Welcome to the online portfolio of Jamie Love.
Specializing in CSS, SEO, web standards and clean, effective writing.

It may have been nearly six months in the making, but the new web presence of Canvas Hair and Nail Salon is live. One of the excellent designers at Taft Media design the interface, and I built standards-compliant XHTML and CSS. Under the hood, the site runs on PHP and MySQL with a custom-built CMS for the staff of the salon to upload new product, stylists, and news items. There are also some nice little jQuery behaviors for good measure.

During the past three months I've been spending my lunch breaks and Sundays laying out the new lovezapp.com design. Based on a graphical mock-up by design freak and good friend Phil (who is also responsible for the look of the new Taft Media website, the appearence appeals to me through its loose blend of professionalism and playfullness. The metaphor of having a relaxed approach to soild web development is well-represented in the new Lovezapp "tree" logo: grounded, stable, and offering welcome shade. The new site boasts valid CSS + XHTML wrapped in a PHP framework with a few sleek jQuery behaviors.

Recently on Duck & Cover, I wrote a review of the new Metric album. Embedded in that review is a Flash object that streams the entire album. The folks on Metric's label were kind enough to provide this nifty gizmo, but I had an issue with how it worked. As soon as you reached Duck & Cover, the album would begin. I'm sure they thought this was a great way to maximise the number of listeners, but it's also extremely annoying. It's also provides a bad user experience, so I decided to disable the sound unless the user clicked "play." At first, I thought all I had to do was add a parameter to disable autoplay like this: <param name="play" value="false"/>. Yet when I added this to the object emded code, it still played when the page loaded. With a little tinkering and research, I learned I needed "autoplay=false" in the flashvars parameter, too, making it look like this: <param name="flashvars" value="widget_id=https://app.topspin.net/ [...] width=400&height=300&autoplay=false" />