transmothraI’ve just finished posting the latest tutorial: HTML Beginner’s Course pt 1. This tutorial covers basic HTML formatting and some common tags. Nothing intensive here, just a crash course in what it is and what it does, with a little bit of the fundamentals. Topics to be covered later include lists, images, links, tables, and CSS.
Get your feet wet now, we’ll be doing some fun diving soon enough! There’s even an RSS feed to the tutorials pages, so you can keep up with the latest tute’s.
Whoa. I just went to a job interview (cross your fingers for me, or pray to whatever sinful, heathen idols you worship), and was interviewed by Grog from the Oxymorons!! (He also runs Mutant Renegade Records and the excellent zine The Chickenfish Speaks)
Okay, for those of ya outside of Dayton, the Oxymorons were this great post-punk band in the late 80s-early 90s. After they split up, their singer fell off of a balcony and died :( so they are sadly no more. But he’s still really active in music. I still have their tape Bash On Regardless in storage – i have to dig that up and see if it still plays; it was one of my favorites way back in the early 90s!
The interview, i felt, went great, and we spent most of the time talking about music, although i also learned a lot about the company. I am really really hoping i land this one. It’s right up my alley in so many ways!
EQ tips – excerpt from “The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook” by engineer Bobby Owsinski
Using Rob Ballou‘s Styleswitcher, the previous version of which i used on my last site, i’ve uploaded a new PHP-driven stylesheet-switching system. You can see on the left hand side that there are now options for the color scheme, the font size, and the font face (serif or sans-). I also changed the default from a black background to a white one to make it look a little less like a 13-year old Marilyn Manson fan with some design potential did it.
Not very friendly towards IE6-, but IE7 is around the corner, and you should be using a better browser anyway.
Music page updated slightly with some old songs, and an early, super-rough mix of the one i’m finishing right now.
I’m working on getting my legacy sites ready for an online portfolio to be presented here on this site.
The unfortunate thing about being a relatively-inexperienced web designer/developer is that most of your clients will be fairly small outfits and that much of your work will be necessarily pro-bono, or close to it. This means that many of them won’t be around for a very long time. In my case, none of them are. I think the Tecumseh Local Music Boosters may still maintain a site somewhere, though probably one with tildes in the URI that i’ll never be bothered to really track down, because it’s probably no longer my work being displayed there.
On to the point: this means that i have to re-build all of those old sites from the archives. Which, in turn, means trying to get code written a pretty long time ago (by www standards) to work. That’s not much of a problem, in most cases, because i at least had the foresight to include some useful future-compatible functions, the most underrated of which is the doctype declaration.
Regrettably, i don’t remember how some of the functions worked, and i don’t have much time to figure it all out.
The worst part, though, is that the one of the coolest sites, for a sadly defunct print magazine, won’t work locally, and i think it’s because i no longer have any idea what kind of a server environment it was written for.
So take this to heart, fellow amateurs: always, always, always include copious comments in your PHP, and archive a copy of the phpinfo() that you generated at the time (when you were literally losing sleep trying to iron out that one nagging bug). Mirror the damn thing live if you have to. This will save you in the long run, when the site goes belly up, and you have to prove to potential employers or clients that it existed outside of the sick, narcissistic fantasy world inside of your head. You won’t look like a blowhard when you can at least produce a working copy. Right now, i’d settle for just some screenshots of that magazine site.
Speaking of which, i can at least produce a static HTML version, using archive.org for the markup and my backup image files for the graphics. So all is not completely, irretrievably lost.
But i’d rather get those bugs ironed out. I just need a lot more time than i can actually come up with lately.
It was also a fact that, in the night, under a pale but dim goose-neck lamp (a veteran of war, of sorts), he would write his life the way he had always wanted it to be…
Spiffed up the navigation menu a little bit to have submenus, via Suckerfish. Added some poems, grouped mainly by the volume of work from which they spawned.
At least one is a song i’ve been working on for many years, which may soon see the light of day, finally…
Have a lot of catching up to do in many areas. Off to bed with me!
I got this in my MySpace inbox the other day. It made me feel terrific. The best compliment i think i’ve ever gotten.
my name is [DL] i am the younger brother of [SL]…now [SW], but i just wanted to say that you wrote a poem and i found a copy of it it started out “each life a letter under an indigo envelope”, anyways i just wanted to say that was one of the greatest poems i ever read in my life, and by the time [SL/SW] told me you wrote it you were already gone to florida i think. anyways, good talking to you i always wanted to tell you that. i actually used that poem for a class in college and we had to memorize a poem and resite it, i picked that one. i hope you are still writing and i hope life and your travels have treated you well.
[DL]
Shame, i don’t even remember the pome. (SL/SW is a girl i used to hang around a whole lot back in The Day, during the grunge explosion and my pizza-slangin’, pot-smokin’, free-wheelin’ heyday. DL is her younger brother. I always liked him, he was a real fun guy.)
The classic David Byrne(rss)/Brian Eno(fansite) album has been remastered, and will soon have 2 songs’ entire multitrack content available for remixing under the Creative Commons license.
More info available on the album’s official site, which also includes a rare video for the song “Mea Culpa”.
From the desk of the Customer Service Adventures department:
I have to admit, i am of late feeling somewhat slighted at work. I just designed and built an entire intranet for my work, from scratch, all during a few hours here and there when i was “allowed” to do so. It’s comprehensive, it’s modern and standards-compliant, it looks clean and nice, with some tasty flourishes via CSS, and it took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to make it happen – all by myself. I even had to make do with MS Paint to do some little extra graphics, and the entire f-ing thing was hand-coded in Notepad.
