Re: Hola?
Wed. Nov 11
Yeah, I'm planning on going up to Bowler for Sat & Sun. I was going to ask Nick when he is going up to see if I could hitch a ride. Most likely I'll end up driving myself because I can't stay for the ...
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Well here is my stereotypical year in review blog post. You can also view last year's post. Overall, my site had a great year. Traffic was up almost 200% compared to last year. Almost all of this is due to the articles that I wrote. I also found Twitter to be a great help in increasing traffic. Here were a couple tweets by some high profile twitter users regarding my site this year:
- Smashing Magazine - 106,556 Followers
- Nicholas Patten (NY Designer) - 37,470 Followers
- Elijah Manor (Co-host of The Official jQuery Podcast) - 31,569 Followers
- Alex Puig (Twittexperts.com) - 30,378 Followers
- jQuery (Official Twitter Account) - 16,436 Followers
- Chris Coyier (CSS-Tricks.com) - 14,346 Followers
I was also featured on cssglobe.com and 456bereastreet.com.
2009 Statistics for NealGrosskopf.com
- Total Visits: 95,830 (32,580) +194.14%
- Total Pageviews: 165,086 (61,301) +169.30%
- Most Popular Page: CSS Browser Hacks For Firefox, Opera, Safari & Internet Explorer 24,834 (Same, 16,690 pageviews)
- Most Visits in a Single Day: May 12th with 1,831 (October 10th with 1,371 visits)
Top Search Phrases:
Compared to last year, most of my top searches on my site were related to articles I wrote. This is due to my SEOing of the articles.
- firefox css hack: 661
- opera css hack: 556
- jquery content slider: 387
- css hack for firefox: 313
Visits By Region
My site improved the most internationally while in Wisconsin I had sort of a poor year. I consider most Wisconsin visitors to be people that know me personally.
Wisconsin
3,633 (3,890) -6.42%US
32,866 (13,733) +139.32%International
62,964 (18,847) +234.08%Target Sites
This includes sites such as Digg, Delicious, Twitter etc. These are sites that I market my articles to. As you can see, I improved my targets sites immensely in the last year:
15,856 (2,734) +479.96%
Wrapping It Up
Due to my work situation for the last couple months of 2009, I ran out of ideas to write articles on. Because of this I sort of ran out of momentum towards the end of the year. My goal throughout the year was to break 100,000 visits and I came up 5,000 short. For 2010, I'll set that same goal and hopefully break it this time around.
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Yeah, I'm planning on going up to Bowler for Sat & Sun. I was going to ask Nick when he is going up to see if I could hitch a ride. Most likely I'll end up driving myself because I can't stay for the ...
Will you go to Bowler in a few weekends? Nick is going I think but I probably won't this year. There's always a possibility though. How cool would it be to get ANOTHER deer!!??
They did....he just said to make sure to let him know RIGHT AWAY if it happens again. It said invalid file name when I tried to open it. I thought maybe someone had hacked into it or something becau...
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New Facebook Home Page
Above is a screenshot of the new Facebook home page. One change on the new page is showing all types of updates rather than just status updates.
Facebook has once again decided to redesign their home page. These types of changes usually result in millions of users joining groups titled "I hate the new design" or something similar. Being a web designer I sympathize with Facebook.
One thing they changed with the recent redesign was removing the "status updates only" option on their home page. I'm now forced to sift through every group, fan page, image and application post my friends have made. Facebook does give me the option to hide specific applications but with 1000's of apps out there, it isn't practical to hide each and every one. Enter Stylish.
Hacking Facebook's CSS
Using a Firefox addon called Stylish I was able to sift through Facebook's HTML & CSS and determine if they did a good job giving their home page elements proper class names and IDs. For whatever reason Facebook uses custom HTML attributes. One of these was called data-ft. The first value in that attribute is a number that represents various home page types. The example below uses "46" which is plan ol' vanilla status updates:
<div class="GenericStory UIStory clearfix aid_718391393" data-ft="{"sty":"46","actrs":"718391393","fbid":"328181226116","s_obj":"11","s_edge":"1","s_prnt":"11"}" id="div_story_1630882208_328181226116"></div>Show Status Updates Only
By adding the code below into Stylish it will hide ALL types of updates on the Facebook home except for regular status updates:
@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml); @-moz-document domain("facebook.com") { .GenericStory { display: none !important; } #pagelet_intentional_stream div[data-ft*='sty":"46'] { display: block !important; } }Below is an example of this would be entered into Stylish:
Other Update Types
You could also substitute the number 46 above with one of the below to show only these types of updates by default:
Attribute Value Table Update Type Number Value Fan Page Added 161 Application 237 Friend Added 8 Group Added 21 Photo Added 65 Photo Album Added 247 Video Added 128 To Each His Own
Some people may love seeing everything their friends do on Facebook. I'm more interested in what they have to say and the rest just feels like noise. Feel free to take this code and make it your own.
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Photo 1 of 5: I ended up playing 3 hours of Skip-Bo with my uncles for our Christmas party this year which was probably the first time I've ever done that. I assure you, we did not talk about politics the entire time, well, yeah we did. Neal Grosskopf (0)
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I've always enjoyed playing old school videogames from my youth. I'm constantly reminded that graphics are nice, but gameplay is the most important factor in a game. Recently I got the itch to play Doom 2. I cranked up my install of Windows XP, installed the game (if you can call it installing) and played it. Unfortunately the game is so old (almost 15 years) that I was unable to use the mouse in the game. After 15 minutes of playing terribly, I looked for a solution. I first found a mouse driver but that didn't work. Next I tried an old school joystick I use to use but that didn't work either. Finally I found on a Doom wikia, a source port called ZDoom.
Back in the 90's Id released the Doom source code for Linux. Some savvy people took this code and converted it for Windows. The next step was to enhance the game to make it playable with modern technology. One of these enhancements was a source port called ZDoom.
ZDoom adds many of the features of modern first person shooters. You can now jump and crouch. The game also lets you define custom controller options (something that was lacking from the original Doom.) Because of this I was able to apply my tried and true FPS controller settings to an old school game like Doom 2. In a way, this made me a super-player and made the game much more enjoyable.
Probably the coolest thing about ZDoom is the modders went back and updated many of the textures in the game for higher resolutions. I can now play Doom 2 fullscreen at 1920x1200 without extremely blurry graphics. The graphics don't look earth shattering but I will say they look good enough that I can once again play the game without being distracted by the blurriness.
ZDoom also comes with an updated network play option that supposedly makes it easier to play against friends. I haven't tried this yet but it would be fun to play with friends.
A few other features the game includes is an updated HUD that is much more useful than the original Doom 2 HUD. The new one shows you your ammo for each weapon along with with other stats like secrets found/total secrets and enemies killed/total enemies.
Overall ZDoom takes a classic game and makes it playable again along with a few modern conveniences we come to expect from modern FPS. I give it a 8/10.
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Being a web designer and often hanging out with mostly tech savvy people, I think we sometimes forget that not everybody cares or knows as much about websites as we do. This video is a great example of how little people know about web browsers and is a wake up call for many of us who want users to switch from IE6 to something better. Neal Grosskopf (0)
Site Coded And Designed By Neal Grosskopf Using No Crappy CMS Or Themes