peripheralvision.ca is the photography portfolio of Kate Wilhelm, who just happens to be my better half

Kate wanted something that was aesthetically pleasing, and easy to maintain. Many photographers use Flash for their websites, but that can result in poor search engine ranking, since the content isn’t accessible to search engine spiders. Using the dojo javascript toolkit I was able to build a site that has slick visual effects, while retaining excellent findability. It doesn’t break the back-button, and you can bookmark individual images. For the content management I used the lovely Zen Photo. The site also features a blog powered by WordPress, which is fully integrated into the site design. Finally, the images are linked to imagekind where you can buy prints of the photos. 50% of profit from sales go to charity - the Stephen Lewis Foundation. The gallery features photos from our visit to South Africa , as well as from closer to (our) home. Soon, it will be updated with photos from our recent trip to Cuba, so subscribe to the newsfeed to stay tuned!

I’ve been reading ‘iWoz’ which is the autobiography of Steve Wozniak, who invented the personal computer in the form of a computer with a keyboard for input and a TV as a display. It seems so obvious now, but it was a revolutionary advance over the existing computers of the time which only had a panel of lights as a display and punch cards as input. The spark which gave him the idea seems to have been playing the archetypal arcade game of Pong. He then formed Apple computer with Steve Jobs … and the rest is history.

It is quite an inspiring and very readable story, which isn’t burdened down by a lot of technical details, but just enough so you can appreciate how really smart this guy is — he built an electronic adder/ subtractor as a science project in high school, when everybody was still using slide rules!

Here’s a fun movie which I found via the Motion Graphics Chicago Festival website:

Today I noticed the leaves waving outside the kitchen window, casting interesting animated shadows…. watch video here.

In case you missed it… get it here. I was just looking for this last week and all I found was an open source project I had to  check out and compile myself. .. guess those guys are out of a job.  Finally we can test our sites in Safari without having to buy a Mac! This is good, but it’s also really weird using it on Windows.

Interesting fact: Safari’s rendering engine is based on KHTML which was developed as part of the Linux K Destop Environment. So Linux’s Konqueror browser is virtually identical to Safari in the way it renders pages.

This is the first post on the new Juju Blog, where I will post updates to content on the site, or other stuff I think is cool

Today I’ve added a page to my portfolio, in the Flash department. It is about the Flash kaleidoscope I developed, with a brief explanation and a couple of versions for you to try out. Have fun.