03.14.99
Testing
Mar 14 Sun (03 PM)
Trying out some new stuff. Wish me luck with the new colors, better code, etc.
A new look
Mar 14 Sun (03 PM)
It’s only a modification, but I’ve been wanting to shape up the journal again. The brown motif was just a bit too garish and the frames and such were way too heavy. This feels a bit lighter, and a bit more me.
I’ve been considering adding some graphical elements, but I just haven’t taken the time. I suppose that if I could run Photoshop and Netscape on my machine at the same time, I might really consider it.
With this re-design I’ve even gone ahead and updated the page with the form that I write with to match. It looks pretty slick. Maybe I should post a screen shot like Dave Weiner does on Scripting News.
I really ought to test out the newer version of the regex I’ve been using to find URLs in a run of text. Say, for instance, I put in an address like http://www.depechemode.com. The period shouldn’t get highlighted. As far as I can tell, once the regex reaches a character that isn’t a letter, a numeral, or ‘/’, followed by a punctuation mark, a > a space or a newline, then that should be the end of the URL. Does that sound right?
Playing with Cascading Style sheets last week really broke down the readability of the site. I still want to start setting all the font sizes by pixel height, even if it makes it difficult for people to print out these pages. If they’re really having problems, they can copy and paste the text of the pages themselves.
Like they mentioned on A List Apart 2, This site is _mine_ and is not limited to the restrictions of “Making it viewable for all browsers.” As long as I stick to good clean code that follows standards, then I should feel comfortable.
Right now I’m downlading the 68k version of iCab, the new Mac-based web browser. It’s got a very small foot print and some cool features that will make it good for web developers as well as browsers. Check it out at http://www.icab.de.
That’s enough tech stuff for this entry. The next will be a bit more on the personal side.
03.10.99
CSS- Techie stuff
Mar 10 Wed (09 PM)
Yeah, I’m playing around with Cascading Style Sheets, if you couldn’t tell.
It’s really a case that once you start, you can’t stop half way through. The text is pretty well along, but the images are just getting out of hand. The most obvious problem is on the Ghia page. The big Ghia gif in the top tab cell is overlapping the text beneath it. I think it’s actually a problem with the Table, not the image. Lots more work to do on it.
03.08.99
Procrastination
Putting of working on my freelance stuff almost got me in hot water this morning.
I ended up only doing 1 version of a front page that I needed to two for. So I set my alarm for 6:00am (I didn’t know that my clock could even display 6:00am!) and got up about 6:30. I grabbed some ideas from an old page of mine, and ran with it, using Amy’s machine. (Smaller screen, but at least it’s a PowerMac). I gave it a bunch more color, like I should have done with the first comp.
But even beyond that, I needed color copies of the pages to show the client, since they wouldn’t have a machine to view anything on. Fortunately, the directions to the meeting mentioned a Kinko’s on the way, so I took off from the apartment at 9:00, got to the location in Gresham at 9:30 and had time to make nice sharp color printouts of the comps, on a Tek Phaser. $2 a pop, but well worth it.
Overall I think I handled the meeting pretty well. The client isn’t design savy, and that’s okay, just different for me. Tim, who I working on this through, was a little out of it due to a flu he was fighting and recovering from a weekend flight to Arizona. Boy am I glad we’re starting out this work relationship with a small client, ’cause I didn’t realize how out of practice I was concerning dealing with clients. I need a bit more polish in that area, and better notebook.
Time to head into work and get the rest of my life going again this week. I can already feel the engines of time starting rev up again. Hold on to your hats, it’s going to be a quick ride this week.
Oh, and I procrasinated last night by adding even more stuff to my my new site, and getting rid of the WIDTH= tags in my tables. I’m letting the text wrap all it wants. If you want to read a godawfully long line of text, that’s your problem. Resize your window if you want smaller columns.
03.07.99
'For Placement Only'
I just spent the past 6 hours re-doing my s.u.r.f.a.c.e site. I don’t really know why I I did it, because the time could have been better spent sleeping or cleaning or something, but I got an idea in my head this… er… yesterday afternoon, and wanted to run with it.
I had been moving my site towards using XSSI commands, particularly for including chunks of HTML that I didn’t want to code into each individual page. It’s a bear to update, and that’s one of the reasons why the navigation on the surface had always been so minimal, and even difficult.
The first step towards getting things ready was moving all of the pages from having the filename.html to filename.shtml. This may seem trivial, but there are a few ‘gotchas’ that you have to watch out for.
