I mentioned recently that I had been blogging less because of a side project I was working on. Time to let the cat of the bag. I've been working with SharePoint 2007 a lot lately, specifically from a branding and UI customization standpoint. This has led to me collaborating with some other folks onﾠa book specifically on the topic of SharePoint 2007 design. The book is with Wrox press and will be released in September of this year. Here is a link to the book on Amazon (yes my ugly mug is on the cover):

Wrox: Professional SharePoint 2007 Design

Also, I have a blog specifically focused on SharePoint design under the pseudo-name "The Mossman":

The Mossman - SharePoint Design Blog

Oh, also I quit my job at a consulting company to focus on SharePoint design full time.

While its name sounds risque, FaceInHole.com is actually my new favorite website on the interwebs. Basically, they provide a bunch of photos (movie posters, famous people, funny shots, etc) that have the subject's face expertly masked. You select a photo and then use the providedﾠFlash app to upload a corresponding photo of your friend or enemy and proceed to use their simple photo editing software to shame them into oblivion. I sincerely hope they have the appropriate rights to distribute these photos because the site is really fun. Check out my latest masterpiece involving my friendﾠJason and the poster for Fantasy Island:

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GettyImagesﾠis usingﾠFlash / Flex to make a really coolﾠ"multimedia mood ring" for lack of a better description. You click your mood from a dial selector and then random intriguing videos and images fade in and out over a soundtrack that matches. The full screen images and video have an interlaced look (i'm guessing to help with full screen performance).

http://moodstream.gettyimages.com/

Everyone is familiar with Mark James (FamFamFam) and his famous free icon set known as Silk. It contains over a 1000 16x16 PNG icons that are incredibly useful. Well, some folks have taken it upon themselves to further the collection:

• Damien Guard's 450+ Silk Companion 1
• Daniel MacDonald's 2 State Silk Icon Set (basically grayed out versions of the original Silk set)
• Don Albrecht's CSS Sprite Blueprint Plugin for Silk

Anyone know of any others? Post the link in the comments.

Say what you will about Yahoo, but they have some very cool projects that aren't at all search related. One such project is the Yahoo Design Pattern Library. They have taken it upon themselves to strive for creating a robust set of standard visual tools to aid in true web design. One of the newer additions (at least from what I have seen) is the Design Stencil Kit. This includes design mockups (for all sorts of things like forms, cellphones, widgets, etc)ﾠthat can be used to create wireframes easily. Let's hope if they get bought out (by whomever, that hot projects like this stick around).

Yahoo Design Stencil Kit

Just realized how much I've been neglecting the old blog... This is probably due to a new side project I've been working on for the past few months. I had forgotten how much pain writing a book really is! But, more on that later. For now, here are some links that amused me recently:

• http://www.popuri.usﾠ- Shows your site's popularity in a quick Ajax format
• http://cfjs.riaforge.orgﾠ- CFJS is a pretty cool library of javascript versions of your favorite ColdFusion functions
• Billy Mays for President - My personal choice for President in 2008

After studying the IE8 Beta 1 a little, I found it surprising that sometimes the render mode that it uses for your site degrades to IE7 rendering without being completely obvious. This is interesting because, if you are not careful, it can confuse you into thinking your site renders properly in IE8 full compliance mode. Basically if you do not have a doctype defined, your page will render in the old mode, while if you do have a valid doctype defined your page will render in the new IE8 mode. Luckily there is a bookmarklet that can help you determine what render mode is being used:

Render Mode Bookmarklet