Suppose you were checking this site out and wanted to know what the top articles are. Look no further. Here’s a list with Top Ten Articles. (Well, eleven actually. I couldn’t make up my mind).

1. Setting the perfect white text
2. Adobe InDesign’s hidden transparancy-flatteners
3. Better not use the Adobe Creative Suite 3 ICC profiles?
4. VIDEO: The Elusive Pathfinder Panel
5. Adobe’s ‘Distiller – Deathtrap’
6. White? There is no white!
7. Preflighters around the world: This is you
8. RGB workflow in ‘real life’
9. Bringing back to life the Old Dutch Masters
10. Golden Century Style Photographing
11. An interview with London based photographer and artist Sipke Visser Read more

This Digital-Engineer website evolved from the Dutch website called MacMojo. That site has been around roughly six years. Within a few weeks this MacMojo domain (containing about 300+ articles, book-reviews and PDF-samples) will be terminated. It would be a shame to just delete this content so it has been moved behind the Digital-Engineer domain in it’s own directory. The links to other articles still work, but all hosted files have been deleted. Check it out right here.
In several of the articles on MacMojo I discussed Aad Metz’s latest InDesign book ‘Leer jezelf profesioneel InDesign’. Because the link to the sample file no longer works Aad has been kind enough to host the PDF-sample file of the book on his own server. Feel free to download this PDF right here.

We’re currently experiencing some troubles after the latest Expression Engine update. Don’t worry we’ll be up and running in no time!

Update: All bugs were fixed!

I’ve had some questions about Digital-Engineer.net’s RSS-feeds, Twitter-feeds, Facebook and my Linkedin Profile. I have updated the footer at the bottom of every page to also include my LinkedIn Profile. You can always check all of the links at the bottom of every page. You won’t find the Facebook-link down there though. I do own a profile on FaceBook but it’s just a placeholder really. LinkedIn suits me just fine. I have found it to be a very valuable tool to find old friends. Whenever one of my contacts changes job I use to loose contact. Not anymore with LinkedIn. And Twitter? Well I’m mostly working all the time (or thinking about working) so I use Twitter almost exclusively just to post the titles of new blogposts and supply the url. I don’t chat about the weather or something. It basically functions as a new way to reach you the reader, like the way my emailing-list used to. But perhaps you would rather receive an email on every new blogpost? Let me know in the comments and I’ll set up a email notifying service as well. I have also set up a Digital-Engineer LinkedIn Group. The news part imports the RSS-feed from Digital-Engineer.net. The discussion part will hold short questions or informative links. Just like the website? Well not exactly. They’ll be links to reviews, good articles by related professionals or other small ‘gold nuggets’ I stumbled upon but did not find the time to publish an entire article about. Of course you can always drop your own discussions or links. I invite all of you to join the group.

Well I was afraid this might happen… Apple decided not to fix Safari’s bad text-rendering. When the Safari Beta first came out it proved to render light colored text on a dark background just terrible. And that’s just what the design of this site uses for it’s main navigation and it’s footer text. This problem had my full attention because 64% of all visitors use Safari (Firefox usage is 25% and Internet Explorer is stuck at 7%). Of course I talked about this with my number one front-end developer Low. We decided to wait until Apple would reveal Safari 4. It didn’t feel right to start adjusting the CSS of this website for a Beta browser with a bug. (And I couldn’t believe Apple would actually not fix this rendering issue). Well… Safari 4 is here and the rendering of light text on dark background is still terrible. At least we knew how to fix it. The issue had been noticed by other webdevelopers like Komodo and Sam brown. There were a few things with Digital-Engineer.net that made this hack extra important. Little did I know it would also make it’s way to a column in the Dutch D-Zone Magazine. Read more

I’ve been running Digital-Engineers.net for almost 3 months now and I’ve reached a crossroad. I’ve been writing about technical and personal design-issues and have neglected press-statements and commercial information. Sometimes that information was actually quite good and relevant. Now my question to you is: Would you like me to post news and relevant information for products like PDF Standardizer, WoodWing, CMYK Optimizer, FOGRA and many, many others? The obvious advantage would be a higher frequency of posts on Digital-Engineer and detailed information about solutions and products most of us use everyday. The downside would be some of you might find it ‘to commercial’. I’d love to hear what you think.

By the way, these articles have been read the most:
473: Better not use the Adobe Creative Suite 3 ICC profiles?
386: RGB workflow in ‘real life’
298: Adobe InDesign’s hidden transparancy-flatteners
281: About the author & site
230: White? There is no white!

Read more

Low and I did a little tweakin’ on Digital-Engineer.net today. The site’s been running for a little bit over a week now and it seemed ExpressionEngine’s count “did not compute”. Google’s numbers were much higher. Low “changed the caching on a higher level”. I haven’t got a clue what that means but if the Digital-Engineers.net’s article’s hits are closer to Google’s thats fine by me. While he was at it he also added my Twitter RSS-feed to the column to the right. It’s not perfect, but it’ll do for now. Apart form that I got my fist spam this morning, so Low also installed Low NoSpam, witch is a spam-catcher on steroids for your EE blog comments, forum posts or Wiki articles Low made. Thanks, Low!

The new project, Digital-Engineer.net, is almost ready for launch. Designs were made, discussed, adjusted and finally created in HTML/CSS. Like I said before, I really want the new design to focus on the content. The site needs to look good of course but the content is king. Everything on the website needs to support the content. That means: no aqua-styled buttons, no fake shadows and as little Photoshop-pixels as possible. Another advantage: No Photoshop-pixels means faster load times. Read more