Cabel.Cabel.

That's Right: First Post

Last week, while eating a bag of chips, I was surprised to find that it had a blog. I can't say it was a particularly good blog ("Current Mood: Maltodextrin ^_^"), but it made me realize that I'm way, way late for my personal trip to Blog Town. It's 2006, and here I am.

Hi, I'm Cabel. I'm the co-founder of Panic (a Mac software company), and my friend Steve has had a blog forever.

First blog step: secure a hot, hot "internet domain". With most of the obvious ones long since taken, and after rejecting the extremely tempting "cabelog.com", I thought I might as well be the sixth person in all time to register a ".name" domain. It seemed perfect and beautifully awkward — with a name like Cabel — to grab cabel.name. (And no, I did not consider www.cabel.tv. And yes, I have heard that before — like, only a million trillion times.)

Next blog step: the design. This was fun. Blogger is easy. I did some interface exercises. For example, I wanted to try to improve the way previous links are presented on blogs (do they have to be always visible?), and so I came up with a pop-up floater (click "Previous Entries" at the top). I hope it's an improvement. (Let me know.)

Final stop: photos. I plan to post pictures up in here, but I've never been totally happy with how to present full-size images on the web. Usually, at least on the Panic site, I simply have them pop open in a new browser window, but I really hate introducing a whole new window just for a zoomed-up view.

So what's my new idea? Well, for example, I write, "Hey, here are some amusing pics from Canada", and then you click:

Meanmo! How about that. Cool? Lame? Looks weird? Too slow? Let me know. (I'm still working out pre-loading issues, and don't be surprised if this idea works its way into Panic-y things.)

All that's left now is — oh goodness — writing about stuff.

Here's my topic prediction: interesting Panic happenings, the Mac (or, as I said when I was about three years old, "Compooters and Ewectwonics"), design (graphic, interface, real-world), games, snacks, etc. Basically, Cabel stuff. (I'll try to keep it away from the mundane personal observations, for example I only just discovered this weekend that cinnamon toast is just as delicious — if not more delicious — when you don't toast it. Yes: mind blowing.)

Anyhow, thanks for visiting, let me know if there's any stories you'd like me to tell or topics you'd like me to cover, and please e-mail me if I never post again. Awesome. See you in 2007!

41 Comments:

"First post" goes in the comments.
Anonymous Dave 1/06/2006 11:52 AM  
Dear God. Could you guys stop being so stylish? You're really making the rest of us look _very_ bad.

Super++ nifty points for the about button link.
Anonymous Gus Mueller 1/06/2006 2:06 PM  
You're gonna tell the story about you getting in a fight with a bear, right? If that isn't a good blog topic, I don't know what is.
Blogger drunkenbatman 1/06/2006 2:43 PM  
Damn neat. The next thing I expect to appear is an entire Panic app running in a blog post. I don't really put it past you either.
Anonymous Mat 1/06/2006 3:08 PM  
So I guess I'll have to be the last Mac software developer with a blog...

-ch
Anonymous Craig Hockenberry 1/06/2006 3:11 PM  
Lovely blog. Very Panic-y design. Looking forward to reading more!
Anonymous Peter 1/06/2006 3:45 PM  
The expanded view for photos is amazing but a tad jumpy. It doesn't expand smoothly, if that makes any sense.

But I'm just picking nits.
Anonymous Etan 1/06/2006 3:47 PM  
The image zoom works smoothly for me, and looks fantastic!
Anonymous Derek 1/06/2006 4:12 PM  
Congrats on the new blog!

And serious, serious kudos on the design. I continue to bow to your talents.

*bow*
Anonymous Nathan Henderson 1/06/2006 4:14 PM  
Those picture effects are awesome. Good luck in your blogging. I've subscribed.
Anonymous Zac White 1/06/2006 5:26 PM  
Any chance of sharing the javascript. :-)
Anonymous Anonymous 1/06/2006 5:49 PM  
I wonder what would happen if you pre-loaded all the image steps into separate divs when the user clicks, then when the zoom actually starts, you can just show/hide them all.x
Blogger Tina 1/06/2006 7:32 PM  
1. the design is great.
2. the javascript functions are spectacular
3. the design is classic.
Blogger Danny Cohen 1/06/2006 7:58 PM  
What you aren't rocking the MovableType like StevenF?

Oh well that little spiffy thing you are doing with the images is... well spiffy ;)
Blogger Twist 1/06/2006 9:00 PM  
Holy !%^! That blow-up image effect was sweet! You've certainly found some pretty neat things one can do with the web that haven't been exercised fully yet (such as with the Panic T-shirt store...drag and drop, baby).
Anonymous Chad 1/06/2006 9:51 PM  
Cabel, this is fabulous. Wow. And I thought my PHP cobbling was cool. Please don't make me pay $18 to read it though! :'( (Kidding, kidding)

Final word – dang it Cabel, thanks for finally coming out in public to put us to shame. :-D
Blogger Joe 1/06/2006 9:52 PM  
*Jumps on the "I ♥ the image zoom hotness" bandwagon.*
Blogger Wevah 1/07/2006 3:44 AM  
I didn't even know you could do those things on the web?!
Blogger Dean 1/07/2006 6:30 AM  
Image zoom is very nice ... love to have the code! Provide an easy RSS feed link, please! If I missed it somewhere I'm sorry.
Anonymous Cole 1/07/2006 6:32 AM  
Welcome to the neighborhood! Very stylish pad!

The image-zoom thingy is lovely. I did run into a bug, though: On my first visit to the blog I first clicked the "ROFLCopter" link, and saw the funny ascii art and closed it; then when I clicked on the various Canadian-picture images, each one came up with the same copter image, though scaled to the size of the real picture.

