Written by Kip on Sunday, April 13, 2008 at 4:24 pm (EDT) Tagged as: updateswebsite
I’ve just rolled out a few changes to the site. The most obvious one is probably the vertical navigation bar to the right. It’s a bit bare for now, but I’ll be implementing tags on this site eventually and that’s where you’ll see them. Doing the navigation this way will make it a lot easier to redesign the site. (The way it is now I have to go through a big Photoshop process before any significant layout updates.)
I’ve also added a comments feed. That’s mainly something to help me out, but if anyone else would benefit from it feel free to subscribe (I’m not sure why anyone would need to though). Adding the comments feed necessitated permalinks to comments, which are represented by a hash mark. Eventually I’ll probably change it to the more conventional “X says:” format, where the word “says” is the permalink. In one other small change, I now conform to most of the rest of the internets in that hyperlinks are only underlined when you hover over them.
If anything looks broken, try refreshing the page (usually CSS files are cached). If you still notice something being broken, let me know.
I’m thinking about implementing tags on this site, but I’m curious if anyone ever actually uses tags when visiting small sites. The only time I use them is on a large blog like Joystiq, which publishes dozens of posts per day, far more than I care to read. But maybe everyone else uses them and I’m just behind the times? As far as I can tell, on a site like mine the only purpose would be to quickly find other posts similar to the one you just read. A search feature would help in that regard too, and I’ve thought about using ZendSearch because it looks really easy to use. But I just haven’t bothered to sit down and figure it out.
If I do implement tags, would I really need a tag cloud? I happen to find them only slightly more useful than they are aesthetically pleasing. And like I said, for a site like mine you probably wouldn’t use the tag cloud much. But again, maybe I’m just behind the times? Like when I launched this site and didn’t have an RSS feed for like six months because feeds are for hippies. Then I started using feeds and decided I needed one too.
I personally do not use tags at all. Maybe I’m behind the times too, but I don’t see the use of them. Why not just use categories to organize your posts? That’s what I chose to do.
I like the idea of tags but rarely use them. Tag clouds are a tad too much, though with an approach similar to your PicTML app, you could create some pretty neat looking shapes made up of tags.
You might consider ditching the incessant hyperlinking and simply highlight a few tags within the post.
Written by Kip on Friday, September 7, 2007 at 1:04 am (EDT) Tagged as: musicupdates
Tonight I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and started playing on my guitar and decided I’d record it. So if anyone’s interested I put up a recording of myself playing Tonic’s “If You Could Only See” on the acoustic music page (you’ll also find it at the end of this post). Which reminds me I never got around to making that page look nicer. You know, using some CSS and what not.
After I recorded this I listened to the original again and realized I’m playing it way too fast, and my strum pattern is different. I still thought it sounded ok. I came up with a way to kind of play both parts on one guitar for the cool part of the song after “when she says she loves me.” I guess you only know what that means if you’re familiar with the song, because I’m certainly not going to put a recording of myself singing out on the intertron. I mean I’m not masochistic.
Yesterday Stephanie and I got a black 2006 Toyota Camry Solara! We love it so much. It’s a used car, but not very used at all—only 1210 miles on it. We got it from CarMax, and I’d highly recommend anyone looking to buy a used car go there. They have “no haggle” pricing, which is good for me because I think I’d be pretty lousy at haggling (I think Saturn dealerships also do no-haggle pricing... I’ve never been to one so I’m not sure). They’re not paid on commission either, so they aren’t super pushy. Our salesman was an Irish guy, which was kinda neat. The whole process was about as easy as we could’ve asked for.
