Simply put, if you’re interested in startups you need to attend the Chicago Lean Startup Circle Meetup. It’s the easiest way to hear from the horse’s mouth how to take your startup idea and to turn it into a real company with paying customers.

Before I get into last week’s meetup, I’d like to give a little more context of the LSC.

In the beginning, there was Bernhard

The attendance of the LSC has increased exponentially since it started. It takes place in a pretty large room at the ITA — and every seat was taken. I was among the legions standing. One of the organizers, Bernhard Kappe (full discloure: he’s the CEO of Pathfinder Development, the company I currently work for) opens up describing the concept of the lean startup. He then usually goes into a quick game of “Name that startup,” in which he tells the audience a company’s early product and has them guess what company it is now. Example, “in 1887, this company used to sell playing cards.” Then every guesses what company that is — and it turns out to be Nintendo. The point of this game is to push home the point that companies rarely end up focusing on the product that they originally envisioned. This is one of the key tenets of the lean startup methodology: You constantly validate your assumptions by talking to your customers . This way, you make sure that you create the right product at the start — that is to say, you build Wii’s from the get-go instead of playing cards. Bernhard then closes by recommending some good books.

In the middle, there were panelists

Last night’s meetup featured a panel consisting of alums from YCombinator, Techstars, and Excelerate Labs.

• Adam Siegel of Inlking, a YCombinator alum.
• Sue Khim of Edulender, a Excelerate Labs alum
• Sean Corbett of HaveMyShift, a Techstars alum.

Siegel was matter-of-fact in his delivery and gave a no-frills version of his time doing YCombinator. He was tired of his job at Accenture, a place he had been for eleven years and decided to take the startup plunge. He was in the YCombinator class of 2006, one of the first. He kept reminding us that this was before YC was as glamorous as it is today. From what he says, the model at YC was, “you live in a house with your team and you crank out a product.” While he looks back fondly at his time at YC and the benefits thereof, he admits that they didn’t really help much when it came to acquiring customers for the product.

Khim seemed very much of a go-getter type A personality. An interesting bit of affect, because she insists that she wasn’t that way before Excelerate Labs. Her story of making it into EL was an interesting anecdote. It’s something she doesn’t recommend anyone else trying: calling up everyone on the board of EL and having lunches with them to talk about her idea. Her team made it into EL without having much beyond an idea. Originally, their app was little more than a scraper program that aggregated and spit out lender data.

Corbett’s story was noteworthy for two reasons:

• his web application had existed for years
• he and his cofounder split up

After the middle, there were some tips

According to the panelists, it is very important to have a team. Incubators don’t take kindly to products who only have one person. It makes sense, it’s hard for one person to take in a variety of perspectives or be challenged by the ideas of her peers.

One of Siegel’s tips was, “don’t piss anyone off.” Goodwill goes a long way. He noted that there were leads that he generated years before they came to fruition because he left a good impression upon someone.

Lastly, maybe the biggest tip was the need to remind oneself that starting and maturing a new product is hard. Khim had taken out 30k in loans to pay for her project, Siegel had left his job. Corbett still works seven days a week on HaveMyShift.

In the end, there were my observations

One thing I noticed from the panelists was that they were all programmers and very code-centric. They spoke abou their products as things to be built, invested in, and sold to customers. None of them spoke about the actual “experiences” of their products. If we were to think of their products as actual architectual spaces, they didn’t talk about the things that they did to give their customers pleasant encounters within those spaces. For instance, I’m very curious to know whether or not design or the user experience of a product is important in an incubator — or if only the technology alone is the selling point. A functioning product is only part of the story of a successful application, it must also be a joy to use to thrive.

Reading an article about iPhone problems — with no signal.

<section> ,<article>, and the semantic web

If I’m understanding correctly, one of the more compelling aims of the spec, is to create more semantic markup. This doesn’t seem like such a big deal — until we actually begin to write html5 markup.

With the new spec we are left to determine where it’s appropriate to place <section> and <article> tags, which are only two tags amongst a great number, with only semantic meanings. When does an html5 author use an <aside> tag in every instance? Because language often disobeys it’s own rules, these semantic tags leave me to think that it makes html less friendly to the beginner. In prior versions you have a <div> and a <class> for your structural elements. You take those and do what you will with them. Although, with the new spec, we’re left to explain to beginners, many of which are off the bat intimidated by technology in many cases, that there are ‘correct’ ways to semantically author things, which have little real bearing on the outcome of the functionality of the page.

I’m as excited as anyone else about the new APIs available in the new spec. Drag and drop, canvas, it’s all really exciting. I just feel for the eager beginner who has to stress over the correct semantic meaning of markup, then realizing that Oh, crap! What’s an API. Oh crap again! What is Javascript?.

One attractive thing about program languages to beginners, is that for a time, it’s all pretty inclusive.You want to write some Python? You open your text editor and write some. On the web, there’s a whole mess of interconnected stuff you have to mess to wrap your head around. HTML used to be the easiest place to start. Now, I’m not so sure.

I’ve done my own startups and have worked on other people’s startups. I’ve been increasingly around the lean startup methodology (if you’re in Chicago, you should definitely join the Lean Startup Circle) where one researches a problem, proposes a solution, and pivots due to customer feedback. In this methodology, you are reasonably sure that people will use the product that you’ve created.

On the other hand there is the idea of scratching your own itch. You know that it’s an problem that you, yourself have had and you sure as hell wish there was a solution to the problem. So you create your own.

And without further ado, I introduce Packio

Dude, I Hate Packing

Speaking of scratching you’re own itch, my friend Jason Pearl, a Rails developer here in Chicago, sent me an IM one day. He complained that he hates packing. He either packs too much or too little. He proposed that we work on an app to solve the problem. Originally, I was skeptical &emdash; in part because I have a lot to do without solving the world’s packing problems &emdash; but the more I thought about it, I realized that it’s a problem that I have as well. I am probably the world’s biggest overpacker. Biggest. You know that show Hoarders? I’m like that with packing. I take everything.

Scratching Your Own Itch

A Packing List

So yeah, we started Packio. It is, in part, a way to solve our own problems with packing. It’s also a way to do something fun.

Perhaps, most importantly, it’s a way to build something great over time.

How it works

Part of a Results Page

Basically, the way Packio works is:

• You enter your Destination
• You enter when you get there and when you leave
• You enter your gender
• THEN
• Packio gives you a list of what you should pack based on what the weather is like where you’re going

A Facebook Share

We also give you a private link that you can use to come back to your packing list whenever you want. We also let you share a non-editible list via facebook and twitter. You wanna share the best thing to pack for Denver for Thanksgiving? Go right ahead.

Get it out there and iterate over time

I’ve worked on my share of personal projects thus far, and many of them just run out of steam. At first you’re just super excited about the idea &emdash; but over time other stuff just gets in the way. Something that helps is the concept of MVP. Minimum Viable Product. You get something out there that’s juuuuuuussssttttt enough to be usable. Otherwise, you try to work on it until it’s perfect. But it’s never perfect. And it never gets finished. This even happens to real companies. See this Wired article on Duke Nukem>.

With Packio, we wanted to get something out there fast. Something that was useful and fun. It isn’t even that original of an idea &emdash; Weather.com has provided a similar service for years &emdash; but in a way that doesn’t really scratch out itch.

We’ve gotten tons of great feedback. A lot of it is stuff that we totally expected. Some of it not. Unfortunately, when we started, the API we’re using would only let us get 6 days of weather information at time. Of course that’s not enough for more than figuring out what to pack for a weekend trip or a really short immediate holiday.

But that’s what’s great about iterating over time. We can constantly push new features. As soon as we get a better weather API, we’ll change the application and push it live (actually, very soon you should be able to have 15 days for everywhere in the world ). Every time we make an improvement to our packing algorithm, it’ll find its way to the web post haste.

Don’t only scratch your own itch, make yourself happy while doing it

A Happy Little Footer

When you work on client projects day in and day out, there are all sorts of neat things that you’d like to do but would never fly with management. Or the other developers. That’s another great reason to get something you like online. You can have all the fun in the world with it because it’s yours. Packio has a really nice looking print stylesheet. It’s got all sorts of whimsical bells and whistles. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you’ll find a little monster. Hover over him and he’ll hop. Send your list via email and the little monster destroys a village. Necessary? No. Fun? Yes.

An Elegant Print Stylesheet

So, while Packio is still a work in progress, I thought this might be inspiring to anyone else working on a little hobby app. Just get it out there, appreciate the expected feedback, and iterate that sucker to make it awesome.

As Apple’s ascent has transformed it from a company returning from the brink of disaster into an object of serious academic study, the idea of design-driven innovation has become a veritable zeitgeist among those interested in technology and business. In short, everyone wants to know why Apple is so great - from the idea that Steve Jobs is one of the great men of history, worthy of admiration and replication, to what we can learn from Jonny Ives about reinventing Swiss design for our stage of history.

Hartmut Esslinger, the founder of frog design, and the originator of Apple’s “Snow White” design language throws his hat into the design-driven innovation ring with his book, A Fine Line: How Design Strategies are Shaping the Future of Business.

This volume fares well against those like Roberto Verganti’s Design Driven Innovation - they both offer case studies about how real companies have thrived or failed due to their embrace or rejection of design driven design practices. Although, were Verganti, a business school professor, writes with the dry and methodical prose of an academic &emdash; Esslinger’s delivery is biographical and warmed by the emotional delivery that can only come from living through these experiences. The Italian, Verganti, is a bit more of Machiavelli describing the strategy of kings of the past, while Esslinger is more the older, wiser gentleman telling you valuable lessons learned.

One of the most compelling parts of Esslinger’s book to me is his borrowing of Julius Caesar’s Fourth Line and adapting it for use in design driven innovation. This idea rests close to the idea of R&D but is distinguished from it by its focus on delivering holistic experiences versus new products.

According to Esslinger, as Caesar’s armies faced larger ones, he would insert smaller forces near the end of a battle that had worked with each other over long periods of time, thus having the agility destroy the competition. They were not merely a group put together to do new things in battle because they had better weapons. Instead, they were an example of leveraging existing resources to do something great.

Esslinger makes a compelling case as he draws parallels between the fourth line and Apple’s resurgence in the market place. With the iPod, Apple introduced a flashy piece of technology that was stunning, and arguably better than the competition in terms of hardware. But one must remember that it was solely an Apple product for Apple machines. More so, it was an MP3 player in a sea of MP3 players. This is where the concept of the fourth line arrives: Apple then used its reserves - the talent that made the initial product, to provide added innovation to provide a more holistic experience. While other companies rushed their own short-sighted MP3 players to market, Apple, on the other hand, was preparing iTunes. The iTunes store. The Mac App store. In only this one example we see how Apple used its fourth line resources to go from a single piece of hardware to providing a holistic way for computer users to control the music on their computers, in their lives, and later moved into the manner in which people handle the applications in their computers, in their lives.

Hartmut Esslinger, A Fine Line: How Design Strategies are Shaping the Future of Business. Recommended.

Isn’t H.264 Video Supposed to Save the Internet?

That’s what I thought. With the whole Jobs vs Adobe thing, it seems like HTML5 video makes angels sing and raises the dead. On a recent project I’ve had to use HTML5 video to serve video to web browsers and mobile devices like the iPad — and I was shocked at how cumbersome it is to implement.

HTML5 Video Ain’t the Same In Every Browser

So H.264 encoded video works brilliantly in webkit browsers. Note that I said, webkit browsers. NOT FIREFOX. Apparently, Firefox needs Theora .ogv files to serve HTML5 video. So before I go through the code to implement this, let’s look at how we encode the videos.