On the permalink page with the Canada pictures, they worked fine. Then when I went back to the main page, everything worked fine, even if I reloaded the page and did the same steps over again. Go figure!

(TIger 10.4.4; Safari 2.0.3 (417.8))

Anyway. The blog design is lovely. I am very envious, esp. having been struggling with some much simpler CSS design at work. (Hey, have you seen Xyle Scope? It's a visual web page debugger. Astounding.)
Anonymous Jens Alfke 1/07/2006 12:51 PM  
Dean: the normal 'on-the-web' rules don't apply to him. Cf. the Panic shopping cart. :o

You asked for comments on the previous entries box - when I switch from "recent" to "monthly" I get shunted to the bottom of the page. Looks like you need to return false from your onclick.

p.s. I like your soul patch.
Anonymous Nate 1/07/2006 3:56 PM  
For those of you who are interested in the cool JavaScript effects, you can do these kinds of things (shopping cart dragging, image zooming, etc.) and more using the script.aculo.us Web 2.0 JavaScript library. Not sure if that's what's being used here, but it's pretty cool, so if you're interested check it out.
Blogger Jason 1/07/2006 5:21 PM  
Cabel, just for once, for the rest of us morons, please do something untidy / ugly / ungainly.

You just ooze beauty. In your work.
And you're kinda cute too.
Anonymous pdr 1/07/2006 10:03 PM  
excellent. i've been planning on doing
that zoom effect for some time now,
and now that one of the cool kids has
pioneered it, i won't get any flack on it.

-bowerbird
Anonymous Anonymous 1/08/2006 12:02 AM  
The image zoom thing is tres cool except it tends to show me the wrong image when I click a thumbnail. Firefox 1.0.7 on SuSE Linux 10.
Anonymous Mikkel 1/08/2006 1:20 PM  
Image zoom is lovley but doesn't quite work with Opera (ver. 8.51, OSX 10.4.3) - I get the image enlarging to the middle of the page (i.e. down and out of sight over the coments) rather than enlarging in the visible area of the page as I do with Safari.

(though I'm prob the only person daft enough to look at it with Opera)
Anonymous Dan Cryan 1/08/2006 2:12 PM  
For those of you saying you get the same image in the 'popup' - just wait. The new image is being loaded in, and for some reason the old image is still being show. This, by the way, is why it works the second time, because the image has been loaded and is now in your cache. That said, a background fallback image saying "loading" wouldn't hurt.

And also, naturally, I'll join in the choir and note that everything is awesome.
Anonymous Jesper 1/08/2006 2:58 PM  
I think you need to add a Panic T-shirt that says something like "I stole this Javascript from Cabel"..
;-)
Anonymous Sambeau 1/08/2006 4:22 PM  
Neat code trick but isn't it a bit of a kitch graphics overload?

I Don't want to be a party crasher, but as photo-viewing-in-the same-window-over-the-page goes, this guy seems to do it a lot nicer and simpler (though I would drop the image loading animation):

http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox/
Anonymous edemay 1/08/2006 9:14 PM  
Thanks for all the nice comments on the zooming. I'm still working out some kinks and making some improvements to the code, so stay tuned -- I'll keep everyone here posted as it evolves.

As for if it's kitsch -- yes, absolutely! :) It's a fun, interesting way to zoom images inline. There's certainly more than one way to do it, and of course you can make it plain, but it's more fun when it's useless and awesome. Useless and Awesome? Uselawsome! (Mac OS X Dashboard new widget ripple effect: uselawesome! Genie Effect: uselawesome! Hooray!)
Blogger Cabel 1/08/2006 9:49 PM  
Beautiful! Funny though, your first post is in 2006 and your copyright is 2005!
Anonymous Michael 1/09/2006 3:09 PM  
Lol: Uselawesome. True true. But it should not get in the way of more important design priorities of websites (like usability, interface, readabilty or simple coherance of it all). Uselawesome is one funny word though.
Anonymous edemay 1/09/2006 7:16 PM  
Regarding the zoom function for pictures, to me it feels that loading/opening the image should go slower than closing/zooming back.

To me it gives a more natural feeling to the action.
Anonymous WJL 1/10/2006 12:14 PM  
Oooo how fun!!
Anonymous Reed 1/10/2006 6:22 PM  
Another nitpicky comment regarding your js image zoomy thingy. After you select an image, if you then rollover a different image while enlarged view is open, the enlarged image is swapped out with the image you just rolled over.

Anyhoo - good job.

Bye Bye
Anonymous Dan Dean 1/10/2006 10:50 PM  
I reckon Awesless works better.

Love the blog btw.
Anonymous Ben 1/12/2006 4:55 AM  
Those of you blown away by this image zooming business are going to wet your pants upon using local.google.com.

It is cool, though.
Blogger Pete 1/14/2006 6:51 PM  
Very nice blog indeed. I have to say that I'm no big fan of the "previous entries" gadget - I keep expecting the buton to take me one step back (the arrow) and I don't see why you'd wan't to deviate from an effective and tested page system like the one google uses?

Like many before I too really enjoy your image previewer. Only the scaling and zooming may be a tad annoying. Perhaps a quicker, mac os style zooming would work better?
Anonymous AngryAnt 1/25/2006 5:52 AM  
So where can I grab a feed?
Anonymous Anonymous 2/06/2006 11:37 AM  
I love your sense of humor. I've worked my way back from the DS review, and I can confirm that your entries always have quite a high percentage of hilariousness.

The "like, only a million trillion times" quote made me release a guffaw. Oh, and I've been using Panic products for a while, thanks for that!
Anonymous bnaro 3/10/2006 8:04 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous 2/01/2010 8:23 PM  

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Name:Cabel Maxfield Sasser
Job:Co-Founder, Panic Inc.
Location:Portland, OR
Email: