About Jonathan Snook

I am a creator of striking designs, impeccable markup and code, and forward-thinking ideas and applications.

From front-end work to hardcore server-side challenges, I share tips, tricks and bookmarks on snook.ca, along with other publications online and offline. I've also coauthored two acclaimed books: Accelerated DOM Scripting with Ajax, APIs, and Libraries, and the approachable, widely-read The Art and Science of CSS.

In my off time, I've also teamed up with a dynamic group of world-class partners to form Sidebar Creative, who invent innovative applications, including Snitter, My Mile Marker, and Overheard.it.

About This Site

First and foremost, this site is a resource—for myself and the community. It's also my personal design and code playground, a place to experiment, and therefore, a site that is in a constant state of flux.

Credit where credit is due

There are some very talented people that I would recommend in a heartbeat.

The lovely hedcut illustration in the sidebar was done graciously by Anton Peck. A nice guy and a great illustrator to boot.

The social icons in the footer are from Rogie King. The icons are available to put on your site, too, and why wouldn't you? They're hot.

There are two custom fonts that I'm using via @font-face embedding: Museo Sans 500 and League Gothic. Both foundries have a great selection of typefaces.

Getting In Touch

If a specific article on the site is of interest and the comments are open then feel free to contribute. You can also contact me directly with your thoughts, critiques, or to send me buckets of money.

Behind the Scenes

This site was initially powered by Blogger but quickly grew beyond what Blogger could handle. The site moved to the more powerful MovableType where it stayed until version 3.2. It had been pretty stable with the latest spam filtering working rock-solid. Expanding beyond the basic blog capabilities had once again become limiting.

Enter CakePHP. For the most part, it has merely replicated what MovableType used to do, in that it's a fairly straightforward system of posts and comments (and even mimics the MT database format to some degree which made porting the data between the two systems fairly painless). But underneath the hood, CakePHP is used to integrate a number of third party systems like Del.icio.us and Flickr.

For hosting, the site runs on Dreamhost.

Copyright

I retain all copyrights to the design, code and content on Snook.ca. I'll be really flattered that you were 'inspired' by anything I've created here but do try to be original. All original code examples displayed within a post on this site is for the public domain. Packaged code (usually in a ZIP format) will include its own copyright information. Code presented as samples or examples from third-party software still retain any owner's copyrights.