Instead of getting recognized, i got a couple of “hey, that’s really nices” and a lot of flack – for, of all things, taking too much time. Mind you, i created something like 100 pages filled with useful technical and product information in Notepad. I was expected to do it with just a few hours here and there. All in all, i’d say i probably only put about 50-60 hours into the entire thing, from start to finish – and it actually looks really nice and functions exactly as it’s supposed to function. There’s probably something like 3 or 4 MB of hand-coded XHTML and CSS, with just a touch of JavaScript (just to correct an Internet Explorer CSS :hover issue).
I even offered to do it on my own time, out of loyalty to my company, and just because i could have gotten it done about 3 months ago if i had. Yes, it’s taken since late November/early December, because i could only work on it when we had less than 1000 e-mails in our queue, which was extremely rare during and after the holiday season (it’s an online retailer) (actually, we never did have less than 1k during that time – i had to wait until late January/early February to dig it all back up). It’s not really even done now – i really want to go back and update all the old information they already had that i fixed and converted to the new format for them.
I’ve also explained numerous times that if i could just do it in PHP, preferably using a database such as MySQL (both of which are free and secure), i could do it in far less time, as i could set up one template that could handle pretty much all functionality and markup, and just dynamically inject content into it via the links the users click to request information. But no. That would be too much hassle for the IT department to set up (nevermind that i could do the damn thing myself).
And now, instead of a note of thanks or a pat on the back, neither of which i’ve even hinted at requesting, natch, they’re sitting me down and patiently explaining that i need to work less on it, because of budget reasons. No, i’m not getting paid a cent extra – it’s just that i’m no longer working for Brand Y, who pays for it, but am taking Brand X’s time. They bully me and make me feel like somehow, all of the hard work and dedication i’ve put into my work notwithstanding, i’m lazy for doing all that i have done. (Naturally, i won’t be getting a copy of my hard work for my portfolio, even though there’s nothing even remotely top-secret on it.)
Bullshit, honestly.
So I am now officially keeping my eye open for other positions in the area. I need more challenge, and to feel like i’m making an honest difference. My girlfriend will be out of school in a year’s time, and then we can do anything we want to do. Most likely, the Dot Com sector will be more stable and robust by then anyway. I admit i lack schooling, but i lack little else, especially determination, perseverance, and dedication.
wikiRecording looks very promising, indeed! Yay Interweb!
The prodigious and prolific Jackie Corley has provided me with what looks to be one yummy manuscript.
The thrillride is called At the Slaughter and within a couple of years you’re going to have read it, too. This is going to be the book that changes people’s lives, like The Catcher in the Rye and On the Road once did (and continue to do so today). It’s going to break records and win every award there is on Earth.
It’s about a tragic kid named Foster O’Reilly. Remember that name. Foster is the most complex and compelling character i think i may have ever run into, in a book, or even in real life. She will grab you by the balls someday and not let go.
The first paragraph is amazing. So far, i’d bet my life that she’s nailed it, in her inimitable way.
Jackie Corley. Foster O’Reilly. Two names, one crushing heartfuck of a book. Remember.
Must go read it now. L8r sk8rz.
Another fantastic night out at the Stockyard’s Inn. The Razor Ridge Band (currently Holly’s dad Tim, uncle Matt & best friend Sarah – Matt’s wife) played better and more confidently than last time. Sarah and Matt did amazing harmony. Tim sang better and stronger too, and played such a fine and harmonic dobro. My new hero Dennis Rotterman played in a three-piece and they sounded terrific. I actually had three whole entire beers. A great time and many laughs were had.
for now, until i get some, ahem, actual content up, i’ve at least managed to put some pictures on all the pages. (see menu, top)
Word Riot, a monthly online literary magazine, is celebrating 4 years this month! If’n you read books, you’ll want to head on over to their publishing node and buy a couple, because they’ve got some of the best and brightest new talent around these days.
Now if ever their incredibly talented EIC herself would get her own Great Work done… that girl is like James Baldwin or something! Come on! But she does have an awful lot on her plate these days, career-wise and et cetera.
Anyway: Throw the goat (and dollars) at WR!
I’ve been getting the music bug. This weekend i had the pleasure of seeing Holly’s dad Tim, uncle Matt, and, er… “aunt” Sarah play a pretty darn good quasi-bluegrass set (including a great cover of Neil Young’s “I Am A Child” – Matt & Sarah sing amazing harmony, and Tim is a tasty dobro player) at the Stockyard’s Inn on Springfield Street in Dayton (which, incidentally, used to be a brothel and still has red velvet wallpaper), but also a fantastic musician named Dennis Rotterman, who is an amazing player and songwriter. I hope to see him around lots more. If you haven’t seen him, you’ve been missing out; and if you have seen him, you probably wonder, like me, why he isn’t, like, famous or something.
In case you’re wondering, i’m not into bluegrass. It’s ok, i guess, but so much of the songs are either religious (yuck!) or sad-assed backward-staring gave-up boo-hoos. There are simply far too many better things to do than cry into a glass of beer in between pretending that you’re filled with something called “the holy spirit”.
my god, it is far too late to be up. i have to be at work in 8 hours! enough for now.
cleaning up the layout a little bit. no more yucky slowdown in IE: i figured out that IE doesn’t like to repeat a background image, at least one with transparency, too many times; so instead of using the smallest possible denominator of pixels to show a grid, i simply repeated the pattern within the image itself a few times. in this case, i changed the grid to vertical lines; but where i might have liked to use, say, 2×1 pixels to repeat across the element, i used something like 2×75 to reduce the overall repeats. not sure why this strange behavior isn’t better known or more widely documented, but i may have to experiment with it more in the future.
also fixed a couple of positioning errors on my part. the sidebar isn’t the most consistent, because some of my sections there have heading elements within list tags, while others don’t, possibly owing to different plugins having been created for different versions of WordPress, or for different themes, and so on.