Only thing that did aid me was the fact that I _never_ refer to the file index.html. This may sound strange, but I have everything point to instead is just directory by itself.
This is from the documentation that I developed for OMSI:
A note about ‘home.html’: home.html is a the default file in a directory.
If the site is built properly, you should never have a URL that points directly to one of these default files. The URLs should always point to the sub-directory, not the default file in the sub-directory. Here’s a table of the wrong and right ways of referring to a directory:
The front page (absolute)
Right: “http://www.omsi.edu/”
Wrong: “http://www.omsi.edu/home.html”
The front page (relative)
Right: “/”
Wrong: “/home.html”
The main page in the current directory
Right: “./”
Wrong: “home.html”
The main page in the parent directory
Right: “../”
Wrong: “../home.html”
The main page in a sub-directory
Right: “foobar/”
Wrong: “foobar/home.html”
Anchor inside a page:
Right: “/foobar/#hours”
Wrong: “/foobar/home.html#hours”
These referals are usually only inside <A HREF=””> tags. This is also important to know for when the Marketing Dept. asks you for the URL for an event or a page. Don’t include the default file’s name. Just point to the directory. (“/events/astronomyshow/home.html” vs. “/events/astronomyshow/”)
Since I use a _lot_ of sub-directories in my site, a lot of file references didn’t have to change. Of course, a simple multi-file search and replace ended up doing most of the rest of the work, but I still felt good for thinking ahead on this front.
Comments and feedback on the new layout is appreciated. More graphics will end up taking the place of the pieces of text that are there, but I am planning on renaming the site ‘For Placement Only’. I may integrate the layout and design into Dwelling as well.
03.04.99
The high-pitched whine
Where the hell did that go?
That was the better part of a week that just flew by.
I’m sure it had something to do with the deadlines that keeps getting put on me. Nothing I can’t handle, they’re all good deadlines that I can make, but taken as one lump sum, they really move the days along.
I actually went out dancing last weekend, but I don’t think Amy and I have done anything on a weekday night for quite a while. I’ll be getting another paycheck tomorrow, the second at the new job. Perhaps its time to start expanding a few of the extra-curicular activities.
Work is crusing right along as are the freelance projects. However, it’s becoming obvious that if I’m going to keep the freelance stuff moving, I’ve got to get a new machine to work on at home.
The stuff that I’ve been doing at work has been fabulous. even loaded with extensions and fonts, the machine just glides along. It’s a G3 with 160+ megs of RAM. My Centris 610 just isn’t up to the task like it used to be, even stuffed with RAM. At work, I can get into Illustrator and just run with designs, jump over to Photoshop and then drop it all into Dreamweaver/BBEdit and the machine doesn’t hesitate. At home I can barely get Photoshop and Netscape open at the same time.
I’m just whining. But with good reason.
03.02.99
Missing-link
I found this on Memepool and though some of you might enjoy it. http://www.geocities.com/Athens/5168/aat_leaflet.html It’s a page about the theory of the ‘Aquatic Ape’, and it note the similarities between the adaptations of humans vs. ape compared to land mammals vs. sea mammals.
I’m not a biologist by any means, so I can’t verify the particular physiological attributes that support the theory, but it’s certainly food for thought, and somewhat explains the reason for the missing link: we’ve been looking on land.
Fonts and such
Well then fine, I’ll go ahead and put the entries in a san-serif face… It must have been me forgeting that the rest of the world doesn’t share my defaults…
Geneva users of the world, Unite!
But it’ll probably be Verdana, then Geneva, followed by Helvetica, and finally san-serif… Soon. really.
Font Storm
The wind is really starting to kick up. Portland’s supposed to have quite a wind storm tonight. Gusts up to 100 mph in parts of the state. A few things have already been blowing around on the veranda but the major part of the storm should pass through after midnight some time.
This should be the first entry in a san-serif type face. I thought I had the journal in a san-serif face, but I was mistaken. Amy and I got in a discussion about type faces and the differences between print and screen resolutions with regards to readability of type.
A number of ‘design’ sites on the web that are put up by print designers that have only recently come to the web often bring the baggage of print design along with them. Among these silly nuggets of so-called knowledge is that type with “serifs” such as Times and Garamond are easier to read when it comes to body text, or text that is over two lines in length.
This is all good and fine when you have the resolution of a printing press and good paper stock (hell even with bad paper stock). However in the very grainy world of the computer screen, these serifs (the little dangly things at the very ends of the capital T or at the bottom of a P) simply get in the way of the character’s basic shape.
