Hypsometry. Modal Synthesis.

To clear some things up, and to stave off future confusion:

• I’m Chris Boone.
• This site is the blog of Hypsometry, which is my design studio. Hypsometry does web design consulting of many varieties. However, I haven’t been accepting new projects here in almost two years.
• My main job for the past year and a half has been as the Design Director for Infoteria Corporation USA. (Please excuse that site: It pre-dated my tenure, has never been really been used for anything, and has thus languished.) We’re an independent offshoot of Infoteria Corporation, in Japan.
• Our main product here at Infoteria is Lingr. Since Lingr launched, at the end of August 2006, we’ve often confused the distinction between Lingr and Infoteria, since there hasn’t been any need to do otherwise.
• As such, our company blog is at blog.lingr.com.
• This is all about to chance. We’re now hard at work on our second major project – about which I can tell you nothing yet. In other words, this will be Infoteria USA’s second project.
• When that launches, we will have to clear up the Lingr / Infoteria conflation. This is a first step towards that.

Make any sense?

As you might have noticed – if you’re as sensitive as Danny, at least – I’ve updated the theme here. This one hurts my eyes a little less than the last, but is turning out to be much more problematic. Eh. Damn machines.

In particular, I’m a little worried about the feeds. Feed problems can happen so subtly and can be so hard to track down…

Anyway, please do let me know if you notice any problems, large or small, with the feeds or with anything else.

Well, I’m back off it. Or on it, depending on whether you think blogging or not blogging is the vice.

So here we are again.

Yes, this is a pre-packaged theme. It hurts me more than you, I’m sure. Garrett Murray is fantastic, and SimpleLog is fantastic, but… this theme leaves a little to be desired.

So I’ll desire it, and you can desire it too, and then perhaps one day our desires will be fulfilled.

In the meantime, let’s get started.

The Hypsometry website continues to morph; if you look at the menu above, you’ll see a new section:Blog.

What’s the difference?Here, in the News section, you’ll only find actual news.There, in the Blog section, you’ll find a much wider range: my writings on the web, on web design, interface design, web applications, etc.

You might say that the news is the past, and the blog is the future.

I’ve made a few other changes to the site. Longer articles appear on the front page in excerpted form only; to read the rest, just click continued… And comments are now enabled — so let me know what you think!

If you like to keep up, there are now two feeds:one for News items only and one for everything. Copy one of them into your favorite feedreader, and you’ll be good to go. (Want to know more about feeds and what to do with them? The New York Times has an interesting article on the basics.)

Oh, and in case you weren’t surewhat exactly Hypsometry does? Well, now you know:

Hypsometrybuilds websites.

Sam Whitmore, despite what he implies, is no closet Deadhead. He’s been listening to the Dead since 1974- if I recall correctly - and, since March of this year, he has hosted the excellent podcast Closet Deadhead. Now his podcast has a new home: ClosetDeadhead.com

Half an hour in length, broadcast twice a week, filled with music and interviews and the occasional field trip, Closet Deadhead is an excellent example of how to go beyond the usual all-talk-all-the-time format of most podcasts. (In case you’re worried, Sam is careful to point out that he has the proper ASCAP and BMI licenses, as well as approval from the band.)

The site is, as Sam put it, “clean and simple.” It’s a Textpattern-based blog that allows Sam to easily manage information about podcasts, his notes to the audience, listener comments, and assorted links and images. Sam relies on SlapCast to host the actual MP3s, and the Closet Deadhead site links to those.

The new site has a feed to which you can subscribe to keep up-to-date; or you can subscribe directly to the podcast.

Take a look at the site, listen to a podcast, let Sam know what you think, and enjoy!

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Update:Dartmouth has decided to give further consideration to the ViewPoints project. As such, the site has been temporarily taken down. Sorry…

In my recent paper for Dartmouth College, I illustrated some of my points with the example of a Dartmouth-focused dashboard. Now that example is live: ViewPoints : Alternative Perspectives of Dartmouth.

ViewPoints is a portal that pulls in Dartmouth related photos,Dartmouth news,blog entries about Dartmouth, and Hanover weather, all updated frequently and regularly.

One of the ideas behind this project was to demonstrate that for an institution like Dartmouth- with its many endeavors, and many public venues -the information that people get is very rarely the information that the institution provides. On the web, sources of content are many and diverse. Our tools for sorting that content are improving constantly, but we still need ways to see the bigger picture.ViewPoints is a first step toward providing that to Dartmouth.

