Joe Levi presents Greener Living through Technology

My good buddy Darby Gardner has posted a new website. Darby and I go way back to the days of junior high school… Has it been that long? Anyhow… nostaligia aside, here’s a shameless plug for his site. Enjoy!

Greetings!

Hello everybody. I’m writing this unexpected, unsolicited e-mail to announce the new online home of Darby & Sheila and family: GardnerSite! You can see it now at www.dnsgardner.com. Unfortunately, though, there’s not much there right now. There’s a discussion board (forum), a calendar, and my weblog. That is where you, the viewer, come in. I actually have had a difficult time deciding what to include on the website. So, along with announcing the site, I’m also asking for suggestions. That way, this doesn’t become just some boring website with stuff on it only I want to see, or think other people want to see. It now becomes a boring website with stuff on it and everybody else wants to see! Anyway, directions on how to submit ideas are listed on the main page of the site.

Thanks muchly for allowing me to shamelessly promote the family website. I hope to hear from you soon.

- Darb

As most of you already know, I’m a web developer. Web developers are the people responsible for implimenting the designs of web designers, and hooking them to their “back-ends” (databases, servers, etc.).

This morning I launched www.PerformanceDesign.com, the latest site to be added to my portfolio.

Performance Design is a company that contracts the expertise of personnel and availability of raw materials from my employer: Lifetime Products. Their product line focuses on “Park quality equipoment for your backyard.” After having seen some of their prototypes, all I can says is “wow!” These are playsets like you’ve never imagined!

There are basically three types of playsets: wood, metal, and plastic.

• Wood must be treated to prevent (read: slow the progression of) rot, must be painted or stained regularly, and runs the risks of developing slivers. Additionally, most wood is treated with chromated copper arsenate (CCA), which contains arsenic which can cause cancer¹.
• Plastic (in its various forms) can fade, be brittle, or even be tied to causing cancer if it is of the PVC variety^{2, 3, 4}. Performance Design uses blow-molded polyethylene, a plastic-like material that is light-weight, strong, durable, stain-resistant, fade-resistant, chip-resistant, and won’t warp or crack like other plastics.
• Metal has always been the strongest, metal rusts, in the past paints on metals have contained lead, and paint doesn’t “stick” to metal very well. Performance Design’s Powder Coating process addresses those concerns. Basically, powder coating is a cool process where “paint” is electrostatically “painted” on a metal piece, then run through a furnace to its melting point, this physically bonds the (now liquid) powder to the metal, making it hard to tell where the metal stops and the coating starts.

I want one… uh, for the kids…

Via The Web Standards Group, XHTML has introduced some new and very cool tags for us to use with old, hum-drum web forms. Introducing label, fieldset, legend, and optgroup.

Take a look at what you can do with some simple style rules, a couple images, and better XHTML formatting: