Back from vacation. But not really back yet.

I’m about to head out on a little vacation, but I realized this Wednesday marks ten years of archives here at SimpleBits. Actually, there were a few other domains that came before simplebits.com (robotcom.com and cederholm.org). I’d actually been publishing short, frequent updates for a few years prior to 2000, either by updating a .html file by hand or using a hobbled together home-grown CMS built with PHP and Perl. Those old posts are long gone, but there’s about to be 10 years of archives still preserved here and that’s rather dumbfounding when I stop and think about it.

It’s likely dumbfounding because the last 10 years also happen to have been the most eventful I’ve ever had. They’ve been both terrifying and wonderful; educational and exciting; important and enlightening. I’m doubtful a majority of that shows up in the archives here. I was busy learning about the web, and that was mostly what was talked about in hypertext. Over the last decade, getting married, having kids, buying a house and other big life events mingled with starting a business or three, writing some books and traveling to parts of the world I never imagined visiting to talk about web design. I have an enormous amount to be thankful for.

Looking ahead, I wonder if I’ll look back at the next 10 years as being this dynamic. I hope so, but it’ll undoubtedly be different. Either way, I thank you very much for reading this tiny little corner of the web, and encouraging the (now) infrequent ramblings and bits.

Handy set of pixel patterns by Naomi Atkinson in .pat, .mpx and .pdf formats. Beats drawing them by hand every time (of which I’ve been guilty).

New from Dave Shea, “…a lightweight, browser-based image processing library that can apply various visual filters to images within a web page.”

I’m salivating just thinking of the possibilities here. Be sure to check out the demo.

Congratulations to the Virb team for relaunching as a way of building and hosting simple websites. The design and copy is beautifully executed as always.

In their own words: “… a fast-paced, retro-style action game”. I can confirm this 8-bit iPhone game is fun, addictive, has great chiptunes, and is easy to play.

Just purchased these city set prints by Ryan Brinkerhoff after seeing their progress dribbbled.

I’ll do my best not to make this website a repeat of Dribbble news, but… makers of one of my favorite apps for the iPhone (Outside) have just launched the first Dribbble iOS app. Dunk is a beautifully-designed feed viewer for Dribbble shots, tags and players. Really looking forward to seeing more from the Robocat folks (and other app crafters!) as our API matures. 

Giving this sketchbook app a spin on the iPad. Hoping it helps me use it more. I’m finding that having an iPhone and a Macbook Pro has me pretty well covered. Waiting for a breakthrough moment with the iPad that goes beyond having yet another device to check email, web, Twitter, etc.

A wonderful book of music prints and posters by The Small Stakes (aka Jason Munn).

Handy tool that spits out the syntax and associated vendor-prefixed CSS3 for properties like border-radius, box-shadow, multi-column layout and more. Especially helpful are the supported browsers icons with pop-up version numbers for each property.

One of the most consistent and admired illustrators on Dribbble, Mr. McKenna just graduated from Notre Dame and is apparently looking for a job. Something tells me finding one won’t be a problem.

A month into using Tumblr for the blog and portfolio here, and I’m still happy I made the move. Something that had been bothering me was the redirect that was required for the homepage. I couldn’t point simplebits.com at Tumblr completely. If I had, over 10 years of files and old archives would’ve vanished. Setting up a subdomain avoids that, but I wanted the blog to be the main index of the site. So redirecting simplebits.com to stream.simplebits.com was the best I could do. A ProxyPass redirect might’ve solved the problem for “masking” the index—but Tumblr doesn’t support that.

I came up with a rather low-tech and sloppy solution for getting rid of the redirect that I thought I’d share in case any of you are in a similar boat. It’s sloppy, but it works well. Many thanks @frogandcode for helping with the scripty-ness.

Here’s how it works: I’m now running a crontab every five minutes that curl’s stream.simplebits.com and saves the HTML source to a temporary file on simplebits.com. The script then copies the temporary file to simplebits.com/index.html (the copy was necessary as if the curl hangs for any reason, visitors won’t get a blank file). And that’s it. The HTML source from my index on Tumblr works like a charm so long as I ensure all the paths to images and other files are absolute.

The other benefit here is that the homepage is now a flat .html file. It’s pretty damn snappy. The downside is that there’s a possibility of a post not appearing for 5 minutes after it’s published (unless you’re viewing stream.simplebits.com). But I can live with that until I’m posting breaking news. 

While I was in London for the Future of Web Design conference this past May, I had the pleasure of chatting with Keir Whitaker from Carsonified about Dribbble.

You can also find the audio over at Huffduffer if you happen to huff the duff stuff.

This is a wonderful tool. Enter a URL and replace its fonts with any of FontFonts web fonts. Hmm, this site looks rather nice with FF Dagny and FF Meta Serif replacing Helvetica and Georgia.

I just purchased a debut copy of Elliot Jay Stocks’ new print magazine that asks:

“If you could only use eight typefaces for the rest of your life, which would you choose? 8 Faces is a new magazine for devotees of typography that asks this question — and many more — to eight leading designers from the fields of web design, print design, illustration, and of course type design itself.”

Hurry though, only 1000 copies available.