Getting Your Video Files HTML5 Ready

In this tutorial, I will start with a .mov file and encode that into what we need to serve our HTML5 video.

First, we open this file up in quicktime (I’m using the version that comes with Snow Leopard) and select ’save for web.’

Then, save an H.264 encoded copy. This folder will save a few files for you in it’s own folder: An your .m4v encoded movie for webkit browsers, a poster frame .jpg file, a .mov reference file, and an html page.

Now we need a Theora encoded .ogv file for Firefox. Luckily there is a command-line based tool that can transcode our m4v file into .ogv for us. It’s located here: FFMPEG2THEORA

Once you have that installed, open up terminal and change directories to where your .m4v file is stored. Then enter the following command:

ffmpeg2theora *name of your video (without the asterisks)*.m4v

It will encode your video into the same directory as your .m4v file. Your terminal output should look something like this:

So let’s start writing our markup. One thing we can do is go ahead and put in our HTML5 markup and include our videos

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title></title>

  <!--[if IE]>
  <script src="http://html5shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"></script>
  <![endif]-->

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script> 

</head>
<body>

  <video poster='your_pic.jpg' controls="">

    <source width='480' height='360' src='your_movie.ogv'  />

    <source  width='480' height='360' src='your_movie.m4v'  />

  </video>

</body>
</html>

With this approach, Webkit should play its .m4v file and Firefox should play its .ogv file.

Two possible issues. First, you may need to put the following in your server’s htaccess file before FF will play HTML video.

AddType video/ogg .ogv
AddType audio/ogg .oga
AddType video/mp4 .mp4

Another problem, is that iPad will choke if both videos are present, as outlined above. And we haven’t even put in a file for IE to play, so let’s do that now.

First, we want to put our webkit compatible video in the DOM by default — that way the iPad will be able to play it along with the other webkit browsers. We’ll leave an empty div to put our video in and insert a FF compatible video if FF is the browser visiting the page, and finally put in an IE conditional so that a non HTML5 video is loaded for IE browsers less than version 9.

<div id="movie">
  <div id="webkit_movie_wrapper">
    <video width="480" height="360" controls="controls" src="your_video.m4v"></video>

  </div><!-- end webkit_movie_wrapper -->

    <div id="firefox_movie_wrapper"></div><!-- end firefox_movie_wrapper -->

        <div id="ie_movie_wrapper">
            <!--[if lt IE 9]>
      <object classid='clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B' standby="data is loading..." codebase='http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab'  width='480' height='376'>
      <param name='src' value='your_video.mov'>
      <param name='autoplay' value='true'>
      <param name='type' value='video/quicktime' width='480' height='376'>
      <param name='controller' value='true'>
      <embed src='your_video.mov'  width='480'  height='376'autoplay='true' controller='true' type='video/quicktime' pluginspage='http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/'>
      </object>
      <![endif]-->
        </div><!-- end ie_movie_wrapper -->

</div><!-- end movie -->

So now we have our html markup, let’s get some jQuery involved so that we can replace the webkit movie with the Firefox one when Firefox visits the site.

<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function() {
//if browser is firefox, remove the webkit div
// then put firefox video in the firefox div
if($.browser.mozilla){
  $('#webkit_movie_wrapper').remove();
  $('#firefox_movie_wrapper').append("<video width='480' height='360' controls='controls' src='your_video.ogv' poster='your_pic.jpg'>");
}  

//grab version of browser visiting in the page
//just grab it's version number,
//cause we're looking for ie9
var ieVersion = $.browser.version;

//if browser is IE and less than IE9
//that means it is incompatible with
//html5 video
//if so remove the webkit & ff movies
if ($.browser.msie && ieVersion < 9 ) {
    $('#webkit_movie_wrapper').remove();
    $('#firefox_movie_wrapper').remove();
}

//otherwise, remove the ie movie

else{
  $('#ie_movie').remove();
}
}); //end doc ready
</script>

Demo

See the Demo

One thing that I have been able to do well this year is read. So let’s see what I’ve been able to get through, shall we?