Once we get those 300 dpi ‘electronic paper’ screens that Xerox and MIT have been talking about, we’ll revisit this notion, but for now, I’ll stick with easier san-serif fonts like Helvetica, or Geneva, or even… yes, Verdana.
Ah, the guilt of using a Microsoft product.
Yes, Verdana is one of the two important typefaces that Microsoft has released to the public for free. The other (Georgia?) is a a serif face and is less important here. But for PC people, it’s important to download Verdana and set your default web typeface (or font) to it. It takes up a lllot of room on a line, but it’s *sooooooo* much easier to read than Arial.
On the Mac side, you can either grab Verdana from Microsoft’s web site, or simply start using the most under appreciated face on the Mac, Geneva.
Oh sure, there’s not a real outline font for it, and it’s one of Apple’s original ‘city fonts’ (following along with Chicago, New York, Monaco, and (good lord) San Francisco), But Geneva rocks.
Chicago, of course, was *the* special typeface used in commercials that wanted to have an ‘engaging’ computer feel. I think Dell or Compaq used it a few times. Chicago is the font used in the menu bar of the Mac, up at the top of the screen. Ugly and it had some serious legibility problems. Apple’s gone ahead and made a replacement for it, but until I upgrade my machine, I’ll be using Chicago in my menus.
Anyway, back to Geneva. Geneva is used for every other part of the MacOS, as it ships. It’s the work horse, the font that does the real lifting in the interface on the screen. It has good variation between the 0, O and the 1 and l. It’s just about perfect, and doesn’t take up as much room as the second runner-up, Verdana. Geneva has good letter spacing, wonderfully subtle decenders, and a fabulous x-height.
I know, I’m too into this. It’s just a typeface. But it’s these details that are the polish in a project. Something’s only done when you’ve thought through every step, or the step comes out of a trained reflex.
Leave nothing to default.
It seems like I’m blowing more in this entry than the storm is outside. 🙂
02.26.99
Speed Limit: 1440 minutes per day
Feb 26 Fri (09 PM)
This week has been really fast.
I just sped through it like hel on wheels. Meetings every day, some for work, some for freelance, details on web sites, etc. Really it was the details this week that got to me. One of the sites that our company is hosting now was developed by some major-lame web-wannabies for Minnesota. Nothing against the Lank o’ Lakes mind you, but this stuff just sucked. The details on forms and tables and buttons just nit-picked at my time till there was nothing left.
At the same time I was playing bit-monkey on the graphics for the firm’s real site. Getting in and changing graphics at the pixel level, which gives me a certain sense of glee (those anal-details), but it is time consuming, even when you’re using the 2×2 px brush rather than the 1×1.
Today was Fat Boy Slim day, as I had that disc at work, and popped it into the office CD player (which I seem to have taken over, but no one has seemed to mind). I work in what is the Sales office. 3 to 5 sales people at any one time, on the phone a lot. Lots of ties and power skirts.
Gary, one of the most inviting of the group (which I thought I’d have a lot of problems with, but it’s turned out that there _is_ a difference between marketing people and sales people), really liked the disc and of course noted that Rockafeller Skank has been on every soundtrack and commercial made in the past 6 mos.
Now Gary seems to be about mid to late 30s in age, has a couple of kids, etc. He loves this album. I think to myself, “Gary snowboards and likes FBSlim. He must be a pretty cool dad.”
But then it hits me. What if I were to tell his kid that. What would the kid say? “No he’s not, he doesn’t even like my music.”
Let me pause here and and say that I think one of the greatest separations in generations is music. You can nail down a person’s formative years by figuring out what artists hit that person with a new persective. The thoughts that a certain perspective contains may have been around for centuries, but when someone is introduced to them for the first time, those concepts are forever linked to that artist. For my brother, I think it was the Carpenters. For me it’s been Depeche Mode.
Whoa. This is all playing in my head in much more detail, but what it really boils down to is: Do Gary and I have overlapping music tastes because he’s more youthful, or because I’m older?
That came as a bit of a shock for me. I mean I know I’m not a teenager in years and I’ve always seemed to shoulder responsibility like I was 50 (even if I didn’t always follow through), but I do stil think of myself as young. Perhaps I’m not _as_ young as I was?
Does even thinking this make me older?
For now I’ll say Gary is just a guy who’s still in touch with his youth in a good way. He’s older in years, but still young in culture and activity. I hope I’m in as much touch as he is when I’m him and that new web guy in the office is staring at me, wondering how old I am…
Yes, I like my music really fast…