Stunslinger.com Blog

I’ve been sitting in a classroom every Monday for the last 11 months, and I always look at this poster.  It bugs me.  The more I read about good design, especially using a grid approach, the more this poster stood out to me as a paragon of bad design.

I don’t even really know what the information is, but it definitely is not presented in the most understandable manner possible.  I know the information is blurred, I took the picture with my phone, but I really think it’s for the best.  This way you can look at just the presentation and marvel in it’s chaos.

I’ve been looking into manipulating Wordpress as a content management system, as I’ve posted about in the past.  Anyway, it’s making more sense now to me, and I thought I’d give you all some links to articles that helped me.

Scriptygoddess - Above the Fold  Scriptygoddess talks about how she manipulated Wordpress with php to make her ecommerce site.

Bloghelper - Wordpress for a Portfolio Site  The first of a series of articles focusing on using Wordpress as the backend for a portfolio of sorts.

Chris J Davis - WP Theming Secrets  This series of articles deals with some basics, like using custom templates as well as some more advanced techniques.  Written for WP 1.5, but many concepts are still applicable.

Wordpress for a News/Magazine Site  While I have not tried to run a news magazine site, and the example isn’t really a huge variation on traditional blogs, there are some useful concepts here.

Nick Smit - Thumbnail Hack   I didn’t know I needed this until recently.  I’m building a portfolio site, and couldn’t understand why it wasn’t generating thumbnails for pictures I was uploading.  Found out what to hack by reading this article.  Excellent.

Hopefully these articles will help you on your journey.  If you’re at all like me, immerse yourself in articles like these enough and it will slowly come to you.  Good luck.

So I finally went to the Apple website and watched the movies showing OS X - Leopard. I’m pretty impressed with some of the features. I’m really looking forward to the release in October.

This will be my first OS upgrade on a Mac. I’m used to the normal hassles that go along with upgrading versions of Windows, and I’m hoping Mac upgrades are much simpler (I’ve been told they are). On my PC I’ve always had to worry about drivers being mixed up, software incompatibilities, and buggy first versions with “service packs” released months later to make the OS fully functional/secure.

All I know is…features like desktop stacks, the new finder, and page-view (like iTunes’ album view) and quick view in spotlight/finder look amazing.  I actually showed the movies to my wife, who was reluctant to watch them (assumed it would be boring).  When she saw the page-view feature, she just sat there open-mouthed!  I think she may be turning to the Mac side!  If you haven’t seen them, go watch the presentation.

Ok, it wasn’t really a problem at all.  But yesterday I imported 490 pictures into iPhoto over my wireless network.  It was a snap.  No problems at all.  But I left iPhoto open and started working on a website.  So I opened Firefox with several tabs, and Photoshop, and TextMate.

And then it happened…lag!  This is the first time I’ve had anything be less than snappy in responding.  So I figured it had to do with iPhoto, and I closed it.  Everything worked fine for the rest of the evening.  But still!

So today I researched adding RAM to my MacBook Pro (it only has 1GB now).  And I realized it’s pretty simple, and relatively cheap.  So I plan to add 2GB more, taking it to the maximum 3GB of RAM.  If you have a MacBook and are at all used to working with computers, I’d strongly recommend adding RAM yourself.  I haven’t done it yet, but you basically just remove the battery, unscrew a panel and slide it in. 

Forget paying a “genius” so much to do that for me!  I’ve read it can cost up to $500 for an Apple Store to do it, versus $140 for me.  Of course, if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t bother.  But I’ve built a computer before, so I’m sure I can handle a RAM upgrade.  It actually looks easier than doing it on my desktop PC.

Now if only I could find a cheap Apple Cinema display….drool!

I’ve been working on a redesign of a website, and I was reminded of how much of a pain in the neck CSS can be at times. Most things are simple to me now, I just get it. But sometimes I’m mystified and pull my hair out.

For example, the site I’m working on has three main vertical sections (head, content, footer). Now, I had to add two extra divs immediately before and after the content for a graphical effect (yes, I hate doing this, but I couldn’t figure out how to get the look without them). Inside the head section is an h1, where I used the text-indent trick to replace the text with a background image. Everything looked fine until I added a margin to the top of the h1 (since I want it spaced down from the top of the page). I guess it was actually once I added 50px of margin…all of a sudden the next div (the “top” of my graphical effect) moves down. Even though I specified the height of the head div. Argh. After trying one or two things, I found that adding any border to the head div solved the problem. Yep, even though I added a 1px border to the top of it, it held the div to it’s specified size.

So everything’s fine, right? Wrong! It’s been eating away at me all day at work. Just hanging out in the back of my mind: What is causing this? I develop in Firefox because I’m not supposed to have these problems (assuming my code is valid). And I did realize I need to validate my code…but still, there’s not much XHTML there in the first place. Sigh.

But you know what? When I figure it out, I’ll be the happiest person alive. That’s the curse of the programmer, I think. It’s the most frustrating and rewarding thing. I spend my day working with people, which is nebulous and inexact, and then I escape at night into my computer world, where everything is logical supposed to be logical.

Update: I realized I had to float the h1 to properly place the logo, and this cleared up the problem.  No more border hack!

As the title says, I have a love-hate relationship with programming.  Ever since I first started programming C++ years ago, my life has been plagued by minutiae.  There’s nothing quite like spending an hour trying to figure out why things aren’t working right, just to find a misplaced semicolon or misspelled variable name.

