"Under the Hood" Redesign of ChipHit

I discovered that I was designing "old school" on the front page of ChipHit by using tables to perform the layout. To get with the modern times, I have redesigned the front page to use CSS layout instead of tables...was a bit more work, but it does make the page load faster. I have also changed the color scheme a bit making the text a bit darker and making Google URL's the traditional green. If you have more feedback about ChipHit, let me know.

Added Blog Refinement

Added a Blog refinement to the search engine as there are some engineering blogs out there related to ASIC/FPGA design. So far, I have found just one and added that to the refinement; however, the refinement will search all available ChipHit sites for blogs. Turns out that there are quite a few. So, if you know of a blog, submit it so ChipHit can search it.

Added Training and Language Refinements

Spent some of the day today putting in language and training refinements. Works pretty good. Try searching for sugar on ChipHit and refine to languages then search for sugar on standard Google...you will be impressed!

Added Search Bar Support for Firefox, Mozilla, and IE6

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ChipHit has now added the ability to add itself to your browser's Search Bar on the front page. ChipHit is currently supporting Sherlock and OpenSearch protocols for adding custom search engines to your Search Bar. This means that we support Firefox 1.5 (Sherlock) as well Firefox 2.0 and IE6 (OpenSearch). Add us to your search bar for easy searching of your ASIC/FPGA topics.

If you did not know already, OpenSearch allows permits ChipHit to advertise its search capability to your browser. That advertisement appears in Firefox 2.0 like the image at right...note the glowing arrow. By pulling down the arrow, you can add ChipHit Search. Of course, for older versions (also works with newer versions too), we provide the traditional add link on our front page.

So, go ahead add our custom search engine to your browser...we will be only a click away!

Added suggestion and feedback features

Today we added Suggest a Site and Feedback sections to ChipHit. The Suggest a Site allows you to submit a site for us to add to the custom Google search engine. The feedback section allows you to send general feedback about ChipHit.

Added About

The site definitely needed a history and about section, so I put that together and posted it.

Discussion Forums are Live

The discussion site is up with some rudimentary forums. I figured we try to keep this simple-stupid with four boards: general discussion, FPGA talk, ASIC talk, and EDA talk. Enjoy Happy

ChipHit.com is Alive

Well after many years of procrastinating, I decided to finally build something that is mine and that I can be proud of....welcome to ChipHit.com!

My goal is to make money while helping pizza-eating ASIC and FPGA designers to get to beer time faster! As is stands right now, the site simply features a custom Google search engine that searches a few hundred websites that are dedicated to the digital engineering space for ASIC and FPGA designers. Eventually, I plan on adding a nice message board so that designers can communicate. Oh, and of course, there is this blog, which I will update from time to time about my opinions. Other than that, I don't plan on adding stuff too much of my open IP...that becomes too tedious.

So, why should you come here? Well, if you are an engineer, you, like me are an expert, of course Happy. It just so happens that I love the internet, art, and design, and getting things done, so I decided to hack this site together that you to can use the web to get things done faster. Nice marketing...eh? Well, really, if you have ever used any search engine to find help for digital design, you too have run into the mish-mash of crazy results. This search engine helps, because it targets to a few websites that are known good, which means you get an answer faster. Oh, and since the ad-bots are now seeing these relationships, advertising that makes sense is here also.

Anyway, enjoy the site!