ali felski

The response I’ve gotten to my blog in the last couple of months has been so exciting. I really just created it so that I could learn and get better at CSS and HTML after becoming slightly bored of the flash and print worlds. I never dreamed that it would have gotten about 80,000 visits, and almost a quarter million page views from people in over 160 countries (less than 1/3 being from the US). So for this post, I just wanted to take the time to show you what to expect if your site starts gaining popularity, and talk about a couple of things I wish I would have known before starting on this journey.

As some of you may know, I recently left my government job for an opportunity to work for the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit here in Washington, DC. The Sunlight Foundation works to promote transparency in the government, and the Sunlight Labs group, in which I work specifically, focuses on making government data more interesting and accessible through APIs and web apps exposing the data in unique and insightful ways.

Why I changed jobs

I am always looking to make a difference through design – which is why I signed on with the government in the first place – and I think I was able to make a difference there, but only with the few people who were granted access to my work. Working for the Sunlight Foundation, I can take pride in the difference we are making on a daily basis, and our work (and my design) has the opportunity to affect uncounted people in America and, hopefully, around the world.

I find that I get most of my inspiration from things around me. I love CSS galleries and seeing all the amazing things other people around the world are doing, but I find that when I am just looking at and being inspired by web sites, all I can think of are elements that other people have created. So I just wanted to share ten things that have inspired me that are at least somewhat non-web related. Some are new, some are old, but all are things that I think are amazing.

Welcome to the third version of my site, the cleverly named, alifelski.com. Finally, after years of having disposable sites I am tapping into my eco-friendly side and making a site that down the road I will be able to, Cameron Moll said, realign instead of redesign. With a client you have to balance their wants and needs but when it is just you and your thoughts in front of a clean blank page in photoshop it can be intimidating. I believe it took me working through four other versions before feeling that I had a site that I was truly happy with. This is also the first version of alifelski.com that is built using CSS and HTML. Although most of my current job deals with working in Actionscript I felt that using web standards was more important for usability reasons and that I would simply use flash as icing instead of the dough that makes up the site.

This site has come a very long way from where it started back in 2004. My first attempt at making my personal site was for my last class in college, portfolio design. The class was in place to get graduating students ready for the outside world. Lets just say only offering three web design classes that focused on Dreamweaver, and Flash wasn’t exactly a rocketship to web design stardom. I actually believe after building the site in Flash I didn’t figure out how to get it onto the internet for another year. FTP’s, domain names, and hosting space? I would always be a print designer and that I didn’t need to know any of those things, right?

While walking through the amazingness that is the Wegmas grocery store looking for something to clean my wood furniture I found an interesting looking mop. I feel like I am always in search of a decent mop especially since I have hardwood floors in my apartment. I cringe using swiffer products because of their disposibility and spongy mops constantly fall apart and using water on the wood floor it just seems as if I’m spreading the dirt around. So when I noticed that this mop had a washable microfiber pad and the cleaning solutions were biodegradable I jumped at the chance to try it.