My 1995 Camry was starting to have a few things go wrong with it lately (which is to be expected for a car with 180,000 miles on it). Most of them were pretty minor issues, but we decided we were approaching the point where it’d be more economical for us in the long run to buy another car than to keep putting money into this one (an economist might call that an effect of the Law of Diminishing Returns). The latest thing was that the car was leaking engine coolant, which meant I had to put antifreeze in it every morning before work for the last two weeks, and by the next morning it’d be almost all gone. It could have turned out to be a simple thing to fix, or it could have been expensive. We decided we’d start looking for a new car and see what kind of trade-in value we could get. Since we now have another source of income (and we’ve been capable of living off of just mine), we figured out how much money we could afford to spend on a car. CarMax ended up giving more than Kelley Blue Book valued our car at, so we took it. Although I have to say that it was kind of sad to see my old car sitting on the back lot to be cleaned up. I mean, we were leaving it for a younger and sexier car, and it didn’t even put up a fight. :)
So far, we are really happy with the car (of course it’s been less than twenty-four hours). We both love driving it, and it still has that new car smell. The ride is incredibly smooth and quiet. We’ve been taking turns driving it, which is different from normal (where neither one of us would want to drive).
Oh I meant to mention that the salesman showed us that there’s a glow-in-the-dark latch on the inside of the trunk, so we shouldn’t put bodies in the there. I said we’d just have to make sure that they were dead before we put them in there. I thought that was kinda funny.
I hate to break this to you, but recently they have found that “new car smell” is toxic. So the fact that you can still smell it means that your car was super toxic to begin with. It’s okay though ... my car had that for a while and look how I turned out ... my kids aren’t deformed yet (mainly because I’m not procreating, but if I was I suspect that they would not be deformed.)
For any who may care, my site now is now validated XHTML 1.0 Transitional. I was gonna do strict, but it seemed a little too strict (no target attribute on an anchor tag? What’s that all about?). Oh well. I wanted to make a very short post after my previous very long post, so... peace out homies.
It’s good to see people validating their websites; now if only we could stop you from using a table based layout... ;-)
Why would you need the target attribute for links? I see no benefit to that. Framesets are generally a bad idea (and thankfully, fewer sites are using them these days), so that rules out the “_self” and “_parent” values. And I don’t ever want a new *window* for content (that’s what tabs are for), so that rules out the “_blank” value. All that’s left is the “_top” value, which is what all web browsers do by default anyway.
I started out doing transitional on my site, but switched over to strict just because it “felt right” to me. It took some work to validate everything, but I think my site is better for it. Just my 2 cents.
Creating a site without table tags (except where they do in fact represent tables) is actually the next thing I was planning on working on.. As for the target attribute, I think there are times when target=”_blank” can be a good thing, like when a user is entering information in a form you don’t want them to lose that information when they click a link. Not allowing target=”_blank” doesn’t really get rid of links that open in new windows, it just encourages sites (*ahem* Hotmail) to use those insidius javascript links that you can’t middle-click on. Of course, Firefox 1.5 added an option to make new window links open in a new tab instead, and that even picks up some of the javascript links.
Some of you are probably aware of PicTML, a Visual Basic program I wrote with back in high school. Well, now it exists on the web. Go here to see some examples of what PicTML can do, and feel free to make your own pages and publish them for everyone to see. There are a number of improvements, namely different optimization options (I find it easier to tweak settings in “small HTML” mode, and then convert to “accurate image” mode before publishing).
I try to make my site accessible to non-geeks, and PicTML could use some help in this area. The background color field currently accepts the following colors: red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, violet, purple, magenta, white, grey, black, and pink. And of course you can use any hex color you want, but if you know how to do that then this paragraph isn’t really directed at you now is it.
I was actually a little disappointed with how easy PHP made it to do a program like this. I had the working prototype done in a single evening. I had set out to make this a two-week project, to take me right up until Christmas break. I mean, when I was learning to code on the TI-83, we had to program uphill, in the snow, barefoot.
Geeky sidenote- once I had finished I realized that I had used an MVC design pattern without even intending to. The image itself, the $_SESSION vars, and the script to validate the $_POST vars are the model. Then the control frame is the controller and the preview frame is the view.
