I've set myself a goal of getting up to speed on Windows PowerShell, Microsoft's new* tool for Windows administration.

I've started by watching the Windows PowerShell: Learn It Now Before It's An Emergency webcast videos. I can't watch them online at work (my desktop doesn't have Silverlight installed), but it is possible to download them to Windows Media (WMV) format and play them in Windows Media Player, so that's what I'm doing.

The narrator for the webcasts is by Ed Wilson, author of the Hey, Scripting Guy! blog. Of course, Wilson references the Hey, Scripting Guy! blog in the video, and links to a couple of tagged subsets as well - Getting Started, and the Scripting Wife articles.

Besides the webcast, I've started reading the Windows PowerShell Getting Started Guide in the Windows Desktop Development Center. 

* OK, PowerShell has actually been around in a release version since 2006. It's new to me, anyway.

From Slate magazine comes this essay on How to be a faster writer. I may have "blogged" ("curated"?) about this story before, but if so, I think it's something I want to remind myself of.

Four years ago, BlogEngine developer Al Nyveldt put together a Webcast showing how to create a BlogEngine 1.1 theme, step-by-step. I watched the first part of the Webcast, but was disappointed to find the originally posted version froze about halfway through.

Yesterday, I noticed that Nyveldt posted an update a few days later, with a link to a Windows Media (WMV) version of the BlogEngine Theme video. I don't know how I missed it when I first became interested in BlogEngine, but there it is.

The download is 158 MB, or 194 MB unzipped. The video is almost 25 minutes long, and gives a good idea of Nyveldt's workflow.

A number of things have changed since BlogEngine 1.1. However, I plan to watch the video for inspiration on creating themes for the current (2.5) version of BlogEngine.

After 8 days of the Design Inspiration Countdown, we've arrived at the end. We've seen clever takes on scrolling, Wordpress sites that don't look like Wordpress sites, and of course innovative and inspirational designs.

Inspiration #1: Lost World's Fairs - Atlantis

Yesterday's installment was a site for an event at this year's SXSW Interactive convention. Today's installment is also related to SXSWi 2011. If you followed the news coming out of Austin this past March 14, you saw the release of Internet Explorer 9.

Previous IE versions pioneered Web technologies like CSS support, but since resting on their laurels in the first years of the 21st century with IE 6, Microsoft have had to play technology catch-up with successive IE versions. IE 9 was big news at SXSWi, because it added support for the Web Open Font Format (WOFF). In response, the Friends of Mighty designed Lost World's Fairs, three sites highlighting the WOFF.

The Lost World's Fairs site is recommended reading for any Evolving Code Monkey. But the site that Mashable.com called out as a design inspiration was the Lost World's Fair - Atlantis site.

Like Ben The Bodyguard, the Atlantis site uses scrolling to move a human figure through an ever-changing landscape - or perhaps seascape would be a better term. The metaphor is that of a visitor arriving at the 1962 World's Fair via an undersea elevator to the lost city of Atlantis.

The site has a number of clever cultural references, including Disneyland, Back To The Future and Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It also refers to current experiences - for example, elevator passengers are cautioned to "Turn Off All Electronics" at the 8K league level.

I was surprised to feel a tightness in my chest as I scrolled down into The Dark Zone - I've never felt claustrophobic in real life, but the "undersea descent" metaphor was effective. I felt a definite sense of relief when The Dark Zone was past!

And speaking of a definite sense of relief - I for one am glad to see the end of this Design Inspiration Countdown. I may do a daily themed series like this again, but it will be a little time. I have enjoyed writing it, however, and I hope you have enjoyed it too.

We're down to the last three installments of the Design Inspiration Countdown. A couple of the previous entries in the Countdown used scrolling in unexpected ways. At this point, perhaps we should expect the unexpected when it comes to scrolling!

Inspiration #3: Design made in Germany

When Mashable first highlighted Dmig 5, the fifth edition of Web magazine Design made in Germany, it was to award them first place in November 2010's Web Font Awards. At that time, Mashable pointed out the use of Web fonts, the seamless way those fonts scaled to fit the browser, and the overlapping text and image effects. This time around, Mashable's judge was impressed by the use of transparency to enhance the effect of the site's illustration.

When you first arrive at the site in a Web browser, you see an illustration of four animals in a heap (and a "Powered by Wordpress" notation in the corner). Scroll down and watch as the illustration remains stationary, while the letters "Dmig 5" move up - but wait! The background of the Introduction ("Einleitung") does a video-style "wipe" to reveal that the four animals are actually the Bremen Town Musicians (from Grimm's Fairy Tales).

Scroll further, down near the bottom of the table of contents ("Inhalt"), and notice something unexpected - the scroll thumb shrinks, indicating that the browser viewport is now showing a much smaller proportion of the page:

Continue scrolling, and the site continues to feed more and more content - over 100 viewport pages on my 1920x1080 display.

