While messing around with some logo ideas for a possible client, I came up with this pic:
This was done in Photoshop. I basically drew a bunch of circles on different layers, outlined them with the “stroke” layer effect and did some choice “spherizing” to make things look less flat. It’s a nice effect I think, and I plan on making some more characters like this. Below is a link to this same picture and another one made with my “new technique”.
p.s. Look forward to an ART category in the menu.
At the Barnes&Noble the other day, I came across this Eric Meyer book on CSS and skimmed through it a bit. ‘turns out, there’s this great big controversy over laying out websites using CSS instead of tables.
I’ve been away from the “web development scene” a bit since I started my new job last May. I knew that CSS was da bomb y’all and it could do a lot of powerful things that nobody was using it for, but I just didn’t realize how much of a movement this has become.
I feel like a dinosaur. I’m an old school html hacker, using tables to do a stylesheet’s job. I’m inefficient, redundant, and out dated. Soon I’ll need to include special loser-denoting tabs in my html to tell the browser how lame and antiquated my web development skillz are (a la Doctype tags).
I’m not so convinced that I’m going about things incorrectly though. I basically agree with what this guy has to say.
This whole CSS vs Tables issue became even more relevant for me when I downloaded FireFox 1.0 and took a look at my site in that browser. The table cell on the right-hand side of the page was all scrunched-up-like. Even though I had code that looked like this…
<tr>
<td width=575></td>
<td width=175></td>
</tr>
…the right sidebar was only as wide as the longest word in the cell. I even did the trick where you put a 175 pixel-wide spacer image in the cell. This would make sure that the cell was “at least” 175 pixels wide, but it was often much wider. Actually, the biggest problem wasn’t that I couldn’t get the cell to be exactly 175 pixels wide. It was that the size of the cell seemed random. On some pages it was too narrow, on some it was too wide. I want one size, folks… 175 pixels like the code says. How comes IE can get this concept, bug FireFox can�t?
So I googled the problem. And I wasn’t too excited when the first couple of sites that came up gave the answer of “just switch to an all CSS layout and this problem will go away.” Nah, I didn’t buy it. I want a table cell 175 pixels wide. There’s got to be a way for me to tell the browser that. I put “width: 175px” all over the place in my stylesheet, but no change.
I searched some more. After about 30 minutes, I found a real explanation of what was going on. You can read into it more at this w3 site. In general, the problem is in the table rendering method. IE calculates every cells size before rendering a table. FireFox, on the other hand, looks at the just the first row and estimates the rest. The result is that FireFox renders tables much faster since they don’t need to wait for the entire table to load before writing data to the screen. However, FireFox also drops the ball by not noticing things like “width=175” in a cell on the third row.
There is a “fix” though… at least for my site. CSS has a “table-layout” attribute. To the main table class, I added the following CSS code “table-layout: fixed”. This didn’t turn FireFox into IE or anything, but it at least let me know that both IE and FireFox would render the table in the same way. Specifically, according to these rules (from the earlier w3 link):
Now in both IE and FireFox, my website looked the same though still “wrong”. The left section of my third row now took up 50% of the table and the right side took up the remaining 50%. The size of the page “columns” is based on just the first row. Since my first row contains just one cell, my table looked like a one-column table. When the third row was rendered, it was just split in half. The width of the third row had been “divided over the columns”. To fix this, I setup a dummy first row with my wanted division. I added to the top of my table the following row:
<tr height='1'> <td width='575' height='1'></td> <td width='175' height='1'></td> </tr>
Now I have a two-column table. When the render-er gets to my fourth row now it splits it up like it did the first row (575 … 175). And the result is what you now see on my site: the requested table division with an added 3 pixels of gray at the top. It’s possible that adding this row would fix the problem without altering the table-layout attribute in CSS. But like I said before, it’s good to know which algorithm your browser is using to render tables rather then leaving it up to whim.
I hope this can help anyone else out there with a similar problem. Now back to the original topic… I like CSS and all, but I hope people don’t go too overboard with this thing. If it ain’t (that) broke, don’t use some other broke-ass piece of technology to get it done.
I created this website to give myself an outlet for my creative urges. I imagined myself writing fictional masterpieces weekly and creating scores of compiled computer games, all of which I would upload to this site. Well, that’s only partially happening. I’m actually encouraged with my progress. However, as is common with a lot of blogs (I assume since I’m not really that big of a blog-o-file), I find myself mostly writing about my writing implement.
