Brendan Nee's Website Archive March 2006
This not my current website, but an old version put up to demonstrate how my web design skills have evolved.

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Welcome to my site, where I post research, photography, and information about me. A list of my web design experience and resume are available as well. You can also read more about my past.


11.14.2005

Firefox Extensions you can't live without

Once you try these extensions for firefox, you will wonder how you lived without them. For those of you who haven't used extensions before, they install directly from your browser in less than 5 seconds through a single click. I think they are well worth your time to try out. Listed here are the best firefox extensions I've found.

1. Tab Mix Plus: Allows you to control how you browse by opening tabs for events you specify. This gives you full control over what happens when you browse, and when new windows get opened, recycled, or new tabs get opened.

2. Forecast Fox: This allows you to show the weather in your status bar and is very customizable.

3. IE View: This adds an item to your right click menu that opens the current page in Internet Explorer. Some poorly designed pages require the use of internet explorer, and as a web developer I am constantly checking my pages in both browsers.

4. Gmail Notifier: Notifies you of new gmail through a popup box and a status bar symbol. Simple and useful.

5. Web Developer Extension: If you don't do web design, you don't need this. However, if you do, you need this more than you can imagine. My favorite feature is the "edit CSS" which allows you to play with a page's CSS in real time to see the changes. Other useful features are outlining block level elements, and turning off images.

6. Google Toolbar: This allows Easy searching of google news, froogle, google, images, and groups. It also has a very useful spell checker for web forms and displays search terms at the top of the page. You can click on them to jump to the point in the page where the term appears, which is useful for wordy pages.

7. BugMeNot: When you get to a site that requires free registration, you can right click on the login field and select bugmenot. This anonymously logs you in saving time and privacy.

8. Unread Tabs: Really simple. It italicizes tabs you haven't viewed yet.

9. Adsense Notifier: If you use google adsense to monetize your website, this statusbar extension will show you how much money you made today and the number of views and clicks.

10. Stock Ticker: Track your stocks in the statusbar or as a separate toolbar.

When you are done adding and tweaking all these plugins, you can easily backup your configuration using MozBackup.

10.28.2005

Google Maps API

I spent some time recently figuring out how to use the google maps API to put an interactive map on my site. After a bit of reading, I figured out how to do it, but I had a tricky time making it work in IE. I got the operation aborted error in IE. Why does IE always have to fight me? Since IE is still the standard browser for most users, its not an option to ignore it. After a bit of googling and some work, I determined that I needed to place my javascript function in the page header and then call it in the body tag using the onload attribute. That seemed to do the trick, check out my contact page.

I also applyed my knowledge of google maps to the USCA co-op map page. This page was in serious need of change because it was using a clunky image based map. I'm pleased with the results.

10.26.2005

The City in Jello

Did they make this in a giant refrigerator? On a giant light table?

This art project of SF in Jell-O must have been at a pretty impressive scale. The details are all there too. I'd like to see this in person.

10.24.2005

Southeast Asia Travelogue



Photo by Preston Theler www.theler.net


My big summer 2005 trip was to Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. While I haven't put the pictures from my trip up yet, my travel companion Preston has posted some to his site. He also wrote up a great travelogue detailing our adventures. Since we went to the same places and did the same things, his travelogue closely matched my experiences. Preston is a good writer and these are really fun to read.

Preston lists the following as the highlights from our trip:

  • Most Interesting Meal: Ox testicles with a side of cook your own squid.
  • Most Interesting Mode of Transport: Riding in the back of a small truck with a load of fresh fish on ice, 13 Laotians, a few bags of rice for good measure, and a basket of fruit. (luckily it was only a 2 hour ride)
  • Most Relaxing Spot: Don Det, a small island on the southern tip of Laos in the Mekong River.
  • Best Nautical Adventure: Crossing a fairly large river, in a Toyota Camry, on a ramshackle canoe ferry.
  • 9.11.2005

    Railvolution in SLC


    I spent part of the weekend in Salt Lake City at the 2005 Rail-Volution conference. I was a speaker at the session called "Carsharing: Another Transit Connection". I was on a panel with a representative from Zipcar and Flexcar, it was interesting to hear about their businesses given that they are both launching in San Francisco soon. This will be the first city in North America to have three large competing carsharing services. I plan to join all three (I already use city Carshare).
    I presented on the carsharing research I have been working on with Robert Cervero. We haven't finished our analysis so I presented some new 2005 results and some results from the previous survey conducted two years ago.
    Salt Lake City pictures on picturetheCity.com
    © 2006 Brendan Nee
    This page was last updated March 07, 2006.
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