A Personal Note. . .

I’ve been AFK (away from keyboard) for some time in the past couple of weeks, so I thought a small explanation was in order. So, without further words, here’s what I’ve been up to:

Mid-May: Went to VA to go apartment hunting with the girlfriend. We found a nice little place for about $800 a month, we move in July 21st.

End of May: This is where everything went a bit insane. I had a bit of life-changing news and had to make a trip to Virginia (more on that when I feel the time is right). In order to afford the trip, I picked up a friend of mine who was coming back from A-School for the Navy and drive him to Havelock, NC.

Beginning of June: Literally on the way back from dropping off my friend Justin at his parent’s house, I was informed that they had taken my Nana off life support. About 10 hours later she passed away after struggling against cancer for over 3 years. I then drove from my home in North Carolina to Indianapolis, IN the next day to make it to her funeral, which was a big ball of crazy events in itself due to how my grandpa was acting towards the entire family.

So, in all, I put about 5,000 miles on my car in a little over a month, I drove (roughly) a total of 45 hours in the span of 2 weeks, and had two life altering events occur. Hectic, stressful, but it’s all done and over with now.

Tags: life, Me, notes

A Couple Tools For Staying Social

This blog post is in response to a question Natilie posed in the Social Media room on FriendFeed.

With all the communities floating around the web today, it can be quite difficult and a bit overwhelming to keep up with all the activity. I know that I can’t always keep up with what’s going on in every community, but there are a few tools that I use to keep me updated and participating. Here’s a short list of some tools:

Tags: firefox, firefox addons, friendfeed, social media, social networks, tools

A Few Reasons “Twitter Pro” is a Bad Idea

Jason Calacanis and Pat Phelan have both written about how they would be willing to pay for a Twitter Pro/Plus that offered a guarantee of increased service reliability. This all comes as a response to the service interruptions that Twitter experiences almost every day.

I’m not sure that I see the point in paying for the increase in reliability, for a couple of reasons.

Tags: thoughts, Twitter, twitter pro

New Feature in WordPress 2.6

WordPress 2.6 isn’t anywhere near completion, but if you’re a WordPress user you just got a great bit of news about the upcoming release in your Dashboard this evening. Michael Adams writes:

Have you ever saved a post on your blog only to realize later that you accidentally erased a critical paragraph? Ever worked on a blog with multiple authors and needed to keep a log of who changed what and when?

WordPress should store a history of all your posts. You’d get protection from accidental changes, and you’d be able to see a clear timeline of the evolution of each of you posts.

Happily, WordPress is awesome! In the upcoming WordPress 2.6 release, the feature exists and rules!

That’s right, no more accidentally deleting an entire paragraph only to realize you’ve screwed the pooch. Also, no more grappling with who edited what post, when, and how much on multi-author blogs.

Read & See More: Post Revisions in WordPress 2.6

Tags: new features, post revisions, wordpress, wordpress 2.6, wordpress feature

Easy CSS Rollover Images

Ever wonder how some images change when you roll your mouse cursor over them? CSS can be used to create a rollover image effect that is lightweight and easier to manage than the Javascript alternative. Here, I’m going to explain two different methods for creating a rollover image effect, both using background image replacement techniques.

Tags: css, css rollovers, css tricks, html, tips, tutorial, web design, web development, xhtml

A Work In Progress

As of this morning, the theme I’ve been working on every now and then for the past few weeks has gone live. The theme is no where near finished, but it’s far enough along that I decided to throw it up on my personal blog this morning (I then spent 2 hours trying to figure out how to make IE 6 support PNG Alpha Transparency).

Stuff That Needs Fixin’

• Need to fix up the CSS for Internet Explorer 6 & 7, Opera, and Safari.
• Need to inlcude styles for various elements and widgets.
• Need to make sure I don’t break and W3C rules in my CSS/XHTML (grrrr.)
• Add backwards compatibility for WordPress installations < 2.5 (gravatar support, etc)
• Crazy code cleaning/organization

Tags: css, internet explorer, wordpress, wordpress theme, work in progress, xhtml

Links for May 8th, 2008

Positioning is Everything
Fixing your CSS for Internet Explorer can be a hassle. It’s just one more step to fine tuning your code before release, and it can be a cumbersome task. This site lists CSS bugs in modern browsers, and provides examples of the broken and “fixed” code.

kuler
I just recently discovered this website and I’ve fallen in love with it. It’s a bit like ColourLovers, but from the people at Adobe. Very good source of inspiration for a color scheme if you’re color-retarded like myself.

101 Color Resources for Web Designers
Related to the previous link, here’s a list of 101 color resources for web designers.

Dropline Nuovo Icons
Just for the hell of it, here’s a great set of icons.

Tags: colors, css, dropline nuovo, icons, internet explorer, kuler, Links, may 8th, Random, web development

WordPress CSS Trick: Image Titles in Sidebar

I was browsing through the WordPress.org support forum today when I came across a question that I thought was worthy of a blog post. The question was:

I am trying to change the titles of my sidebar widgets (i.e. “Pages,” “Recent comments,” “Meta,” etc) to images. Since my sidebar is widgetized, it seems this is more difficult than simply changing a few things in my sidebar.php document.

Does anyone have any tips?

It seems that with the implementation of widgets in later versions of WordPress, users have had some trouble customizing their sidebar titles with images. In early versions of WordPress, one could just go into the sidebar.php file and replace the titles of sidebar sections with an image using the good ol’ fashion HTML tag. This is no longer possible since widgets are dynamically added to the sidebar and are no longer located in the sidebar.php file.

Although I personally would rather use text to title sections on my sidebar, for the reduce loading times and various other reasons, using an image can allow you to use non-standard fonts and add a bit of flare to your blog. I’m going to show you have to achieve this using a bit of “detective work” and CSS.

Tags: blog, css, html, stylesheet, tip, tutorial, wordpress

Migrating. . .

I’m migrating my blog from WordPress.com to a new, self-hosted WordPress blog. I’ve gotten most of the content imported without any problems, now I just need to get my plugins/theme situated on the new platform.

Tags: blogging, migrating, wordpress

Twitter in Plain English

Are you using Twitter? I am. I can’t say that I’m completely addicted, but it’s nice to see what people are up to at any given time in the day. There is a problem with Twitter, not many people understand it or know about it (in respects to everyday folks). That’s why this video rocks:

Tags: Twitter, Video, youtube