Thus revealed, the creature buried its nose in the tire-tilled soil...
March 22, 2005
More template tweaking!
Category: Technical Stuff

Okay, I'm actually starting to enjoy this now that I kinda understand what I'm doing here. Following a link from the lovely Tina, I downloaded a few themes created by Theron Parlin and have been examining his code as compared to his output to figure out how/what he did to achieve certain effects. Borrowing some code here and adjusting values there, I ended up with this result -- and I've gotta say I'm pretty pleased with it. Note the sidebar pulldown menus! Fun fun. 🙂

I'm still a little confused about the purpose of those links at the bottom, though, which I left in for now but will probably eventually remove. I get that they're used for validating the page's XHTML and CSS, but why are they there for all to see and do? For that matter, why are they there in the first place? I think it's kinda weird.

And now I must be off to the bookstore. Ugh. But in less than 24 hours things may be looking up! *fingers crossed* Ja ne, minna-san.

-posted by Wes | 3:36 pm | Comments (0)
More design stuff
Category: Technical Stuff

So I totally meant to cheat and use tables for the mock wesoteric layout, but I ended up playing around with the divs some more and read up on CSS tricks and "hacks" and actually kinda got something that mostly works in both Mozilla and IE. Like with this blog here, there's a two pixel difference that I don't see any getting around, but ah well -- them's the breaks. Feel free to check out the page in your browser and tell me what you see -- it should look kinda like the Scary-Crayon main and content pages without all of the graphical splender. Don't start frequenting that place just yet, though. As you can see, we're still in a testing phase, and the full "post" on there is yesterday's entry here -- I just posted it so I could see how a full post would look. Anyway, the layout over there will change quite a bit -- different color scheme, the addition of graphics, more template tweaks, etc. -- but this is a pretty good indicator of how the Scary-Crayon blog will eventually look, assuming I don't decide to just keep the page uniform and paste the post PHP into the current layout. Which would certainly work!

But for the time being, I must rest. G'night, minna-san.

-posted by Wes | 5:52 am | Comments (0)
T-E-S-T-I-N-G!
Category: Technical Stuff

(Pasted from another entry...)

So after installing WordPress on the new domain, I spent the better part of the day mucking with divs and PHP and CSS templates and other design-related crap only to rediscover what I should've remembered from way back when I first started this blog and then later when I attempted to convert SC to a primarily CSS-based layout -- for reliable cross-browser compatibility, tables are still the way to go. Now that I've settled on a table-based layout, I just need to decide on the design specifics for the new wesoteric.com. Implementation should go fairly smoothly then, but man I wasted a lot of time today! Ah well, at least I picked up a bit of PHP along the way... that include function should come in handy for future endeavors. But damn, this WordPress is complicated stuff! I dunno how Tina does it. 😛 Fooling with endless lists of variables and values and specifications that you didn't create and/or set and therefore have little idea how/where they are used -- or, for that matter, if they are used at all, let alone if you require them for your purposes -- is pretty mind-numbing stuff. It's enough to make me want to try coding the Scary-Crayon blog from scratch -- it'd be pretty difficult, true, but at least then I'd be mostly aware of what was going on. Anyway, the SC blog will be on hold until I've made more headway on wesoteric.com.

-posted by Wes | 12:07 am | Comments (9)
March 21, 2005
Scary-Crayon updated! and hurting heads.
Category: SC Updates … Technical Stuff

With Monday morning comes another two-hitter from Scary-Crayon: A Crayon Haiku #27 and Dusty Plastic HELL: Hot Flash #32. Enjoy!

So after installing WordPress on the new domain, I spent the better part of the day mucking with divs and PHP and CSS templates and other design-related crap only to rediscover what I should've remembered from way back when I first started this blog and then later when I attempted to convert SC to a primarily CSS-based layout -- for reliable cross-browser compatibility, tables are still the way to go. Now that I've settled on a table-based layout, I just need to decide on the design specifics for the new wesoteric.com. Implementation should go fairly smoothly then, but man I wasted a lot of time today! Ah well, at least I picked up a bit of PHP along the way... that include function should come in handy for future endeavors. But damn, this WordPress is complicated stuff! I dunno how Tina does it. 😛 Fooling with endless lists of variables and values and specifications that you didn't create and/or set and therefore have little idea how/where they are used -- or, for that matter, if they are used at all, let alone if you require them for your purposes -- is pretty mind-numbing stuff. It's enough to make me want to try coding the Scary-Crayon blog from scratch -- it'd be pretty difficult, true, but at least then I'd be mostly aware of what was going on. Anyway, the SC blog will be on hold until I've made more headway on wesoteric.com.

Get some sleep, Wes.

-posted by Wes | 2:25 am | Comments (0)
August 25, 2004
<poordesign>???
Category: Serious … Technical Stuff

I may have to start doing multiple short posts instead of long posts every day to every few days. We'll see. For the moment, I'm so not in the mood to write about what the past two days at work have been like -- I'm off today and tomorrow, so perhaps at some point I'll share my tales of assholes THE LIKES OF WHICH YOU'VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE. (more...)

-posted by Wes | 9:41 am | Comments (0)