Stephan Miller
Building Websites, Traffic, and Income
The Importance of Knowing What You Want to Write
There are times I have had pretty good luck with just taking off with a topic and coming out on the other side with a post. This morning was not one of those times. But I knew. I could feel it.
Even though that is my favorite way to right a post, it didn’t work. I didn’t feel my juices flowing and I tackled a subject I had been thinking about for a while, but not quite enough. When the post was around 750 words long and I wasn’t sure I was halfway done, I knew I was in over my head. But I still tried to force it.
Positioning Images and Javascript in Blog Posts
I wrote HTML before they really made any good editors for it, back in the old days of 64 colors or however many there were back then. Tables were the only option. You could place something anywhere you wanted to in a page as long as it was in the center, on the right or on the left. And fonts. Forget fonts. A manual typewriter had better fonts.
Firefox for Mac Sucks
Short, sweet and to the point. CSS doesn’t look the same. A window pricing calculator I wrote in javascript that works in Safari, IE7, and Firefox for Windows doesn’t work right. Why? I don’t know. But I am not going to spend just as much time writing a seperate calculator. Bring it on, Firefox people.
Update: I was a little bit pissed here, but Firefox for Mac still does not handle javascript calculations correctly.
Using BlueprintCSS for Drupal
First, the design is a work in process. I know it sucks right now. But BlueprintCSS is awsome for layouts. There are not too many tutorials that go into detail on how to use it. But it’s simple, so no worry. I just used it to build the layout and used a seperate stylesheet for the presentation. I am not sure of the correct practice. But it’s simple. And who needs flexible width designs. I’m done at least for now with flexible width. No more creating images to stretch. Everything is a predictable size and that’s the way I like it.
Design by Accident
The alignment of the logo in the header was an accident. Didn’t really mean to put it there, but I forgot to adjust the size of the top black bar. My name was supposed to go inside the black bar. But I uploaded the change and saw the the accident. I was about to fix when I decided it looked better.
I have to admit that I don’t know as much as I should about css. The tricks. The workarounds. And especially dealing with the differences between Firefox and IE7. We don’t even want to throw Safari and Opera in the mix. But I always check them just in case. And as long as they look presentable, although not the same, I go with it.
Hacking WordPress Themes
I don’t know if you can it being a perfectionist, but i can’t really rest until a site I have does everything I want it to do. If it doesn’t fit, it just doesn’t fit. The main issue with the template I was using before was space. I was running out of space. It didn’t matter if I wrote a longer post or not, the sidebar still stretched out to be twice as long as the content. I wanted it to fit my average sized post better. The orange and black were boring me. Way too dark for my liking.
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