Masuga Design, LLC

Many thanks to the teams at CSSRemix and CSSMania for calling attention to my new Masuga Design site! You can see the archived pages for Masuga Design at: CSSRemix and CSSMania. Thanks so much for posting my site. My Mint stats are going ballistic, and it’s nice to see that my design and layout is getting some decent votes on both sites. UPDATE: Looks like this site is making the rounds of the CSS-inspiration sites. I was just looking at my Mint stats and noticed that the unique count for today was into four digits. All the latest hits are …More »

My current set up consists of two Macs, which includes a G5 tower in the main office and a 12" G4 iBook for those times I need to be out of the office. I usually keep both machines on at all times, so I always have two screens open (for no good reason, really, other than that I really prefer to type on the laptop keyboard, so I keep my laptop running mostly for email. But sometimes I just like the intimacy of working on this little machine, so I just use it instead). As a new freelancer, this Memorial …More »

Lately this site has been having connection problems, as the server it is on is slightly overloaded (as I’ve been told by the web host). This doesn’t only affect this site, but all of my client development sites, as well as a few live client sites. I want to apologize for any delays or disruptions in service that you might have experienced lately, and I want you to know that I’m on the problem. There will be some server changes made by this weekend. These changes should improve connections, eliminate timeouts, improve overall speed, and fix email issues. Thanks for …More »

One cool thing about running your own show is you have an excuse to make fun stuff. I read somewhere that one of the most overrated, expensive, and underused things for new businesses is letterhead and envelopes. I can see how that could be the case, especially in my line of work where almost everything is digital. I have very little to do with paper. I send out my invoices as PDF files via email, and can (and do) accept payment via PayPal. Although I have very little use for letterhead, I do have to send out the occasional letter. …More »

I added an entry for MedDirect to the portfolio section. I was involved in doing the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (including a dash of AJAX for the sortable tables) for a medical billing application being built by MedDirect. Unfortunately, the pages I worked on are only being utilized on a back-end area (read: inacessible to the general public) at this time, and the bulk of their existing site has the same layout it had before, and has had for years: the unnecessary Flash intro, an inexplicable use of Flash for the navigation, bloated table-based layout, and confusing navigation. The client …More »

When I was thinking about the layout of this site, I looked at numerous similar sites to see how wide they were. The majority of sites I’ve worked on have been a static width, usually centered, but sometimes anchored to the side, and have almost always been no wider than 770 pixels, which is usually a pretty safe bet for the majority of the population. I thought that that width seemed a little thin for what I had in mind with this site. What I found through studying the layouts of my web mentors is that their sites are much, …More »

Back in January, I cobbled together a PHP script to put multiple AJAX star rating bars on a page (2177 downloads as of this writing), based on work found at Komodo Media and Climax Designs, with the goal of making a WordPress plugin to rival Votio. I still haven’t had the time to do that. But when I do, I’ll post it here in a section of this site that I haven’t yet made live. That forthcoming section will be specifically for scripts, plugins, and any other extra stuff that someone else might find useful. If you want to see …More »

If you’re a web designer that, like me, manages your sites using Subversion source control (and not necessarily with Rails, but just in general), you might want to read this article written at Hivelogic concerning “SVN Exposure”. I realized a few projects I had worked on were not protected, but with the help of a little .htaccess magic: RewriteRule ^(.*/)?.svn/ - [F,L] ErrorDocument 403 "Access Forbidden" I was able to fix the problem.

I’m glad to announce that I will be developing a website for Chrysalis Design Services, a Connecticut-based commercial floral design service. They are looking to develop a photo gallery and to better promote seasonal specials and other services through a fresh online presence.

Masuga Design is now live, warts and all! My hope is that this site will give you a better idea of what my skills are – moreso than the info I currently have on my personal blog (masuga.com), which has, up to now, doubled as my portfolio site. Of course, this site isn’t complete to me by any stretch of my imagination. There are more projects to add to the portfolio, copy to tighten up, and other little tweaks that I will probably be the only one to notice. But I had to remind myself that perfection is not an …More »