In addition to A Crayon Haiku #28 -- which really must be seen to be believed -- the main and content pages are now active in their table-free CSS and PHP form, and the same goes for all articles starting now. It's kinda sad to see the tables go -- I've had a ten year love affair with those special little tags -- but ah well, times change. Besides, it's not like anyone'll be able to tell the difference! I've also set up a little redirect thing, so visitors to the old blog should automatically end up here now. (If that's you, welcome!) And that's about all I've got for now. Ja!

That it is, along with a new piece -- Dusty Plastic HELL: Hot Flash #36. Poor guy. 🙁

In other news, CSS and PHP are awesome! I've moved well past the "hey, this is useful!" phase and have entered the world of "holy shit, look what I can do!", in which one plays around with the code to achieve nifty results simply because one can. Take a look at the following mockups: print-css.php, dphell-css.php, and main3-css.php. Now I haven't replaced the articles to fit the appropriate pages or done anything with the bottom area yet -- that's the easy part -- but look at the header and the page titles. Pretty standard, right? But here's the kicker -- with the exception of one or two variables specified at the top of each document, these three files are exactly the same. They all call upon a header -- the same header -- that's filled with fun PHP that basically says, "If this variable equals 'Main' (thus marking it as the main page), print the 'What is... ???' text and don't hotlink the title graphic." And for each of the archive links, the PHP says, "If this variable equals 'Print' (and this is the Print link), don't output the link HTML." And since all of the linking and image rollover stuff is defined via the CSS, that results in the graphic text remaining highlighted. Even the document titles are controlled in this way! So I feel pretty accomplished right now -- PHP is pretty sweet stuff and though I'm doing relatively simple stuff (includes, if/else statements, etc.) I think I'm getting the hang of it. Expect me to be using more of it on SC in the near future. 😈

Hope you didn't find that to be too boring, minna-san! Ja!

Not technically a Scary-Crayon update, but since we're talking SC design stuff, I've marked it as such. Read on if that sort of thing interests you! (more...)

New short "comic" for the masses -- a little something I like to call Cereal Noir. Hope you enjoy it! Especially since I'm considering doing more pieces along these lines in the future. I also wrote a lengthy blurb in the Site Talk box on the main and content pages, for those of you with really good eyesight who don't mind squinting at the tiny text. And, of course, Wesoteric has been linked over there now. 😀 (more...)

Well, I made a lot more headway with Wesoteric than I expected to this past week -- the site's almost ready to go live. New colors have been selected; a header graphic has been created. Fun fun. All that remains is to add some stuff to the sidebar and add a quote of some sort to the main content bar, and of course import of all of my Blogger posts, and we'll be set! It's kinda funny how on Monday I was complaining about the impossibility of all of this stuff and now I've pretty much got it covered. I've learned a lot about browser behavior (at least Mozilla and IE) where CSS rules are concerned -- enough, I think, to conceivably convert SC to a table-free layout, but I'm not going to do that anytime soon because I'm still quite satisfied with the way it looks now and I see no need to go changing a bunch of code just to get it to look exactly the same way it looks now. But if/when I decide to do a new layout for it, I'm game for a CSS layout. (more...)