Tonight I had this issue, while sorting through a website I’m building with Wordpress as a CMS.  I used my own template to render a portfolio, and once I had the basic XHTML in place, I tried to add a CSS file.  Seems like a simple task, one I’ve done multiple times.

I’m working to implement frameworks in my work, so I fired up my reset and tabbed-navigation CSS files and saw….nothing.  WHAT?!  Usually when something like this happens, it means I added an extra “/” at the beginning, and it’s looking outside the folder where my CSS is.  No luck.  So then I viewed the CSS using the Web Developer extension in Firefox.  Instead of CSS, I saw XHTML.  Ok, now I’m confused.

Finally I gave in and used the Wordpress default: style.css.  I used their function to get the location of the CSS.  And it worked.  But I wasn’t happy.  Then I got up to get a snack and it hit me: I forgot to add the wp-content/themes/theme-name part to the filename.  How could I forget that!?  Well, I guess it is because I’m not used to building Wordpress sites, so I don’t have to worry about their folder structure.

But at the same time…it’s so rewarding when it works right!  This is why I spend my days working with people, in comparison to computers, they’re easy!

Wow, apparently I’ve been away for a while. I just realized it’s been over a week since my last post. I’ve been spending all of my time researching Wordpress as a CMS yet again, and I finally get it. I’m currently working on my first site with Wordpress as the backend, and I’m very pleased with the results. I’ll post later with more details.

On the Mac front, I just finally purchased a license for TextMate. I must say I really like this editor. It definitely speeds up my coding, and all the things I read about it when I was using a PC are true. Bliss.

I hope I haven’t lost too many readers during this time of radio silence. Here’s hoping a week away from the blog will have given me enough fresh ideas to bring my old readers back, and maybe even gain a few new ones.

I thought about naming this post “</radio silence>”, but then I thought that might reveal a bit too much of my inner geek.

I have a problem that costs me money.  I check books out of the library, and then keep them past their due dates.  I often don’t notice this until a week or two after, and then I feel horrible.  This sort of defeats the purpose of using the library, as it is supposed to save me money.  Granted, it’s not the same price as buying a book…but still, the idea that I have been lazy enough to incur fines (and, usually, not even finish the book) bothers me.

So this morning it hit me (and this is not an amazing revelation, the only thing amazing about it is that it took me this long to think of it): why not put the due dates into iCal, so I have some reminder of when they’re due.  I can even assign a specific color to a library book calendar, and have no excuse for missing a due date.  I guess I could miss it by not turning on my computer (yeah right, that happens) or by not opening iCal.  Maybe I need to have iCal start on load.

Technology will save me!

Today I gave my final formal presentation to the psychology staff.  Before, since I didn’t have a laptop, I had to make my presentation at home and take it to the old work computer on a thumb drive.  Then I had to hope the old laptop wouldn’t take 10 minutes to load up Powerpoint.  This time, I decided to use my MacBook Pro, and what better time than now to try out Keynote for the presentation?

First impressions: I love it.  I’m thinking about purchasing iWork because of it (I haven’t really found a use for Pages).  It was pretty easy to figure out, not that Powerpoint is hard, but things just seemed to work right.  The real magic happened during my presentation.  I set up the 3d cube transition between slides, and as soon as I changed the first slide everyone went “ooh.”  I actually had to stop the presentation for a second when several people asked how I did that.  They were also wowed by the 3d graph I created (which was extremely easy).

So, basically I was able to put together a great looking presentation simply, and it set me apart from all the other Powerpoint templates everyone else uses.  Kinda cool.  And I love using the remote without worrying about whether it will work right or whatever when you use a remote that is from the projector.

I also realized (too late) that it actually works the way a presentation program should.  In Powerpoint, you set up the slides and the projector shows them.  Everything the computer screen shows, the projector shows.  When I hooked up the projector to my MacBook Pro, I noticed things were not the same.  It showed the nice Mac background, but none of my icons or files or anything.  Then I fired up Keynote, and saw that I could send the slides to the projector, and have notes, the timer, and other options on my computer screen.  So cool!  I always wanted to have the opportunity to keep my notes in Powerpoint, but not have them projected on the big screen.  Keynote and my MacBook Pro let me do that.  So cool.

This morning I looked at my laptop’s keyboard and realized I never use the Caps Lock key.  I know at some point, years ago, I used it.  But my main memory of the Caps Lock key is the frustration I found when I accidentally hit it instead of the shift key.  THEN MY NEXT SENTENCE LOOKED LIKE THIS.  Doesn’t that suck?  Actually, in that situation it’s not terrible, you realize after a couple of letters and correct it.

However, when you’re trying to enter a password that is case sensitive and the Caps Lock key is on…oof.  That’s frustration, when you know you’re typing the password correct, making sure you capitalize the proper letters of your ultra-secure password, and it doesn’t work.  But you have no feedback because a * representing a capitalized letter looks the same as a * representing a lowercase letter.

I guess the only real users of the Caps Lock key are message board misusers who don’t understand that all caps means yelling on the interweb.  That and people who write spam emails, they seem to like the Caps Lock key.

Even when I need something to be in capitals (which is rare) I just use Word’s “change case” function.  In web designs I use CSS’s text-transform property.  So, again I ask, why hasn’t the Caps Lock key fallen prey to technological evolution.  The Caps Lock key, essentially, is like a Cro Magnon man trying to live in modern society.  You just feel sorry for it, but yet avoid it at the same time.