Robert Spangler

My New Job

Robert — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 12:11:17 +0000

In case you didn’t know I switched jobs. I am now a full-time freelancer and owner of Emerge Web Studio. I’m into my second week now and things are going great, I’ve had a ton of great phone calls and meetings. Waking up for work has become really exciting. With all that being said, I look forward to showing you all the great things I’m doing.

Now it’s time to sell you…
Emerge specializes in attractive website design for businesses, developers and agencies. I know the web really well, so as a standard my sites are always easy to update, optimized for search, and ready to promote your business (as long as it’s not shady).

HTML5 Doctype Template

Robert — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:39:58 +0000

It is finally time to start switching to HTML5 for projects moving forward. If you’ve been following the progress you already know that xHTML will eventually be outdated and browsers will, eventually, support HTML 5 functionality. So it doesn’t make sense to continue with xHTML; plus, now our clients to use HTML5 functionality as it becomes available without too many headaches.

Below basic doctype template I’m starting out with, please feel free to give me feedback.

Note: I included a holder for JQuery and and IE specific stylesheet (just in case). These can obviously be removed if they’re not needed for the project.

Intelligent Conversation

Robert — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 04:30:42 +0000

Does anyone else enjoy a good laugh? I do, I do a lot. Laughter can get me through the day sometimes. I have some hilarious co-workers. There is joy wrapped up in laughing together, a deeper connection beyond agreeing that body sounds are funny.

On the other side, what happened to deep intelligent conversation? The kind where you just want to take a seat on the couch together with a cup of joe (or tea). In a world of 144 character messages I fear that we’ve (I’ve) traded deep meaningful conversation for effortless shouts. We don’t allow for our perspectives to be changed, only voiced.

With that being said, we should take some time and talk about life over coffee. No phone calls, no texts, no tweets.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., More Than a Great Humanitarian

Robert — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 18:54:38 +0000

While remembering Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Martin Luther King day is not a challenge, remembering his teachings through our lives on the other 364 days of the year becomes more difficult. It is easy to think that we’ve come far enough. It is easy to think that we’ve accomplished what needs to be accomplished.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a man whom I don’t know enough about, but from reflecting on his writings I am inspired. He spoke honestly about social and political injustice. He was a voice for peace, but a peace without conformity or complacency. He lived the life he preached, and the results of that are marked with the blood of his assassination in 1968.

Even though it would be easy to write him off as a great humanitarian, I don’t think that is his story. Don’t get me wrong, he made incredible strides and accomplishments for humanity. It is however impossible to separate what he did from the relationship and divine inspiration he had from our God.

In his sermon writings on “The Answer to a Perplexing Question,”¹ he referenced a scripture in Matthew 17:19: “Why could not we cast him out?” Jesus’ disciples were unable to cast out an evil spirit from a man’s son.

We learn from Dr. King that men throughout the history of mankind have attempted to “remove evil” from this earth, but humanitarian efforts are not enough. When we base the foundation of our lives on scientific knowledge, eugenics now becomes justifiable on moral grounds. An atomic bomb becomes a solution to a problem. However, Dr. King is clear that science itself is not corrupt:

“Nor would I minimize the importance of science and the great contributions which have come in the wake of the Renaissance. These have lifted us from the stagnating valleys of superstition and half-truth to the sunlit mountains of creative analysis and objective appraisal.”^1a

There is another method of “removing evil” from this earth. We learn that others prefer the method of “praying and waiting,” or in other words, just waiting on God to rid the world of evil. However, Dr. King is clear that removing responsibility from ourselves is not the answer:

“The idea that man expects God to do everything leads inevitably to a callous misuse of prayer. For if God does everything, man then asks him for anything, and God becomes little more than a ‘cosmic bellhop’ who is summoned for every trivial need.”^1b

Neither methods of removing evil are successful, nor are these methods godly. Dr. King says, “We must pray earnestly for peace, but we must also work vigorously for disarmament and the suspension of weapon testing. We must use our minds as rigorously to plan for peace as we have used them to plan for war.”^1c God and man working together can accomplish great things. Jesus himself said, “…anyone who believes in me will do the same works I have done, and even greater works, because I am going to be with the Father.”² God gives us the grace and mercy, but we are the hands of feet of God on this earth.

Come, let us do greater works. Let us use our free will for good. Let us not leave the dream unfulfilled. Let us not become complacent.

Some stuff I referenced…

¹, Strength to Love by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Chapter 13
^1a, Page 130
^1b, Page 131
^1b, Page 132
², John 14:12

A New Look

Robert — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 02:13:15 +0000

Fresh new redesign! The last design was probably not as thought out as it needed to be. It placed a heavy emphasis on my blog, and let’s be real, i’m not blogging every day. This one is supposed to put more emphasis on my work, and still a little on the blog…

Thanks for checking it out, hope you enjoy!

