Internet Wanderer

So this supposedly is the closest I could come to getting this web site to look like me. I saw the post on metafilter and thought I would give it a shot. What do you guys think?

As of writing this entry right now there have been 1,001 unique visitors to my blog. I started this blog back on December 3ed 2007, so a day before 9 complete months there have been 1,001 visitors or about 111.17 visitors per month. The most visitors were 19 on January 13, 2008. I think its pretty impressive for such little work that I’ve actually put into it. I also currently have a google page rank of 4 out of 10. There have been visitors from 63 different countries with the top 5 being(these are all time visits):

1. US- 998 visitors
2. Canada- 50 visitors
3. UK- 42 visitors
4. Germany- 18 visitors
5. India- 16 visitors

These are the top 5 searches:

1. Digsby review- 199
2. evernote3- 18
3. zalternator download- 14
4. Keith Keristead- 12
5. zune alternative- 9

As for my main portfolio site I’ve only had 281 unique visitors. My main site has a google page rank of 2 out of 10.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been updating my web site as well as learning and implementing CSS (Cascading Style Sheets ) into my design. Now since I had little clue of how CSS worked and how to design with it I was a little intimidated to say the least. After reading some articles online, watching some examples on youtube and looking at some examples I got the basics down and was able to get the gist of it. While searching for examples and information I had to wade through a lot of websites that weren’t all that helpful or were to vague to figure out, so I decided to compile a list here so people could have easy access to many of the sites.

1. w3schools.com-Where to get all the basic info that you need to get started. Also check out the example pages where you can view and test out some of the basic CSS skills.
2. Youtube tutorial-Its a little long at a little under 40 mins. But it goes step by step starting for the beginning of how to create a page using CSS.
3. DynamicDrive-Where I figured out how to get the menu and other examples to work right and implemented. They also have a lot of other information on web design.
4. Smashing Magazine-This is more a collection of links but is been a very good resource for me. They show you good designs, layouts, and navigation along with having  links to how to create different things like graphs, forms, and image galleries. Keep checking back here for good CSS techniques and other design software.

*Bonus little bit of information that I was having trouble with. When I was entering different lines of information the line spacing was way off. So to get the line information you just enter this into your CSS and then add the class to the lines that are spaced to far apart. Just change the percentage to what you want:

p.small {line-height: 90%}

This is a slide show of a powerpoint that I made following my dad and I’s trip up to New Brunswick, Canada for the Keirstead Family Reunion in the year 2000. I meant to post this awhile ago but I just found it while searching for something on my external harddrive. As you can tell by watching this that its old and outdated. A couple of things I noticed off the bat Comic Sans typeface…horrible, Some really bad clip art/images (random Bart Simpson?), the third and most disappointing was the slow and obnoxious animations for all of the slides, luckily for you when I turned it into a slide show to be upload online I lost all of the slide animations so you guys don’t have to put up with it. Also some of the things I can’t believe that I put on there, the horrible excel graph and used the template from powerpoint. Although I guess I have to take into consideration that I was 14 when I created this and it was before I had even started high school so I guess I can give my self a break.

EDIT: For some reason its coming out really small. Click here to view it full screen.

If you check out www.keithkeirstead.com there is a new design up. Nothing to tricky, nice simple and clean. Got rid of that slow flash opening and the flash gallery for displaying my work. I also was able to add descriptions to my portfolio page as well as adding some new work and PDF versions for those who need it. Looking back at all the years I decided to take a screen shot of the so far of the 3 different designs that I have had. Hit the jump to seem them in all of their glory.

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As you can tell I have a new design for my blog. Over the next couple of weeks I am going to try and update the blog to my liking and adding some pages as well as updating my regular site. I am going to try and go for a whole new theme as well as making it more user friendly. If anybody has any suggestions feel free to email me.

Its been two weeks since Firefox 3 has come out and I’m just getting around to posting a “full” review of it. Overall I’m impressed with it, its a big step up from Firefox 2. There have been some visual changes as well as software and memory changes. Now I don’t know much about programing so I have no idea what they did but all I know is that its faster then 2 and that it uses a lot less memory then 2 did. One of the changes that I love that they did is when you enter your user name and password into a site a bar drops down from the top to ask if you want to save the password or not. In the older versions and was a pop up window that asked you which was extremely annoying if you entered the wrong password you wouldn’t know until after you selected if you wanted to save it or not.

Hit the jump too see some of the other changes…

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Today was the official release of the ever popular Firefox 3. Today was the official day to download to try and set the Guinness book of world records record. Right off the bat when Firefox 3 went live their servers started to crash from everybody trying to download. Once they fixed that ahem minor problem everything seems to be going fine. I was able to download and install without a problem. Once I installed I was expecting for only a handful of my 31 extensions to work. However all but 7 worked and installed correctly. So before the browser even started I was happy with them all just working. Once the browser was up and running I opened a few tabs and was surprised how much faster it was then Firefox 2. They had developed a new “theme” for it to fit across all platforms and there appeared to be some people who didn’t like this new look. I however think it works just fine under Vista (yes I use vista). Right now I have just been playing around with and wanted to post to tell people to go download and Spread Firefox and help to break a world record! Expect a full review later this week when I’ve used it for a couple of days.

Update: Check here for the total count so far!

Today was Apples WWDC (world wide developers conference) conference today. With the much anticipated iPhone 3G release as well as the iPhone 2.0. So why am I saying No no no? Well look at at the name “iPhone” first of all nothing was released about the phone part of it, just add-ons for it. Then there’s the price for it….you ready…..$199 for 8GB and $299 for 16GB version. That’s it. For a phone. An iPhone. A PHONE. Are you kidding me?

When my parents signed up for the their mobile plan they got my phone for free. Now my phone doesn’t have a camera, or have GPS or have a touch screen but you know what it does do? It makes phone calls, receives phone calls, receives voice mail, receives and sends text messages, plays games, does email and even has Internet.

Now why would anybody want to pay $199 for a phone when you could easily get pretty much the same features for $199 less? Hit the jump to find out the big secret.

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I’ve mentioned Last.fm before (here) to track my listen habits and statistics. It gives you pretty much endless statistics and graphs and list, yet I crave more, I need more. Then along comes the wonderful and re-launched Lastgraph. Lastgraph creates, you guessed it, graphs based on your last.fm feed. All you have to do is go to their site and enter in your Last.fm username and then click on posters and pick from what dates you want data to be collected. Then after awhile your data will be collected and made into a graph similar to what’s pictured above. The way the graph is made is that the more songs you listened to by an artist the bigger their color section gets. So for February/March I was listening to a lot of Pink Floyd and Boston, then for April it was Blue Oyster Cult Then for May it seems to be Elton John and Michael Jackson and since then its pretty much dominated by The Beatles. The huge increase with The Beatles has to be attributed to me watching Across the Universe. The picture above is really bad quality, but you can download a PDF version from Lastgraph that you can zoom in to see every bend and curve and name. You can view a PDF of mine here.