Now, in my web design class, we’ve been working with two development environments for HTML and CSS. there was Adobe’s Dreamweaver, and the considerably less fantastical Crimson Editor, whose only real upside was that it was free. As the deadline came closer, I decided I would throw the site together over a couple days on Dreamweaver by staying at the lab late, but thanks to some kleptomaniacs in the building, the room that I was told would be open until as late as 10 at night, was locked by 4 o’clock and not accessible to the public. Thus, over the course of a weekend, I hammered through the antiquated Crimson at home, productivity and morale boosted by Kit’s graciousness to lend me a 17″ Samsung he had laying around for dual-screening.

Development went rather well, my only real obstacles consisting of aesthetics such as rounding the corners of divs. One trouble, however, ended up being a stalking predator in the grass, waiting for the opportune moment to strike; I was having issues with my divs moving to where I wanted, and accidentally planted the seeds of woe by designating their position as “fixed” in the CSS.

The following day, I wrote the final few pages, and posted the link to my site on our class discussion boards. When I went to view the site and make sure the link worked, to my horror, I discovered that the “fixed” positions that had been defined to me as keeping a div in one spot, “even when scrolling,” had in fact removed the idea of scroll bars completely! Sections of the pages were cut off by the window borders with no way of viewing them. After researching the positioning system deeper, I was enlightened to the concept of absolute positioning with relative positioning for divs within divs.

One would think that this task would be simple to carry out, and for a seasoned web-designer, I’m sure this scenario is a non-issue, but this was hardly my case. Diving back into my code and changing the positioning caused my page to detonate beyond all readability. The following battle that lasted for 3 hours straight showed me just how much my page was a cobbled together catastrophe of ropes, crudely nailed wooden planks, and duct tape. divs, and classes were created and destroyed like the primordial matter in the early stages of planck time following the big bang. Phantom divisions shunted my text about on the page while I struggled to re-size images and rebuild navigation bars. At last, I emerged somewhat victorious, my mind flayed by the channel cast of HTML and CSS syntax. At a time during the war, I thought Dreamweaver, which I at last had access to, could prove a secret weapon, but by that time my code was so gnarled that Adobe’s interpretation of my code was unintelligible.

It was submitted at the eleventh hour, and is almost everything I wanted. Feedback is appreciated:

Welcome to Your Future.

• rich text editing – I want to feel like I’m writing in a real word processor and not some crappy little widget.
• Seamless drafting, publishing, editing – I don’t want to have aborted posts because of some browser timeout, or accidental posts I wasn’t ready to publish, etc
• Simple image handling – It’s 2010, where is my drag-and-drop picture inserts into the text body?
• Post Preview – I want to know how it looks before I publish.

So far, Live Writer has done an exemplary job of handling these tasks… I’m impressed

Having searched the various lifehacker-esqe blogs and self-help sites, I was unable to find the ultimate mass photo manager.  Google’s Picasa 3 is promising but a little clunky (and lacks native Flickr support), F-Spot looks quite nice, but alas is Linux-only (thus alienating my photo collection), and Adobe Organizer which costs money (came with my copy of Photoshop Elements 6) future support and upgrades are a joke here…

Here’s where Adam Savage comes in.  Although my luck in the past has been more hit than miss with using the “@” message on Twitter, the prospect of getting to the bottom of this mystery was enough for me to give it a try by asking the man himself:

and much to my surprise, the humble Adam Savage did me the honor of not only answering my question, but explaining his selection as well:

Without going into the details of how Twitter has changed how I view the availability of otherwise unreachable people…

Mr. Savage, thank you for making my day.

I really liked the song but I didn’t know what it was at first, eventually finding out it was “the ghost of you”. After Kit exposed me to his MCR collection I quickly became a fan. Now after a year I come back to this video to find :

If this had been done a year ago I might never have heard of MCR…

It seems to me that the horse and buggy makers are trying to make it illegal to drive cars in the city limits…

My initial reaction is that the Live Writer is a huge help in terms of catching in-line typos, with its on-the-fly spell checking.  Yes Firefox has this feature, but that’s a browser dependency.  Also, Live Writer makes it fairly painless to add pictures to the post.  And lastly, Live Writer includes a tool for generating tables. To me, this is huge.  WordPress’ TinyMCE lacks any default table creation functionality, forcing the use of straight HTML editing to create tables in posts.

If anyone has their favorite blog post writing software to recommend feel free to let me know, I’d be interested in drawing a comparison between what various products have to offer.

Until next time!

1. Played in the dark when possible, and
2. Played with slow, elegant classical music playing in the background.

The design of ships and attention to detail never ceases to blow my mind.  The proposed mass Sins match is still planned, by the way.  We need only to wait for certain conditions to be met.  These conditions shall be achieved as early as Tuesday the 16^th.