latest posts relevant to ‘development’

not earth-shattering developments, but i’ve made a few updates to my site theme that may or may not be interesting, depending on whether you are a geek or not. in no particular order, the changes include:

• the site name is larger, and the byline is moved to the right of it
• the main page width scales with your browser window width, but will have a minimum and maximum width if your window gets too small or too large (except Internet Explorer 6 users – you get a fixed width page. please upgrade)
• there is a very subtle, dotted separator line delineating the flickr images on the left, from the content column in the center, from the utility column on the right
• not only do the columns scale with browser width, but the whitespace between them scales, and keeps the separator line centered between the columns
• the header and columns now are more rigidly aligned in a grid
• the utility column on the right scales up to be wider than it used to be, yet scales down smaller than it used to
• the content column, and parts of the utility column, are now text-justified so they fill squarely to the right margin
• i’ve added some simple logic to the flickr image display so it retrieves fewer images on article pages than it does on the homepage (the content of some articles is a lot shorter, and the images were pushing out the page height past the content length)

this revisit was inspired by attending An Event Apart Boston recently (writing a summary of AEA on my SQUAREDESIGN site). if you have any opinions, let me know.

i liked the old design okay. it was a quick new thing when i switched to wordpress.

this new design incorporates a 3 column layout, built with techniques i learned from this old school tutorial at glish.com.

the sidebar is different – i canned the archive links. who wants to read this by month? use the Search feature if you need to find something in particular.

also the banner graphic, while it overlapped the content area slightly, i thought it could be more prominent – yet, less distracting.

the font face is defaulted to Helvetica, and will degrade to Microsoft Sans Serif in the absense of Helvetica. if neither is found, your system’s default sans-serif font is loaded.

oops, i almost forgot to mention – the images on the left are the latest feed from my flickr photostream.

there are lots of other little tweaks to improve readability and usability. plus a few that might be functional or fun (doesn’t that first line of each paragraph look darker?) enjoy! feel free to comment if you have questions or concerns.

yes, both relevant to this post, and a musical reference (song by 10,000 maniacs). anyway.

this post is, actually, about the weather. this past christmas, carrie gave me an Oregon Scientific WMR968 Weather Station. those of you who know me might remember that i’m a weather geek. or you may have glazed over that detail, because it’s mundane. anyway.

like any competent weather station, it measures: temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, rainfall, wind speed and direction. but the geekiest feature is that the base station connects to a computer via serial cable. i’ve got it hooked up to my server at home, and it’s logging meteorological data 24/7.

there are various open source packages to interface with this data, as well as to submit it on intervals to sites like weatherunderground.com.

i will be developing a widget to embed the data on this site and my other sites, so keep an eye out for that. why do you need to know what the weather’s like on my back deck, exactly? that’s for you to decide. i’m just enjoying the programming challenge.

so, i’m trying an offline blogging tool again. i’ve recently purchased TextMate – a really great code editor for Mac OS X.

it turns out TextMate has a “Blogging” bundle that i can use to push new posts to my blogs. all b’zillion of them. let’s see if it works — if you’re reading this, welcome to a brave new world (again).

something has changed here!

after just a few years running the Drupal content management system, i’ve switched again. this time, to WordPress.

why?

because i want to be like the coolkids. no, i kid. sorta.

because i don’t need Drupal. i don’t need the extensive community-supporting framework. i just need a blog, and i want the most advanced blog software available. i want to get into developing themes and plugins as well, and this allows me to concentrate on making them for one system.

so, to begin all this, i made this theme. from the ground up, created every file and wrote (almost) every line. the only parts of code i repurposed were the logic for conditional comment display (from the default WordPress theme), and a CSS reset developed by Eric Meyer. (read my CSS file, i attribute the code to him).

for now, things may be sparse and not every dark corner may have been fully fleshed out. i’m working on it. but i’ve been getting emails from people (hi, mom!) wondering why i haven’t updated my site in a while. well, this is why.