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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NealGrosskopf.com 2009 Year In Review
Jan 12
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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Message Board
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Re: Hola?
Wed. Nov 11
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!!??
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Re: Hola?
Tue. Sep 29
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...
Poll: Prefered Holiday Greating?
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Merry Christmas
57% -
Happy Holidays
0% -
Happy Hanukkah
14% -
Joyous Kwanzaa
0% -
Bah! Humbug!
29%
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Tech: Find Unused CSS Selectors With CSS Usage, A Firebug Extension
Jan 27
As a website grows so does its stylesheet. The problem is, the opposite is not true. As a pages get removed, seldom do the selectors in the external stylesheet. This becomes even worse with multiple employees, especially if people come and go. Enter CSS Usage.
CSS Usage
Above is an example screenshot showing selectors in green that were found and selectors in red that were not. As a website is browsed, the tool will continue to re-analyze the stylesheet.
I found this Firebug extension a couple weeks ago and thought it was worth talking about. CSS Usage shows up as a tab within Firebug so if you don't have that extension yet, head over to Mozilla's addon site and download it - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843
The jist of CSS Usage is to scan your stylesheet selectors and HTML to determine if each selector is used. Used selectors are colored in green while unused selectors are colored in red. Selectors previously found on other pages are colored in dark green
By default it will only analyze a page if you hit 'scan' but I like to turn on the auto-scan feature and just browse around my site for about 20 pages to give it a good mix of selectors. After that I had only a handful of selectors that were left unused. I took those selectors and did a site wide search to try to identify if they were used.
Cons
There are a few drawbacks with the addon. Currently it will only scan pages you visit. It does not have the ability to scan your entire site. Sites with 100's of pages may be difficult to scan with this tool. I also found the line numbering to be a bit flaky (as seen in my screenshot above).
Pros
Some great pros of this addon include cleaning up your stylesheets and reducing filesize. You can also save a little bandwidth by making them smaller in size.
Download
Head over to the CSS Usage page on Mozilla's addon site and give it a try.
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Photo Gallery
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)
Review: ZDoom - A Doom Source Port
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Oct 06
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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Video: Google Asks People: What is a Browser?
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)