Site news
Back from the dead, again.
Well, it has been more than a month since I have updated this site—I’m sure all four of my readers have been quite disappointed with my posting performance. I blame it on the month of December. It is now January, and there are no more gifts to procure, New Year’s parties to throw, family to entertain, or trips to take. In short, I’m out of excuses.
Out of action
It occurred to me that I hadn’t updated this site with my whereabouts. I am in Australia for a couple of weeks to visit Jeni’s family, as well as to do some wedding venue research… I’ll be back in a week and a half.
Typos galore
My apologies for all the typos around here lately. While it would be easy to blame Movable Type for not having spell-check, the reality is that I need to start proof-reading my work. Or better yet, maybe I just need a copyeditor.
I have a strange tendency in writing this blog which stems from it being almost too easy to update my site. It feels more like dashing off a quick email to a friend than publishing. Still, no excuse.
Passing the hat
After seeing how much (or little) I have made off my Amazon referrals, I thought I’d actually update my list of essential books. Hopefully I can keep it updated as I read new books that are worth sharing, as opposed to this once a year binge and purge pattern I’ve been following for a while.
And if any catch your eye, be sure to purchase them using my links. It will help me pay for my hosting fees. Thank you.
Thank you
On a whim, I headed over to Amazon Associates to see how I’m doing on my book referrals. It turns out that I’ve made a bit of money in the past 3 years. Well, enough to satisfy my Amazon habit for about a month. Still, it is much appreciated everybody.
The big winners are the design books, though interestingly, I’ve never had two sales of the same book. It isn’t just one person buying, is it?
Minor bug fixed
IE 5 on windows hasn’t been centering this site for, oh, about a year. I kept forgetting to fix it, partly because I was a bit bitter about IE not supporting margin: auto. Well, I got over it. Done.
Back from the dead?
Alright, my engagement news has had the top spot long enough. While, its importance still trumps any random blog entry I’ll have for the forseeable future, I have a responsibility to my readers (er… reader?) to update this site. I have a backlog of entries, so get ready.
Back from the dead
Sorry for the lack of updates this past week. I’ve been buried in HTML/CSS production for my current project, but I delivered my templates so my life on the ‘net will resume.
Busy…
We are in crunch mode on our project. No updates. Must code. Need vacation. Leave for Jazzfest on Friday. Must code. Must finish.
More fiddling…
Three changes to the musings area. The first is that those dropdown menus for archives are gone, which means that now you don’t need JavaScript to get to old entries.
I also added search. It is more for my benefit than for anyone else, but go ahead and knock yourself out.
Now I’ve added a link to an RSS feed for those that want to use a RSS news reader to view this site without all the clutter of my design.
Validate this
Alright, I went through my site to make sure that everything validates. The biggest culprits were unclosed image tags on pages that I converted from my old site and attempting to wrap a link around a DIV.
Unfortunately, my Musings page doesn’t validate, but that is because of “un-espaced” characters in URLs. I’m not about to escape every ‘&’ in any site I link to. Validation isn’t that important to me.
Nice site, haven’t I seen it before?
Hmm… who shall I report to Pirated-Sites.com?
I’m looking in your direction, Marc and Jon. (Just kidding guys, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.)
Movable Type lives!
Well, I have moved over to Movable Type. Fun stuff. I’m working on the live server, no testing for me. Hence, lots of ugliness. Some to-do’s:
- Install SmartyPants DONE
- Assign old posts to categories DONE
- Create titles for old posts DONE
- Fix category archive pages DONE
- Add menu for monthly archive pages DONE
Add ability to comment
View Source
Look under the hood and you should find a refreshing lack of spacer gifs and tables used for layout. I haven’t checked to see if everything validates yet, but all the pages are based on a valid template. I am now installing Movable Type. It may take a while before everything is working. Infrastructure is just so damn sexy.
Update, 6 March 2003, 11:48PM: This is my second attempt. Turns out I had a NOBR tag that wasn’t closed. What made it so vexing was that it was in the SSI for the global nav, thus it made every page on my site blow up. That all of Mac browsers handled it with aplomb, made it a little difficult to spot. Oops.
A few pages have minor rendering problems in some browsers, but I believe the blame lies with bugs in the browsers, not my code—Chimera, after all, renders the site perfectly. I haven’t tested it on the Windows side at all, with the exception of IE5. I’m afraid to do so.
Spacer gifs are for chumps
At long last, I finished converting my pages to XHTML and CSS. Now don’t go rushing over to validate my pages just yet. They are on the staging server as it were. I need to get Movable Type up and running first and then I can officially say goodbye to the spacer GIF forever.
Tables? We don’t need no stinking tables
Today I finally finished the new CSS 2, XHTML 1 template for this site which doesn’t use HTML tables for layout.
When it goes live, you probably won’t notice a damn thing. The design is exactly the same. Under the hood is completely overhauled though. Soon thereafter, I’ll be able to whip up some alternative designs that use the same underlying HTML.
In the meantime, I have a ton of production to do.
I’m not ready for the Zen approach
I want to be a good Web citizen. I do. I really do. I want to make my site adhere to Web Standards and use CSS and XHTML. Separation of content and presentation is a Good Thing™. I even want to adhere to the sprit of Web Standards. I want a liquid layout that doesn’t rely on HTML tables.
But alas, I’ve been trying to recreate my current site design to no avail. My site has a simple four column grid that I use differently throughout the site, sometimes I want content to span 1, 2, or 4 columns. Making this work in a liquid layout using CSS is clearly beyond me. Or is it beyond the technology? Absolute positioning? Relative positioning? Using float boxes? Arrrgh!
Or is the problem the fact that I want to maintain control of the design? Is that anti-thetical to the “new way”? If so, F___ that. I’ll stick to tables. After all, my site works just fine (for the most part) on a WAP phone.
You get what you pay for
Blogger officially sucks. Half of my archives are missing and presumed dead. Time to install Movable Type.
I’ve been busy, trust me
I just realized that my portfolio is looking a little weak right now. It would appear that I haven’t worked on anything since July of last year. Two sites for Morgan Stanley, including the public site for individual investors, a few sales pitches, and some site audits, have certainly filled the gap.
So many to-do’s, so little time.
Issues
I was having blogger issues, so I apologize to my wide, wide audience about my lack of updates.
I finally get programming. I
I took a ton of classes in college and I hated every minute of programming. I’m pretty sure that debugging is one of Dante’s levels of Hell. But all of a sudden, it all makes sense. I’ve been playing around with JavaScript on this site, first to randomize images on the homepage, do popups, etc. But nothing serious. Yesterday I decided to do something real. I created a function that would auto-generate all of the pagination for this site. It was a pain, but eventually I got it to work. What’s more, I enjoyed it.
All it took to get me hooked was actually trying to solve a problem that I wanted to solve. Nothing in all of those progamming classes remotely resembled something that was relevant to me. What does that say about our education system?
And yes, I know that programming in JavaScript in not real progamming, not in the legit sense, but compared to HTML, it is a big step.
Why is this so hard?
A handy little utility for converting funny characters into the proper html. I still can’t believe how much of a pain it is to get proper quotes and apostrophes.
Hacking Blogger for good, not evil
The default format for Blogger archive links isn’t very readable, but Phil Ringnalda creating a very cool utility using the magic of JavaScript to automatically change the date formatting. Behold the power of the Blog archive script generator.
Ship it!
The site will never be finished, but I’m sick of having the “coming soon” graphic. I’m calling it live.
Searching for a “quick win”
I’m in the midst of launching this site, and it is a hell of a lot of work. The fact that I got this Blog working long before completing the rest of the site speaks volumes.
