I’m a sucker for topography, something I really enjoyed in college when using LaTeX to get really cool looking printouts. A lot of that fun was lost with I started using applications like Word that do a pretty good job of kerning and hyphenating text without you having to do anything. Using (X)HTML I often just let the browser do what it does, even if it leaves a lot to be desired. This changed today when reading A List Apart’s wonderful article The Look That Says Book.
I’ve playing around with other CMS systems lately to get a feel for what is out there. I recently had the opportunity to hack around in WordPress and ran across a neat little utility in some of their docs. It is an external Online CSS Optimiser/Optimizer that does some CSS compression.
I’ve been using Reflection.js for some time now to generate reflective category images. I did this mainly to avoid having to create the reflections by hand. However, it has always had a bit of a lag when generating the reflections. This can be a bit jarring at times, but I’ve gotten used to it.
I really haven’t liked the way the code routine displays on my blog. It adds a lot of white space and generally looks bad. To make things a bit nicer, I removed the Code: message, set the overflow to auto instead of scroll, and I removed the extra breaks.
One thing that always bugged me with using scripts is that you tend to see the script name. For example, this site has always had an index.cgi and most PHP sites have index.php in the links. I find it tacky and many commercial sites don’t do this. I don’t want to change my software, so there has to be a way around this problem. The search is on!
It has been almost three years now running on my current web site design. Sure I've changed elements here and there, mostly due to changing underlying software, yet it is starting to feel a bit old to me. The problem to me is where to start. Is it color? Is it it form?
Between blogging about digital TV (it’s all over) and playing Halo 2 (finished campaign on legendary) I’ve been working on a new dynamic userbar. This time, I’m generating a weather userbar showing the current conditions and temperature.
This is probably one of the sillier experiments I’ve done. I’ve put together a dynamic userbar that displays the current Pay Per View (PPV) offerings on DISH Network.
I got around to upgrading IE8 to the latest beta 2 today. Mostly, I wanted to see if they had fixed the float issues. Well, they had — at least the float that was also broke on Microsoft’s own site now worked. However, my site still had a problem. Well, I tracked it down to a very odd behavior with the entity. Unlike most browers, IE8 breaks lines oddly with and messes up CSS width. Unlike other browers, when this happens, IE8 drops the float to the bottom instead of letting it just break the width. Considering that this is the only browser with this behavior, it will be interesting to see if it makes it into the final version.
I don’t normally do two posts in one night, but I put together a new Dynamic Userbar and I just have to share!
Cow’s Blog has an update to Reflection.js to version 2.0. I’ve wasted no time in updating my site and, surprise, I don’t notice any difference! However, if you use the new Google! Chrome browser or IE8, things should look a bit better. Great bit of code and worth a try.
I’ve been building web sites for over 13 years and have been escaping HTML for years. You know, converting & to & or " to ". Easy stuff, right? Then why did I completely forget that you have to do the same within attributes? Perhaps I just never had a need or realized that it was required. It is.
I noticed a few errors with my 360voice Dynamic Userbars today, so I decided I should probably fix them. One was with my watched list. I limit the list to 20, but it wasn’t actually working properly for users not watching anyone. The other bug was in challenges where it would stop displaying members after it found the callers gamertag. Fortunately, both were easy fixes.
When I added that visitor map yesterday, I wasn’t all that concerned that it used an embed object. That is, I wasn’t concerned till I tried to validate my site. It isn’t something I do that often, but I’d made enough changes that I thought it would be a good idea. I expected a few validation errors, I tend to forget to encode the ampersands in URL’s, but I was surprised about all the errors around the embed tag. I don’t tend to play with plug-in’s myself, so I was blissfully unaware that the standards based tag is object. Although I’m not a big standards freak, I do like to see my pages validate. I was on a mission.
In playing around with iTunes, I really like the way the CoverFlow looks, especially the reflections. So, I started searching around to see if there was something similar for Vista. I didn’t find any finders, but I did run into a few javascript scripts that had some neat features.
Must be a coding night for me, as I’ve been cleaning up a few things and fixing bugs. First up, I’ve been tweaking the way the tags display on the site. I added the ability to limit the tag cloud display and then did just that in the plugin. Now, only the top 25 tags show. I also now sort case insensitive. I also added a “View All Tags” link, since I don’t display all the tags by default.
As much as I use the 360voice.com data, I thought it only fitting to give back. So, today I launched 360voice Dynamic Userbars. If you’re a 360voice user and like userbars, show your pride by adding one of these images to your forum signatures.
I just realized that the US has just one year left till all the Analog broadcast signals are turned off. As someone who still doesn’t own a digital—or even HD—TV, I’ve created this Userbar countdown to remind me of that fact: Good thing I have satellite. 😉 You can check out my ot
You would think that using an standard would mean that your RSS feed would work just about everywhere. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to always be the case. All those RSS 2.0 fixes I did on my site seemed to have broke the feed to MyBlogLog. Not sure what it doesn’t like as other RSS 2.
This is pretty cool. Hawty McBloggy blogged about a site that generates some spawn time stats (Halo 3 - Time Wasted Respawning). The script is interesting. But more interesting was that it makes use of a Halo API.
I’ve been using the tag cloud concept on a lot of other sites and find it useful at times. The idea is pretty simple, supply keywords or tags to your content. Those tags are then counted and a tag cloud of links is displayed, with more frequent links larger then less frequent ones. Since my site was lacking in that capability, I decided to program it in.
I’ve been hearing a lot about the Web 2.0, but not sure how much I’ve been participating. I signed up for a Digg account, but didn’t really get into it. I’m still not sure what is considered Web 2.0. If you check out Wiki's definition of Web 2.0, I’ve already been part of the whole Web 2.0 deal by blogging and using and creating RSS feeds. In many ways, my use of 360voice and its API probably qualify as well. After thinking about, maybe I do a lot more with Web 2.0 than I thought.
I’ve run into a bit of an issue. XML uses UTF-8 encoding. I wouldn’t think it would be a big issue, but my web pages render in ISO-8859-1. Since my ISP uses perl 5.6.1, I can’t easily encode/decode between the two Unicode formats. So, I thought I’d just render my pages in UTF-8. Ouch, bigger headache. Now older articles don’t look right and some of the WebAPP code converts things wrong. I’m still looking for a solution. For now, you may find some things display wrong here.
Your Xbox 360 has a voice, and now it can have one on your WebAPP site as well!
Sigh. Seems all I seem to do lately is update my Mods. Truth is, I’ve been working on another web site, but found some issues adding in my Slideshow Mod and decided, while I was there, to fix a few other minor annoyances I had with it. I also cleaned up some minor issues in BlogCal as well. For th