The situation may be special for me since I’ve written this blog “software” myself. I’m so proud of this accomplishment and each new feature that I add, that it is sometimes difficult to set those feelings aside and think of other “content” to put here.
I also started thinking about the random lack of focus this site empowers and how that it would be very difficult for me to create something here that will be consistently interesting to people other than myself. This is why I created different “topics”. I imagined people visiting my site because they were interested in me (my family) or interested in my poetry (sick minds) or interested in my games (the extremely bored). Overall though, I always really understood that this blog/site is more than anything self-fulfilling. I’m most interested in venting this stuff for my own good. As of now, whether or not anyone else takes notice is secondary.
Despite all that, and in an effort to produce some genuinely useful content, I’m going to start a series of posts entitled “Making the Blog”. The idea is to talk in detail about the various aspects of building this beast from the ground up. Even though there are numerous commercial products like those from six apart, books on blogging, and even open source options, I feel that if you are capable, building your own blog from scratch can be very satisfying. I feel much more ownership over this production and the words scrawled here than I would have otherwise. You can too.
So, if you’ve written some code before, dabbled in PHP and mySQL, or know a little html, you might be interested in this feature. I hope to provide anyone interested with the code and understanding necessary to make your own blog like mine (in PHP).
Undoubtedly, as I add new features to my site, I will expand on the “Making the Blog” series by bragging about and explaining the newest goodies. Excuse and ignore me if you must since blog software is already available. Excuse me if someone else has already created a feature like the one I describe here. You can, as always, consider this exercise another one of my masturbatory self-indulging mind dumps. But I truely hope I can produce something useful with this.
Thanks.
I figured some of my writing pieces and whatnot were going to be too long to fit into the typical blog-post design. So I created a page suited for my longer-winded engagements.
I surfed through my trusty OneNote mess for a suitable piece of writing. The result of that search is the feature I present to you now: Airport Saga.
In addition to displaying longer pieces of text, the new content page displays the images I link to in a nicer wrapper. I think I may eventually make some sort of “content browser” to display all of the images, text files, and downloads stored in that directory. I imagine such a feature would be extraordinarily clever and wildly popular. Look forward, friends.
I’ve just started an affiliate program with Amazon. To celebrate, let me post a link to Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. This is the book I’m going to read next. I will probably sit in at Borders or Barnes&Noble and read it. If you’re not as cheap as me, you can click on the link above to buy it from Amazon and in the process earn me a buck or so.
Fantastic Voyage, by Ray Kurzweil and some other dude is a serious take on the future of human health and mortality. I’ve been reading some of the articles over at Kurzweil’s site, and this stuff is exciting to think about. Super-human AI, nanomachinery. GREAT toilet reading material if I do say so myself. Checkout the “living forever” section to find articles pertaining to the book in question. And checkout the Kurzweil Catalogue to find other great books by this futurist author. I recommend Age of Spiritual Machines.
There is nothing like Kurzweil’s writing to get you excited about life. He makes anything seem possible, reasonable, and down right inevitable. I’ve been compiling some of my own thoughts a nanotech future which should find there way onto this site soon.
…on the beach…with a beautiful woman.
That’s a picture of me in the header now. I’m sitting on a beach chair on the Atlantic shore of the Dominican Republic waiting for sunrise with my girlfriend Kim. (links above)
So I needed to have a sixth post to test my “show only 5 posts” or “recent posts” function. I didn’t have to tell you all this. I could have just added a sixth post and written about any old crap that came to mind.
Well… I’m basically talking to myself here.
In other ‘news’, I’m thinking about adding a comment feature so all you non-existing folks can write back at me. It’s a pretty common feature of most blogs nowadays. However, I’m not going to put time into that until I feel like it might be used. So if you ARE interested in talking back to me, send me an email. It’s your only option.
Have a great day!
That ‘O’ in the upper right of this post-box stands for ‘other’. I think sometime today I will implement a function to make those letters link to a filtered version of the page. Clicking on ‘O’ would show only posts in the ‘other’ category. The idea is that people with different interests can come to my site and get only the information they want. Of course this all assumes that people are interested in what I have to say/write/create.
We’ll see.
In my first attempt to port content from my old site to my new blog-a-licious site, here is a link to download the installer for my tetris-esque puzzle game “Puzzle Dropper”.
Puzzle Dropper Full Install v1.2.2 (2.93 mb)
This is the third post. This post is special because I am entering it using a custom built tool rather than entering it directly into the database. Let’s see if this works…