8 Web Design Resources I Couldn’t Live Without (Honestly!)

Robert — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 02:50:16 +0000

Ok, so the “10 ___’s that will save your life!” posts can be annoying. Hopefully you can get some use out of this post; these are the web resources that I honestly use all of the time. No Filler! They are ordered by how well they’re know (least to most known).

1. Web Template

I typically use either a 12 or a 16 column grid on most of my designs. I also need to see what it will look like in 800×600 and 1024×768, so I basically just created a nice little .PSD file that includes all of my necessities in an overlay folder at the top of my document. It helps to get my design going on the right foot (after planning, research and sketches of course!). For the grid system I’m using overlays from 960.gs.

Download the Web Template (.zip)

2. The Viget Photoshop Color Fix

Have you ever sliced out an image and the colors are slightly different from what you saw on your .psd? Photoshop does this horrible thing where it changes how you see your colors in Photoshop window to match your monitor. This is unacceptable for the web! Make sure you run this fix to ensure that your colors come out right.

Read the Blog Post

3. IETester

We all hate IE, but we all still need to make sure that our visitors and clients don’t hate us (because you know they all use it!). The difficult thing about designing for IE is that you can only have one version of it installed on your PC; unless… you don’t have 3 virtual PCs running do you? That’s a shame, because IETester gives you the ability to open a different version of IE in separate tabs (from 5.5 to 8).

Get IETester

4. AutoPopulate

This was originally developed by Roger Johansson and basically auto-populates your input field with instructions (ex: “Enter Your Search Term Here”) but it still keeps your fields accessible by doing it using the title attribute. I’m a big fan of JQuery, and so is my friend Andy Stratton, so he created a great plugin for it.

Get JQuery Populate Plugin

5. JQuery UI

Ok, JQuery is an awesome hotdog, and JQuery UI is all the relish, mustard and ketchup. JQuery UI allows you to easily create a datepicker, a slider, a dialog box…, or even make elements resizable. I find myself using the tabs more than anything.

Get JQuery UI

6. FireBug

If you’re a web designer, you probably already know what this is all about and you can skip to the next one. FireBug has saved me countless hours in my CSS, it allows you to inspect and alter live CSS on any site. This is great if you’re fixing an issue on a website that has already been integrated into a complex CMS (e.g. Ektron!).

Get FireBug

7. SwfObject

There are a couple good solutions out there for flash replacement, but I stick with SwfObject because it never lets me down and it’s not complicated. It basically allows you to add your flash file in an accessible way by providing alternate content for people without the Adobe Flash Player.

Get SwfObject

8. sIFR

I have a love/hate relationship with sIFR. I always seem to have to tweak the heck out of it to really get it doing what I want, but it is still the best font-replacement tool out there.

Get sIFR

xHTML 1.0 Strict Doctype Template

Robert — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 14:29:14 +0000

This is just the xHTML document that I usually start off with, already included tags for title, description, keywords, favicon, and stylesheet.




	
	
	
	<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

There were a few occasions where I gave up on using the UTF-8 charset because IE6 had a ‘white screen’ bug on certain pages using a post through PHP. If you’re having these problems use ISO-8859-1, ex:

WhatTheFont iPhone App

Robert — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 01:53:01 +0000

Ever been looking through a magazine and wondered what font you’re reading? MyFont’s just released a WhatTheFont iPhone app to answer that question!

I took a picture of my mouse pad at work which has one of our client’s logos printed on it. I’ve always wondered what that font was…

First Crop Your Font Selection

Crop Selection

Upload Your Image

Upload Image

Verify Font’s Characters

Check Chars

Pick the Correct Font!

Font Matches

The app isn’t quite perfect, you definitely have to make sure that you have a clear picture with decent lighting. But for headings, and larger font faces it’s great to be able to figure out the font.

Don’t have an iPhone? I don’t blame you, they’re expensive. Use this!

New Redesign and WordPress 2.7

Robert — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 04:36:26 +0000

The feeling of “I’M BORED” was definitely the impetus for the redesign. I wanted something that was a bit more personal and I always felt like my last design was a bit too “corporate.” I have a few pictures that I’ve taken sampled throughout some of the backgrounds, and just an overall warmer feel. Still a bit of a work in progress, let me know if you have any suggestions!

Along with the design changes I decided to ditch Textpattern and head back over to WordPress. The latest WP changes have been great and the platform has become so much more flexible since the pre-2.5 days. Hopefully Textpattern will begin some updates for us, but in the meantime I’m definitely happy sticking with WordPress for a while.

Taking a Little Break

Robert — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 11:42:57 +0000

Well friends, I’ll be away from the computer for about a week (jealous?). Me and the wife are heading out to Daytona Beach for Student Life & The Beach 2008 with the students at our church.

Bye!