Swiss Graphic Design: The Origins and Growth of an International Style, 1920-1965

This is probably my favorite book so far this year. I’ve been an avid fan of art movements such as DADA and Surrealism, and this book helped me better construct the historical narrative of what those movements inspired and where some of their protagonists ended up. It appears that many of the ‘art for art’s sake’ types post WWI reconsidered their positions and decided that it would be better to use art to better social conditions &emdash; which is what should be thought by all who design.

It was interesting to see the historical parallels between that time and now &emdash; the way that designers of that era wanted to fulfill the promises made by modern life, by (at that time) the unprecedented technological progress.

I discovered a love for Jan Tschichold as well.

The New Typography (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism)

What I enjoy about Tschichold is his stereotypically German matter-of-factness. Unlike someone like, Robert Bringhurst, there’s no flowery language or meandering prose. It’s like a real Elements of Style. The author opens up with a very rewarding history lesson and then pragmatically lays out what is to be done and what isn’t. I say, skip blowhards like Bringhurst and go straight to this.

I’ve always been into large, strong, sans-serif type &emdash; and these first two books of this post not only inspired me creatively, but gave me concrete rules to work with. And they, thank goodness, introduced me to the greatness that is Aksidenz-Grotesk.

The Laws of Simplicity (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life)

This book, by the legendary designer and computer scientist, John Maeda, is a short and sweet look at minimalism in design thinking. Heavy on helpful acronyms, like SHE, for “show, hide, embody”, in very short chapters Maeda deftly makes lucid the reasons why certain designs appeal to our affective nature. One could read this in an afternoon and I give it my highest recommendation.

Rework

Everyone knows DHH and Fried. They’re les enfants terribles of web application development. Getting Real was very important in developing my attitude toward developing for the web, namely, the belief that small teams can do great things and the most important ingredient to doing is simply, to do. I found Rework to be very much in tune with Getting Real &emdash; almost the same book really, sort of like a remake of an indie film for a larger audience. I don’t say this to cheapen the quality of it, because I feel that the 37signals duo to have truly perspicacious insights, I just felt Rework was a bit more of the same.

The Visual Miscellaneum

I’m a huge fan of David McCandless’s blog and this anthology of his work presents some of his best infographics done for the Guardian and other papers.

Javascript: The Good Parts

After spending so much time writing jQuery, a friend recommended that I give this book a try. While, the faithful regard Crockford as something close to the second coming of Gandalf, I was really put off by a horrendous infographic that the book opens up with. After that though, while somewhat of a difficult read, I now see the power of the Javascript language. It has also helped me examine my jQuery code differently. For instance, now I keep all my variables and functions nested in such a way that I prevent my variables from being global.

//Note how the function below is nested within a single variable //so that the variables related to that function are prevented //from being globalized.

var navSelectedStates = function() {

                 var currentURL = window.location.href;

                     if (currentURL.match('category/product-strategy')) {
                         $('ul.main_blog_subnav li:nth-child(3)').addClass('selected');
                     }

                     else if (currentURL.match('/category/user-experience-design')) {
                         $('ul.main_blog_subnav li:nth-child(5)').addClass('selected');
                     }
                     ........

 }();

Storytelling for User Experience: Crafting Stories for Better Design

I’ve always used stories as part of creating personas for users &emdash; a practice that I’ve always found very useful. This book has expanded my understanding of what stories can be and how that inspires web application developers to better meet user needs. I’m a really big fan of Rosenfeld Media and this book is another great example of the good work that they do.

I’ve actually read more than that this year, but I think that this has been a good audit. It’s been nice to reflect.

Today you find only a few companies that take design seriously, as I see it. And at the moment that is an American company. It is Apple.

