Journal

A slightly belated “Welcome” to everyone visiting the new and updated minning.de 3DCG.net!

With last week’s relaunch this website has undergone a major rebranding: Not only has the layout and design been adjusted to be more inviting and clear, most of the information has also been rearranged and reformatted to make things easier to find and read.

And finally, the site now runs under the 3DCG.net banner.

3DCG.net? Whatever happened to minning.de?

For the past few years I’ve been on the lookout for interesting domain names and managed to snatch up a couple of nice ones, but with 3DCG.net I found I’d managed to grab one that’s more valuable than most:

• It’s short.
• It’s meaningful.
• It’s directly related the site’s contents.
• I just like the sound of it.

Compared to the old domain minning.de which carries little meaning unless you happen to know my last name, that’s a lot of good reasons to make something of it.

As I’d been planning to relaunch the site with a new design for a while now anyway, I finally decided to move everything to the new domain.
minning.de will remain active and redirects to 3DCG.net for the time being. It will also continue to be used for my and my family’s email correspondence.

It’s been brought to my attention that this site doesn’t work too well in Internet Explorer 6 and 7. My official stance on the matter? I could not care less.

I simply refuse to waste any more time dealing with Microsoft’s issues. They broke it, they can fix it. minning.de looks fine in all modern browsers and that’s good enough as far as I’m concerned.
So people tell me to give IE8 a try because it’s apparently much improved – no. I don’t care. I’ve had enough of Microsoft’s failure to comply with 10-year-old standards and I’m not interested in whether they have finally caught up with the rest of the pack.

Same thing with Windows 7. After the hideous, bloated mess that is Vista, I am not giving a Microsoft OS another chance. They clearly have other priorities than what I am looking for in an operating system.
The main thing that bothered me about Vista was that it looked like they let a bunch of amateur WindowBlinds themers run wild with the interface. How am I supposed to perform accurate color corrections when I’m blinded by the flashy GUI? I quite intentionally didn’t set up my workplace to be a translucent, turquoise Fisher-Price environment and I’d prefer my computer desktop to reflect that choice. Just stay out of my way, OS!

In the eternal words of Weird Al Yankovic: "Poke out my eyes, man!"

Apparently Microsoft has a vastly different opinion there as they somehow inexplicably managed to make the interface look even more garish and tacky in Windows 7. Words fail me.

Now I’m definitely not a huge Apple fan – in fact the only time I turn on my Mac is to compile software. But I must hand it to them: At least their stuff looks professional and not like it’s aiming to woo preschoolers.

I know, I know… I should be working on more important stuff, but when I updated the site’s design last June it was missing some of the more interesting design ideas and refinements I had been planning. I finally got around to coding the site the way it was originally intended with nice typographic styles and – hopefully – better readability.

“Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign”

Instead of starting from scratch I built upon the existing design’s code and look, taking the good advice from A List Apart about realigning instead of redesigning; the foundation was quite solid, after all.

If you’ve visited my site before, you should feel right at home:

• The main navigation remains the same with an extra bit of polish.
• All links should still work.
• I’ve implemented a proper caching mechanism that should not only speed up page loads significantly, but will also prevent the site from stalling whenever Video Copilot links here.
• The cool AJAX page loading turned out to be a not so great idea overall, so that’s gone.
• Comments were a bit of an afterthought in the last iteration… this time they are fully integrated into the site’s concept.

Please bear with me while I iron out the last issues and enjoy the refined minning.de!

For my many Japanese visitors I have asked a kind friend to translate the most interesting bits and facts on my software including Normality, Celulight and my shaders.

日本語ページ

Due to what is either massive abuse, negligence or an outright denial of service attack, I have been forced to suspend access to all downloads until further notice.

A user with the IP address 208.95.112.198 found it necessary or fun to download Normality 44.712 times in one night… that’s simply unacceptable and unfortunately actions had to be taken to prevent continued abuse of my limited resources.

I apologize for the inconvenience and hope to reinstate downloads once the traffic has returned to a more reasonable level.

On a totally different note, minning.de is featured in today’s Smashing Magazine article on the topic of Best Practices For Effective Design Of “About us”-Pages!

Thanks for having me!

(The “About” page is the one featured in the article, in case you’re wondering.)

It’s been more than two years since the last major revision to minning.de. To coincide with the upcoming release of a new version of Normality I thought it would be a good idea to finally push through with the new design that’s been cooking for almost ten months.

WordPress remains my CMS of choice and I am very happy with the latest version. I was considering both Drupal and TYPOlight, but WP does everything I need and does it well.
My new design also makes heavy use of jQuery, which I am using to spruce up the site with some neat effects and also to significantly cut down on loading times through the use of AJAX; according to my tests, this iteration of minning.de is fastest I’ve ever developed, even though it is by far the most complex personal website I’ve worked on.

And thanks to web browser’s increased standards compliance developing this site was relatively painless and at times an actually enjoyable process. Firefox and Safari pretty much render the way one expects them to.

At this point I’d also like to send out a really big F***YOU to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
From the get go I decided not to make any effort whatsoever to support IE6. Little did I know that IE7 would require personal attention as well.
It’s almost like Microsoft is intentionally trying to screw web developers: They have accumulated nearly a handful incompatible versions that each require individual hacks and to top it off, you can’t install them at the same time to test your site – brilliant!

Although I don’t think of myself as a web designer and I hate debugging HTML with a passion, some people seem to enjoy my current site design.

Scanning through my logs, I found these CSS galleries had recently included minning.de and have been sending a huge number of new visitors here:

CSS Remix

tom.ma

The Daily Slurp

CSS Mania

I’ll also note that a few unnamed folks appear to enjoy my design so much that they’ve taken the liberty to outright steal my files and simply replace the copyright notice. Some even found it unnecessary to host the graphics themselves, simply pointing to my server for the juicy color-splash.

Very clever.

Next time try to do it in a way so you don’t appear prominently in my log-files, my Eastern-European friends…