Welcome to the new and improved home for Eric Appel’s (that’s me) digital life. 

With this fresh start I’d like to focus my attention on some of the things that I deal with on a daily basis while developing various web projects such as http://ark.intel.com and SmartSetr.  One of the areas that fascinates me the most is Rich Interactive Applications and a lot of my content here will be focused around that.  More specifically I’m interested in UI design on the web, interactivity, UI concepts, and the development frameworks and technologies that make it all possible.

In addition to the blog content, this site is about the rest of my digital life.  When working through this design I wanted to be sure to not only highlight the blog content, but to also bring in content from services I use around the web.  The only content stored here is the blog, the rest is brought in from external services that I use every day.  With this seamless inclusion of services like Twitter, Google Reader, and EricAppelPhotography.com (powered by Zenfolio), I can go about my digital life as I normally would, and that content is automatically aggregated here on my site. 

The twitter, google reader, and photography content can all be found in my slider bar at the top of the site.  The slider uses jQuery and Robert Penner’s easing equations to gracefully slide in the content for each section.  There you’ll find my latest three photos, tweets, google reader shared items, and also my about section and subscriptions.

In Google Reader I subscribe to 150+ blogs that I read on a daily basis, and in the last 30 days I’ve shared 54 posts that stood out in some way.  My interests range from web development, to design, to photography and my shared items reflect that.  If you’re a .NET developer, designer, or photographer that is interested in getting into reading blogs, a subscription to my shared items would be a good start.  That way I do all of the work of finding the best stuff so you don’t have to.