- Dieter Rams

I bought an iPad. I was not expecting to be an early adopter. I didn’t pre-order it. In fact, my decision to get one on launch day was pretty spur of the moment.

Upon my first viewing of the iPad in January, I remember saying to lots of people, “I think it’s a great machine for non-techies, but I don’t think I’d find much use for it.”

I was wrong.

In this review, I’d like to start with the packaging. The package design of the product is our first encounter with it, and as Donald Norman notes, our interactions with things are often colored by affective tones.

The Unboxing

First, the packaging is predictably (this is Apple after all) sparse, in line with a few of John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity:

• The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction
• More emotions are better than less

The packaging leaves the subject in a place of bountiful emotion: awe, calm, and even excitement, among others. It leaves one to think, “The thing that’s supposed to do all these cool things is in that little box?”

Upon opening the container, the iPad just lies there for the taking. This is totally unlike modern packaging, where the person has to fight to get to the damn thing that they just bought.

Upon picking the iPad up, the peripherals lie hidden behind the manual. Hiding things to keep your attention focused on the device. Perfect affect.

The pleasantness ends however, as Dietrich Kappe notes, upon turning the iPad on, it instructs the user to plug it into a computer with the most current version of iTunes. I have about 300 gigs of music in my iTunes library which makes for a very slow iTunes startup. I hate starting iTunes. It’s like John Candy running a marathon. My computer didn’t take to the iTunes upgrade well, and it took about 20 minutes for me to get iTunes happy and my iPad on.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

- Arthur C. Clarke

My valid annoyances disappated once I was finally able to use the damn thing. It was like magic. The system is stunningly quick. Opening Safari on the iPad was infinitely faster than browsing on the iPhone. Pages rendered quickly, and I could pinch and pan around without any lag. The screen is beautiful and radiant. The colors ‘pop’ and after about 10 seconds of use i did see the truth in Steve Jobs’s claim that the device was ‘magical.’

iBooks

I’ve read that some people aren’t a fan of reading on the iPad. For my needs, reading on it is great. The only caveat I have, is that I can’t scribble in the margins and underline as I do in paper books. I find that the ability to have a conversation with a book, to physically experience it as I jot things that I’m simultaneously etching into my memory, is a hallmark of the reading experience. As of right now, I can’t imagine an electronic device recreating that experience well, but if someone produces a great app for that, they’re going to advance electronic reading by leaps and bounds. Jotting notes in the margins would even be a good and natural use for a stylus (i haven’t forgotten that Jobs is anti-stylus).

Books render really well, and the fashion in which the screen changes itself to look like a real book, meaning, the way that one can see the binding of the book and the inside of it’s hardcover, does a lot to recreate the experience of reading as most of us encounter it. I really believe that Apple hit the nail on the head for the most part in Josh Porter’s belief that virtual objects should mirror their physical counterparts in an effective (and affective) manner. You can flip pages like you would a real book by flicking your finger across the screen — an added affectual touch is the way that when flipping pages slowly, the user can see he text that lies on the other side of the current page. This kind of attention to detail only immerses the user deeper into the reading activity. I’ve been able to read for long periods with no eyestrain. One thing you can’t do: read outside in full sun. Just doesn’t work.

More so, the ability to download books (in the ePub format) from Project Gutenberg and read them with iBooks is a marvel. I am thoroughly enjoying The Brothers Karamozov in full iBooks splendor. I can double tap on any word and look it up in a dictionary, i can search the book for occurrences of a particular word (Imagine what this would mean for students), and even look for this word’s Wikipedia entries.

Reading PDFs

As a web designer and developer, many of the books I read on a daily basis are in the PDF format. I use the GoodReader app for this. It sure beats reading them off of my computer screen. Especially when I’m on the train. Pages render with no sluggishness, and I can pan around if I need to. Best of all, especially in the case of Coyier and Starr’s Digging into Wordpress, I can orient the iPad horizontally, and the screen accommodates this by changing accordingly.