If you get tired of scrolling, you can use the article title links in the table of contents to jump directly to one of the magazine's 18 articles. Each article opens in its own page when you use its title link. You can also jump to any article by number using the navigation on each article page.

The progressive delivery of page content when scrolling, and the individual links to article pages, means that you don't have to download the whole magazine just to read a couple of articles, whichs makes it very responsive on a smartphone - without sacrificing the site's design.

Design made in Germany 5 shows that a clever take on scrolling can enhance the user experience, and also shows once again that a Wordpress site doesn't have to look like one.

Today is the sixth installment of my Design Inspiration Countdown, wherein I take a closer look at nine sites featured in Mashable.com's 9 Outstanding Websites for Design Inspiration. Today's site, #4 in the Countdown, is Analog, a co-op of web designers and developers from the US and UK.

Inspiration #4: Analog

Analog's site is an attractive one. The Analog logo and the illustration of five workers tugging on hawsers remind me of designs from the Art Deco period. Drop below the "fold" and the pictures of the five co-op members (designers Alan Colville and Jon Tan, and developers Andrei Zmievski, Chris Shiflett, and Jon Gibbins), and you'll see a thoroughly modern color wheel repurposed as a mission statement.

There are a number of "Easter Eggs" built into the site. For example, CSS3 transitions allow you to play with the mugshots of the designers, from this:

to this:

The footer - "placeholder frippery" as Analog describe it - notes the use of GeoIP to enhance the visitor's experience, and the site mines the five members' Twitter feeds to further personalize the site. If you've used layout grids like the 960 Grid System or Yahoo UI Grids, you may want to press the "G" key to see how Analog's own hashgrid alternative looks.

Analog's site is a great showcase of their work, both as designers (able to blend historical and modern elements) and developers (applying advanced technology with humor). It's a great example for a wannabe web designer/developer like me.

We're halfway through the Design Inspiration Countdown. Today's site is Guide to the App Galaxy, Google's business guide for mobile app developers.

Inspiration #5: Guide to the App Galaxy

Do you love rocketships and retro science fiction?

Do you love mobile app design?

Do you love web sites that use scrolling in an innovative way?

Do you love Javascript?

Then you'll love Google's Guide to the App Galaxy!

The first thing you'll notice about the Guide is a mostly-blank browser window and a long load time. The HTML alone is 6300 lines and 462 KB. Even on wi-fi and broadband, the delay is noticeable. And as to viewing it on a mobile browser, forget about it. Even after the page finished loading, I was unable to scroll to view more than a corner of the page.

After the page has finished loading, the picture switches to a view of a retro-looking rocketship on a launch pad. A Big Red Button marked "Launch" (but without a molly guard) invites you to start your journey into mobile app design.

If you try to scroll down instead, you'll find that the site is already scrolled down as far as it will go. Instead, it scrolls up, befitting the spaceship blastoff metaphor.

The first stop in the journey (whether you pressed the Launch button or scrolled up manually) is Promote - ways to promote your newly-written app. The next stops are Earn, Measure, and Evaluate.

At each stop, the "engineering plans" are divided into sections on different aspects of the mobile app business. Also at each stop, a drop-down tab marked Choose Journey gives you access to the stories behind Angry Birds, Ant Smasher, and the Weather Channel's app. You can also take the Grand Tour or Create Your Own Journey. This last option allows you to create and share your own story and tips on mobile app development. Google gives you a unique URL that you can share on your own web site.

The site links to around 20 Javascript files to work its magic, and also uses jQuery.

If you want to learn about the mobile app business in a fun way, take a trip with the Guide to the App Galaxy (but don't forget your towel!)

Today's fourth installment of the Design Inspiration Countdown features the home page of Octavo Designs, a "Print & Web Design" shop in Frederick, Maryland.

Inspiration #6: Octavo Designs

According to Mashable.com's review, Octavo Designs' horizontally scrolling home page "...bucks the trend of awkward side-scrollers..." I agree that the site is well put together, and there is nothing that interrupts the flow of the visitor's experience. Or almost nothing - vertical scrolling shows a few pixels of various background images, including one that doesn't look anything like the rest of the site.

A look at the page source, or a check with Under The Site, reveals that the site is built on Wordpress. While this is not the most extreme use of Wordpress, it's certainly not the expected backend for a site like this, particularly since Octavo does not include a blog section on their site. Octavo also doesn't brag on their Wordpress expertise on their site - Wordpress doesn't even get a mention on their Services listing. If you're looking for a custom Wordpress theme, Octavo could probably accomodate you - but you'd hardly know by looking at their site.

