With some recent projects — like the redesign of Hike New Jersey and a little Flickr View Larger tool — I’ve had the opportunity to try a few bleeding edge techniques as a means of enhancing the look of a site while keeping code and maintenance down. In his recent book Handcrafted CSS, Dan Cederholm calls this ‘progressive enrichment’ — or providing a little extra spice in the visuals for the few browsers that can follow along, while functionality, page structure, and general styling rules remain at some stated baseline across browsers. While working with these new properties like box-shadow and rgba colors I hit a few quirks that I thought I’d share.

A little while back I mentioned that I had reclaimed an old domain of mine and was looking for something to do with it. It took about two months to pull the free time together to design and build it, but I’ve just relaunched the site: Hike New Jersey.

The Secret Lives of Insects from Chris Casciano on Vimeo.

I spent Labor Day afternoon on a 7 or 8 mile hike of some local trails, exploring areas of the park I don’t normally get to. During the hike, while still in the South Orange area of the park, I passed a really busy tree. It was snack time for a wide variety of insects from ants to flys, bees and wasps.

Video shot with a Nikon D90 & Nikon 105mm 2.8 VR, though I shorted and recompressed it a little, its otherwise straight out of the camera.

View HD version of the video at Vimeo

View Slideshow

In the vein of events like 24 Hours of Flickr and Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photo Walk a local photographer recently used Flickr and other local web sites to organize 48 Hours of Maplewood, an event where people in town were asked to go out on a nice summer weekend and document their suburban New Jersey neighborhood.

As a college student in the mid 1990s I got my first regular access to the internet. It didn’t take long for me to realize that the internet was more then just a new piece of software, but a new way to communicate with others and find and form communities and relationships. Back then we didn’t have Facebook or Twitter — or really even web sites at all — the communities I found were in mailing lists like the very active forum for hikers that centered around the Appalachian Trail, at-l.

Out of those interactions came my desire to share online and as the web grew into a place for regular people to share more static and permanent information I registered my first domain name – hikenj.net.