Watching Screencasts

I’ve always had jealousy for my roommate’s MacBook Air. He’s able to pull that sexy, lithe machine out anywhere and comfortably watch a screencast or read a PDF. I now have this ability with my iPad. Watching an episode of Doctype, CSS-Tricks, or Railscasts is simple. The 1024×768 screen allows me the ability to see every line of code written without squinting, unlike when I try to watch them on my iPhone. It’s also nice to lie on the couch and watch Netflix if I fancy doing so.

Final Thoughts

I feel, like Dieter Rams above, that Apple is one of the few American companies that give a shit about designing experiences. While the product isn’t perfect — for instance, Apple has not solved such problems as book annotation, reading outdoors in full sun, and activating the damn thing without a laptop + iTunes — this device is a technological marvel. It’s easy enough for a baby to use. If a baby can use it, I’m positive that it’s enough for the legions of users who use computers for consumption and not creation. I think most forget that many people use computers just to surf the web and write email. Many don’t use Photoshop, write Office documents, or code. While somewhat of a luxury at this point in time, soon this machine will be the computer lying on the coffee table or kitchen counter for residents and guests to use to look something up or quickly check or send an email. Yes, these things can be done with a smartphone, and one could also walk to the market instead of drive.

How it works:

First, in your html markup you need to create an img tag and assign it an id or class:

<img class="shuffle" src="" alt="">

You probably want to leave the source and alt blank. You could load an image there by default, just in case your random image has some sort of problem loading — but I would advise against this. I say this because, if you have a ‘just-in-case’ image that loads by default, it will halfway load on every page load before one of your random images pops up. And that just looks weird.

In the plugin javascript file, you need to place your images in the array like so:

...
	//you can change these defaults to your own preferences.
	path: 'images/', //change this to the path of your images
	myImages: ['image1.jpg', 'image2.jpg', 'image3.jpg', image4.jpg', 'image5.jpg' ] //put image names in this bracket. ex: 'harold.jpg', 'maude.jpg', 'etc'

...

The plugin works by changing the src and alt attributes to your image of choice randomly. In the plugin javascript file you can see that it’s set to use the path “images/” by default:

	path: 'images/', //change this to the path of your images
	

So you can change the path here or you can do it when you call the randomImage() function in your header or wherever it is that you keep your js.

Example:

	$('.shuffle').randomImage();
	//or to change the default path
	$('.shuffle').randomImage({path: 'myOtherPath/'});
	

Get the Goods:

View Demo
Get Plugin

_Why is my favorite programmer. Primarily because he sees the art in programming and realizes that programming isn’t just a thing for programmers. Just as we don’t find the act of writing something down solely the domain of writers. _Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby really affected me as it was a compelling way to teach programming. I love visual aids / visual learning techniques and I find that _Why really provided a tour de force in giving people the ability to have people visualize the meaning of seemingly mundane programming syntax . For instance, when he defines arguments in a method he says:

Think of it as an inner tube the method is pulling along, containing its extra instructions. The parentheses form the wet, round edges of the inner tube. The commas are the feet of each argument, sticking over the edge. The last argument has its feet tucked under so they don’t show.

The visual nature of that example is stunning to me, just as Nabokov is when he describes the word ‘loyalty’ as a golden fork lying out in the sun. _Why’s mission was to make programming a domain in which everyone could flourish. Just like telling stories. Just like making music. Just like drawing a picture.

Of course, _Why disappeared and removed his large body of work from the web, though thankfully some people have collected his work and have it posted here and there on the internet. A collection of his material can be found here. John Resig of jQuery fame wrote a eulogy to _Why here. Finally, _Why’s talk at the Art & Code conference can be found here.

To show my appreciation and indebtedness to _Why, I’m posting a 18×24 in. poster I designed as well as a desktop wallpaper that feature my favorite quote from the man:

When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow & exclude people. So create.

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