Redwind Software

When designing a website, taking the time to integrate good typography can mean the difference between a good site, and a GREAT site. Typography is a fascinating topic, of which I am still learning a great deal, that requires you to be picky, and focus on even the small details. There are many aspects to typography, as well as limitations when translating these practices to the web. Let's talk about some good practices to follow when designing a website.

Typographic Rhythm

Typographic Rhythm is the vertical spacing of lines of text. By being consistent about our vertical line spacing (using a standard line height or multiple) we create a rhythmic pattern. This pattern makes the reading of text more pleasing to the eye (not to mention...

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Throughout the week, I have been brushing up on my understanding of typography and how it relates to web design. This is a fascinating topic, and I needed a place to try out some things I had learned. Unfortunately I do not get time to maintain the redwind site, and it gets neglected (admittedly) due to other projects.

Before:

After:

By making some simple styling changes, such as increasing line-height, as well as changing colors to reduce the jarring contrast of the site, it is now more readable.

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I love Markdown! It's simple, concise, and as distraction free as possible. Not too long ago I started writing my blog posts in markdown. It become tedious to convert my markdown into html for the blog, not to mention trying to do this on an iPad.

So, I gave in, and began implementing markdown support for spudblog. This very article was written in markdown using the latest github release of spudblog.

Then I thought, How could I make this better for myself and other developers out there?. The answer, was to use github's markdown parser redcarpet. Now you can hookup your fancy code syntax highlighter and go write in the same syntax you would use on github. Pretty cool eh?

 def content_processed if self.content_format ==...

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It's been a few months of work, but the results are astounding. Spud is a full-featured site management tool developed by Redwind Software and Westlake Design as an open source solution based on experiences with web development and customer interaction. Spud's main goals were to create a modular (adaptable), easy-to-use (customer centric), blazingly fast, and reliable site management system (Content Management, Blog Management, and more).

The Problem with CMS Engines

CMS engines are all over the place in all sorts of languages. The goal of a cms is to allow a user who knows nothing, or little, about web development to update their site content, and keep their visitors informed with blog posts, or news posts. Some of the most...

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Many people are confused as to what the purpose of Open Authentication (OAuth) is, as well as why it seems so complicated. As a result of doing research on this very topic I thought I would provide a basic summary of Open Authentication.

The purpose of OAuth is to allow a web-site to either access or provide data to and from another web-site securely. A good example of this use case would be twitter. Let’s say I wanted to make a web app that posted updates to a users twitter account. In the past, in order to do this, the app would have to collect the users twitter account information and securely store it for making future posts. With OAuth, this process goes out the window. You are no longer needing to store the users account...

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