stevengharms

In what first started out as “can i make a rounded corners square”, I have now undertaken an entire site redesign and am about 40% through it I’d guess.

Is this making progress on the Mellies app? Is this doing amazing things in Ruby?

No, instead it’s been time with me running a lot of Textmate and The Gimp.

And Helvetica, a lot of Helvetica.

Order of operations…

(more…)

I apologize.

I was thinking about reviewing movies, and then I decided I would make a cool scorecard in CSS for them on some rounded corner squares, and then I wound up reading about how to do rounded corners, and then I wound up testing the corners and getting stupid fricking Internet exploder to do it right, and then I shaved a yak…

I’m working on a post about my favorite topics: GRIDS and what I’ve done with that information afterwards.

So I was recuperating ( by writing Rails code, what other way is there? ) and, stuck on a problem, i decided to visit good old dmiessler.com and he has hit me up with a bloggers game.

My favorite sites are mostly friends’ sites:

1. The League of Melbotis
2. Subtraction, by Khoi Vinh
3. Mark Boulton Designs
4. My Best Friend Since 9th Grade
5. And of course… dmiessler.com

[BONUS]: Ad Absurdo, a site for beauty and design

Apologies to Tennyson.

I decided I hate my sidebars. In a white-paper, my colleague Robbie Allen wrote that the present age of web design has a lot less visual busy-ness. I then visited Daring Fireball and read about Gruber taking weeks to pick his background color. A few moments later I was really sick when I headed back to my site.

Issue was confirmed by dear girlfriend: Your books section looks like ad-space.

wince

So, like The King and I, I proclaim, no more busy sidebars, forever! A clap of the hands and a :wq! later and you have what you see.

I’ll put some level of the functionality back…eventually. But for now, enjoy a slightly less busy site.

( besides, if you really want to find something you’re better off going to google, typing in what you want and adding site:stevengharms.com anyway )

In case things look screwy, I’m trying to update my site to look good in Safari. Firefox kept having issues with memory when I was doing Rails development so I’ve been using Safari for a bit. I think that I’m going to convert, it works better for the Mac and it scrolls so-very smoothly.

Hi everyone, not that I imagine that thousands of readers were shocked to see PHP errors and were woefully impacted by my rather spontaneous site code update decision.

• I think that I’m pretty much done. I cleaned up the markup within the PHP code so that I could have more power to manipulate the layout / coloration directly.
• I added some javascript savvy so that the very long sidebars are now shortened by default (at least in Firefox and Apple’s Safari they are). I think it makes for easier reading. Update My girlfriend said that she thought that the long sidebars looked better. So, I wrote a function to randomly expand one of the sidebar boxes so that visitors would get the idea that they could expand the boxes. Internet Sucky Browser Explorer can’t handle this function well so i’ve put it in hibernation until IE7 comes out (which promises to be ever so slightly less sucky).
• I also got rid of the “…” as the character for expansion and replaced that with “↓ and ↑”.
• I used some DOM manipulation code to do the images from Amazon load in the background, you don’t see it when you first visit the site, but it speeds up the load a little bit.
• I cleaned up the About section, I guessed with my life having changed so much lately it was worth freshening that content a little bit.
• The glossary has been cleaned up too.
• I removed the consumed media section. I wasn’t updating it, I don’t think anyone cared, and frankly, I wouldn’t blame them for not.
• Added some new groovy CSS so that I could have a ‘terminal looking’ terminal as seen in this post.
• As always, I designed this page to Firefox, so if you have issues with other browsers they may be a bit behind in implementing some of the features I used.
• On the back end, I updated my WordPress code so that I was no longer hacking up the original code, but just overlaying my cosmetic changes onto the pristine source. This should make upgrades a bit nicer.
• Added an inline more utility so that instead of clicking “read more” doing another server query and reload, it just expands within the browser. I thought that was a nice feature and much thanks to Chroder for writing the plugin. I didn’t want to have to write more DOM code today.

Let’s see if i can find a nice way to insert code

#code into a code block
$_='yo momma';
print "Please don't tell any more $_ jokes";
$foo='foo';
$bar='bar'
for ($foo, $bar){
  print "$_\n";
}

Hm, i like it, looks like a good ol’ unix terminal.

Things may look a bit strange around here throughout the next couple of days.

You see, I’m running the WordPress blog engine and when i first got a hold of it i hacked the heck out of it. I put functions in crazy places and generally made a mess of the code. Mess of the code made a mess of the markup. Mess ofthe markup makes it very hard to apply styles consistently. This lack of caution is playing havock in my attempts to get IE to render things properly.

I’m also going to add in some groovy javascript functions that I’ve learnt through my Ajax studies.

So, things may be a bit funky off and on, but I promise when we’re through it’ll be A-OK.

OK, so, uhm, in the vintage 1993 phrase, I need an under construction icon

My girlfriend, Lauren, whom I shall no longer refer too by a pseudonym, and I are moving to Austin and are busy like hell. Boxes here, boxes there, piles here, piles there, clothes, people coming to buy stuff, people calling, people mailing.

I don’t think that I’ll actually get much written until I’m on the road. I’ll catch up when I can.

I’ve got so much to write stored up! I’ve been driving my spare computer time into the Sudoku application and haven’t had a chance to work on the literary angle. I want to write about:

• Keira Knightley’s teeth of doom
• The Mellies
• My work at work (hint)
• Learning Ruby and Ajax
• Other Things (tm)

Keep your eyes peeled, I’ll be making up for missing in action shortly.