think I’ll make this update to KC’s art & technology short and sweet this morning. Not much has changed since the last update, mainly because I really haven’t found too much to add to the site. But, having said that, I’m working on a mobile app that will give readers a rss feed of this site. Hopefully there will be more, but for right now I’m starting small.

I haven’t ever made an app before, yeah, I’ve started probably about 10 or 12 in the past. For some reason I never seem to finish them. I’m not sure why, but it could be that I don’t use my phone for really anything. I’ve got a few games that I play from time to time, and there are at least a few occasions that I’ve needed it for navigation while I traveled, but I’m really not a phone person. I think that it’s been hard for me to understand why people use their phone like they do and why an app is warranted. I do understand, I just can’t identify with them. Nevertheless, I think it’s time that I at least try to get into the ‘app game’ so to speak.

The app is going to be focused on the blog posts and to do this I needed to call the site to get the updated entries. The only way I could figure out how to do this was to use an RSS feed. I’m not sure how well this will work in the long run, but I think it gives me at least a starting point.

In the meantime, if you’d like to take the new and improved RSS feed out for a test run, you’ll need some way to parse the code. Most people will use an extension on their browser (at least until the app is finished).

The link to the RSS feed (add to your rss reader)

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It’s coming along nicely…

Posted on | by Ken | Leave a Comment on It’s coming along nicely…

I want to first say that I feel good about where the site is at right now. I think I’ve got most of the elements in and I’ve started to update some of the older entries. Basically that means that the site is almost open for business, so to speak. I won’t be ready to announce it on twitter for a while, at least until I’ve had some time to make sure that there aren’t some errors or problems that I haven’t noticed. That usually takes a few weeks.

I’m not going to go through the long list of things that I’ve fixed right now, but I will mention some of the more difficult things that I’ve managed to correct. Most of the difficult items have to do with formatting of the layout, and to be more specific, making sure that there is continuity between the blog and the static pages. Since they both use Bootstrap you’d think that wouldn’t be that much of a problem, but it turned out to be something that I worked on for days. To give a quick example was the sidebar on some of the pages were different from each other, and then they collapsed differently as well. Since I’m used to, but not an expert in Bootstrap, I first had to fix one then find out why the other was doing messing up. Like I said it took me days to figure it out. Continue reading →

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