If the Web 2.0 technologies enhance our abilities to create and interact with that content, they will likewise enhance our abilities to create and interact with those communities. (Yours, Mine, and Ours.)

The site was built over the past couple of weeks working with Jay Collier and Alan German from Dartmouth’s Web Publishing Services group. It uses a variety of technologies, prominent among them Ruby on Rails and AJAX.

Try it out and let us know what you think.

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Recently I’ve been working with Jay Collier and the Web Publishing Services group at Dartmouth. The first product of this collaboration is a short paper:Yours, Mine, and Ours: How simplicity and transparency are building the Web 2.0.

The paper is a high level overview of some of the changes that have come to the web recently, changes referred to as Web 2.0 and the Social Web. As I wrote,

The Web 2.0 tools allow us to interact with each other in new ways; those interactions, and the communities that arise from them, form the Social Web.

The focus is, not surprisingly, on Dartmouth. Jay has collected a bunch of related links and feeds that accompany the paper, and they illustrate how the new web technologies can be used to view an organization’s presence on the web from the outside.

Our next project will illustrate that further. In other words, expect more Ruby on Rails goodness soon…

Hypsometry has joined forces with BlueArc21 and eyedive, and we’ve begun work on an exciting new project: a web 2.0 application, built using Ruby on Rails, that will - among other things -make sure you get what you want for your birthday.

Cameron Beers, the man behind BlueArc21, is spearheading the project. Martin Jespersen, designer of the logo for David Heinemeier Hansson’s development company Next Angle, will be focusing on the application’s design and style. I will be working on the interface with Martin and coding up the application with Cameron.

We plan on having a good time of it.

Stay tuned for more…

Hypsometry’s latest work:JGoodwinStudio.com

Joe Goodwin’s paintings are abstract and subtle, often so ethereal that you wonder what exactly you’re looking at.

Twist of Fate might be a hallucination of rust on a New Endland barn roof, or perhaps a satellite photo of a particularly vivid lake deep in the Sahara; Seen in Santa Fe is an inter-galactic battle seen through dying eyes; Tuscan Sun might be that same battle seen from the hazy tropics of a planet below, distorted by distance into a cottony gauze.

But then works like Jungle Influence defy easy visual description: perhaps best explained in terms of layered experience, dripped over with thought, and blended by soft patches of color meditation.

Needless to say, presenting these large and highly detailed abstractions on the web was a challenge.

Simplicity was the order of the day: let the paintings speak for themselves. Clarity was essential: text, navigation, and the site’s colors must not interfere with the viewer’s experience of the actual works. This approach extends even to the URLs, which are simple and readable.

Joe is an active and productive artist, so the site needed to leave him ample room to grow. In addition, he wanted to be able to update and modify the site himself. The solution was a highly customized installation of Textpattern.The result is a site that is simple, elegant, and easy to use, both for you and for Joe.

Enjoy.

PS: Joe’s works have been exhibited widely, as his biography attests. His next show is at the Plum Gallery, in Williamstown Massachusetts; the opening reception is on July 23rd, from 5 till 7. If you’re in the area, you should stop by.

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uvList.org:Free online classifieds for the Upper Valley.

A special Hypsometry project, the uvList is fast, simple, and free.

Have an old car kicking around? Need another frisbee player? Want to tell us all how you really feel?

Post an ad.It’s completely free.

Developed using the cutting-edge Ruby on Rails,the uvList gives the Upper Valley a new way to communicate.

PS: Want to know where the Upper Valley is? It’s here.

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It’s spring, and things are looking bright.

To celebrate, Hypsometry has a new look. Behind the scenes, it’s the usual standards-compliant code, with all the usual Hypsometryattention to detail. The new site is built on Textpattern,Dean Allen’s excellent new content management system.

Things are moving quickly here, so the new site is focused on the news. To be sure that you keep up, grab one of the feeds: RSS or Atom.

More new stuff will be here shortly. Hypsometry is increasingly Agile in method — and the new website is no exception.

PS: Want to know more about feeds? FeedBurner has a good article explaining the ins and outs.

PPS: The Dandelion is based on a photo by Tracy Scott-Murray, found at the excellent stock.xchng.