Besides Wordpress, Octavo uses Google Web Fonts to serve Droid Sans and Droid Serif, their default page fonts. jQuery is also in use, particularly on the Home (leftmost) section of the home page to animate an illustration of a young woman being carried aloft by a bunch of balloons.

In the Full portfolio, the Web Design examples are framed in computer monitors. This establishes clear boundaries between examples and keeps the examples from clashing with each other and with the design of the rest of the site. Similarly, the Exhibit Graphics examples are framed in a "stand" that looks like it could found in a trade show booth.

If you've thought about designing a horizontally-scrolling web site, or wondered how far you could push a Wordpress theme without having it look like a Wordpress theme, you might find some inspiration from Octavo Designs.

When you're learning HTML and CSS, how do you try out examples? Do you use a less-advanced freeware tool, or do you set up a full-blown Integrated Development Environment (IDE) like Eclipse or Visual Web Designer Express?

Sometimes, it's just not convenient to use a "real" tool - maybe you're away from your development computer, or you just want to check out a couple of CSS commands and would rather not have to load up the full IDE.

And what if you're looking at a web page and are curious about the back-end technology used - is it a Wordpress site in disguise? What back-end server are they using - Apache, Microsoft IIS, or something more obscure? Are they using jQuery, or a lesser-known Javascript library?

Today, Smashing Magazine linked to a couple of articles with tools for Evolving Code Monkeys.

Helpful Tips & Tools for Web Design Experiments

Helpful Tips and Tools For Web Design Experiments, from Design Shack, pitched readers on the Benefits of Experimentation, offered Tips for Experimenting, then got down to business with Tools for Experimenting. There were two free web tools for HTML / CSS and Javascript experimentation.

CSSDesk is an online tool that allows you to work with HTML and CSS, making changes in two windows on the left side of the screen, and watching the results of your changes live in the right hand side of the screen. It's much easier and quicker than opening up a "real" IDE to experiment with a few lines of code.

jsFiddle is more elaborate than CSSDesk, but besides windows to enter HTML and CSS, jsFiddle adds another window to allow you to use Javascript and Javascript libraries like jQuery, Dojo, or YUI. However, the idea is the same - it's a good quick tool to enter a few lines of code and see the result right away.

Under The Site

UnderTheSite.com is a clever online tool that analyzes the technologies used by a website you supply. Just enter the website address, and UnderTheSite connects to the site and detects things like jQuery and other Javascript libraries, Google Analytics, and (sometimes, for some web sites) the type of host server, and the site scripting language or programming framework.

Under The Site is not perfect - for example, analyzing Stack Overflow (the popular techie community answer site) told me that the site is using jQuery, Backbone.js, Google Analytics, and the Google Libraries API. However, I wasn't able to find out whether Stack Overflow is using  Microsoft's C# language or an Open Source language like PHP or Ruby. I even got a "500 Server Error" page when I queried Under The Site for my employer's home page. However, when Under The Site does work, it's a quick, easy way to peek behind the curtain.

Design Inspiration Countdown

A couple of months ago, Mashable.com ran an article titled 9 Outstanding Websites for Design Inspiration.

As an Evolving Code Monkey, I try to develop an appreciation of graphic design, but my skills lie in text - copywriting, HTML/CSS coding, and back-end programming languages like C# or PHP. For me, design articles are good to read, but not essential. I thought this Mashable article was good, but not really noteworthy. I left the site open in a Firefox tab for several weeks (!), planning to blog about it some time when I needed to write an article in a hurry.

Tonight, I noticed the tab and clicked on it, intending to get a quick blog post out of it. But after looking at a couple of the example sites, I realized that I couldn't possible do all of them justice in a single hit-and-run quick blog post.

Instead, for the next 9 days I'm going to do a countdown of the sites, highlighting each site's educational value for students of web design and development.

Inspiration #9: Awwwards.com

Awwwards.com was the 9th site in Mashable's list. On Awwwards.com, a jury of designers select a site from a pool of candidate sites and score the site on design, creativity, usability, and content.

Every day. Since June 2009.

That's right, Awwwards.com has been serving up a daily example of web design and evaluating each site for over two years. This is a terrific source of graphic design inspiration - over 700 examples of what the web has to offer.

The daily jury appears to be drawn from a pool of 29 designers from all over the world, including Australia, Brazil, France, the Netherlands, and the United States -- and those are just the first five! If you've been looking for web designers to add to your Twitter feed or sites to add to your daily blog consumption, you're in luck - most of the designers have their Twitter handle and their web page listed on their jury profile.

If you're confident in your design sense, you can create an account on Awwwards.com and add your own comments to the Daily Site's page. As an Evolving Code Monkey (i.e., NOT a designer), I will probably be lurking for a long time!