Quick note to say that I’ve got RSS feeds for our blogs now. If you don’t know what that means, you probably don’t care. And if you do know, there’s a good chance you still don’t care.
There will be links at the bottom of the page later, but for now you can use those.
Update
Upon learning of Firefox’s automatic live bookmark (very cool feature by the way), I retooled the RSS feed so that now there’s a feed for both blogs (as well as the original two).
you cant post HTML? thats crazy... I was trying to post the code to make it work in firefox, but no-can-do... htmlentities() is the function you are looking for there...
Okay, now I’ve gone and made this really elaborate alternative to strip_tags, that escapes the html on disallowed tags. So your <link> post would work if you did it again. But if you type <b>, you’ll still get bold.
The function could have been a lot more efficient if I had implemented a finite state machine, rather than 14 different calls to preg_replace(). Especially since (I think, don’t quote me on this) a regular expression parser is a FSM itself, then the regular expression matcher is yet another FSM. Of course, regular expressions and FSM’s tend to be write-only code, even if well-commented. But I digress.</b>
That Firefox link thing is pretty cool. I’ve always wondered who actually used live bookmarks, they seemed so awkward to set up. And I never noticed the little orange icon on the bottom of the screen (well now its on the top).
I’m glad to see lots of people posting comments. If you are wondering what the magic rules are governing whether or not you can leave/edit comments, here they are:
You can add comments to any post that is less than one week old.
You have one hour to edit your comments. The feature is there so that you can fix a typo, not so that you can change history.
In order to edit a comment, you must be in the same browser session. In other words, if you close the window you’ve lost the ability to edit.
You may leave the name field blank, but if you do so you will be labeled “Anonymous coward” in long-standing internet tradition.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.
If you’re having trouble making comments, there’s now a link (you really can’t miss it) to go to the javascript-free version of the site, which should work fine with any browser made since 1994. This includes Internet Explorer for Pocket PC (the reason that I implemented the feature to begin with). Does anyone else ever browse my site—or any site for that matter—from a PDA/cell phone? If so my site should be about as accessible as they come.
As far as my life is concerned, I have no complaints. Today (well, technically yesterday, since it’s after midnight now) was my birthday. Stephanie and I went out to Tsunami’s (a Japanese Steakhouse) for dinner. Probably my favorite type of food. Although I think Kanki in Raleigh is my favorite. We went sorta late and ended up being the only people at our table, which was a little bit awkward, but we ended up getting way more rice than usual. Which I don’t really have a problem with. Well this story isn’t really going anywhere and I have to be at work in about six hours so I’m going to bed.
All I really wanted was a Happy Bird Day card from my boss
Written by Kip on Friday, November 11, 2005 at 8:16 am (EST) Tagged as: updateswebsite
It’s been over a week since a new blog post, but stay tuned. I am working on giving you the freedom to comment on my posts! Hopefully the first comment-able post will be made Sunday or Monday. And I’ve already got a good idea of what it’s going to be about...
Your secret’s out and the best part is it isn’t even a good one
I just added a text-only feature to my site. If you’ll notice at the very bottom of each page is a “View text only” link. That might be useful if you are on dial-up. And the setting is stored in a cookie so you don’t have to keep clicking it. And, if you are browsing from a PDA, my site will default to text only, which is nice for people who, like me, browse the web from a PDA from time to time and don’t like how this page doesn’t fit neatly into a 240x320 screen.
February 7, 9:56 am
I personally do not use tags at all. Maybe I’m behind the times too, but I don’t see the use of them. Why not just use categories to organize your posts? That’s what I chose to do.
February 7, 9:56 pm
I like the idea of tags but rarely use them. Tag clouds are a tad too much, though with an approach similar to your PicTML app, you could create some pretty neat looking shapes made up of tags.
You might consider ditching the incessant hyperlinking and simply highlight a few tags within the post.