Dave Kellam

Oldest page on the Internet

I came across this paper folding page from 1994, that had me wondering about the oldest page on the internet. Obviously, I turned to Google for answers. My search turned up this Slashdot thread that posed the same question a few years ago. Stanford also hosts some documentation of the early world wide web.

Digging through the Slashdot thread reveals that Tim Berners-Lee produced the earliest pages in 1990 and 1991 on his NeXt machine, which servered as both the first server and browser. You had to telnet into the computer at CERN (nxoc01.cern.ch) and look at the hyperlinked files on the machine. The pages no longer exist, but here’s a mirror from 1992.

There are some interesting tidbits in there, like this one:

There is no “top” to the World-Wide Web. You can look at it from many points of view. If you have no other bias, here are some ways of looking for information: By subject, by Type.

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Cease and Design

Pure gold: Let’s teach our students to become better designers by asking better questions not of us, but of themselves. Although, I think it applies to all aspects of education, not just design.

Firefox 1.5 Released

Firefox 1.5 is available for download now. I advise upgrading, so you can experience eightface in all it’s glory. For some reason the nav bar on the site wasn’t working properly in earlier versions.

New version of Fontographer

I believe that Hell has in fact frozen over; there is a new version of Fontographer available. Man, I was using the last version to make fonts seven or eight years ago (you can still download them). That said, the pricing model seems pretty dumb — considering FontLab is probably more powerful and costs less.

A paper rocket

Instructions for making an air-powered paper rocket.

Paper CD cases

If you’re one of those people that buys CDs and DVDs in spindle form, finding cases for people can be tough. I’ve wrapped them in paper before, but it usually looks pretty lame. Here are a variety of techniques for creating a paper cd case. If you’re in the market for real cases, make sure you check out Jewelboxing.

Richard Scarry’s changes with the times

What a difference 30 years will make. A side-by-side comparison of the 1963 and 1991 versions of Richard Scarry’s The Best Word Book Ever. I borrowed these books so many times from the library when I was a kid. They had to have been the earlier versions, judging from the amount of tape on them.

Decorate vs. Communicate

Cameron Moll is soliciting comments to form the bulk of an upcoming article based on the idea that good designers decorate, while great designers communicate. His eight things I wish I’d known when I started are required reading. I’m still moving out of the decoration phase, but I’d say less is more and whitespace is your friend are good rules to live by.

5Q with Dave Shea

Here’s the eighth 5Q interview for Seal Club (and the second in my blue and orange series), featuring Dave Shea of mezzoblue.

So long Bastard

Changes are afoot at eightface, I can’t help it. This week, we bid farewell to Bastard, the white grungy/erasure theme that landed the site on DesignShack and CSS Beauty. In all honesty, it was just supposed to be a place-holder design while I dug around inside the WordPress guts. The new layout is called Tool (feedreaders, this would be your cue to launch that rusty browser). It’s based on the Bastard, so there may be odd remenants kicking around for a little while.

Most of the template is in place, the only major thing left is the footer, right now it looks kind of flat and ugly. Parts of the design were heavily influenced by Matt Brett’s current layout; mostly the nav-bar and some of the CSS hover stuff (you could say the grunge, but that’s my territory too). The nav-bar is all one image, that’s uses some clever positioning via styling.

The template started on a whim yesterday afternoon, but there have been a few other major changes over the last week. I’ve introduced a portfolio page, mostly to figure out what I’ve actually produced. I experimented with the live archives plugin, but find that it chugs a bit. The other major change was replacing Jerome’s keyword plugin with Ultimate Tag Warrior. It has a lot of nice-friendly options built-in.