robglazebrook.com

Well, as I’m sure you’ve noticed as you entered the site, I’ve made a change. The mini-weblog has been incorporated into the contents of the main weblog via some beautiful (if I say so myself, which I’ll have to, because it’s probably not according to the ~real~ net gurus) PHP script I wrote while taking a break from the Sociology website. Yes, I can take a break from a website by working on a website. That website is all old-school HTML and ASP (which I know nothing about). My site is mostly XHTML, and the script I wrote was PHP. So it’s all good. :)

Tell me what you think, or not. Whichever. I still plan to have a “Downloads” page in a couple of days, for this script and scripts like it. Someone else may want an easy way to use Movable Type and their PDA, yano? I think I’m just going to make a category in Movable Type, post the downloads to that category as updates, and then make a link to an archive containing only that category. That would make it spammy here for a couple of days, but would stop me from having to make a whole new page and templates for said page for no good reason.

Work has been tedious as of late, but only because I got all the redesign stuff done in a tenth or so of the time Dwight and I thought it would take me, so I’m already quite a ways into the “copy old content into a new template” stage. Though, I’m taking a bit of a creative license on some of the content, too. On some of the PhD pages, for example, they reference professors who haven’t worked for the department in five years. Some of the links on the Links page go to gopher:// sites. For those of you who don’t remember, or maybe weren’t around online yet, gopher:// is PRE http://. We’re talking 1993 or something, here. Some of these links haven’t been updated in a decade.

I’m really starting to feel like web work is my ‘real’ job now, which may mean I’ll be in for a bit of a shock three weeks from now when the website is done and I have to go back to rebuilding PCs and fixing brilliant screwups from brilliant professors whose genius lies somewhere outside the realm of technology. I suppose my delusion is somewhat understandable though, right? I’ve done nothing but web design at work for the last seven work days (56 hours). When I take a break from that website, I work on ideas for this one. Dwight just sent me a link a couple of hours ago to a contest on campus for a website that I’m seriously considering trying for, which means even more web work in my free time. I’m even attending conferences, now. Okay, so I’ve only attended one, a few days ago, on RSS and how they could benefit departments in the university (which I may write something up on later). But I’m still planning to go to Gnomedex come late July, and that’s going to be an awesome experience.

Speaking of PDAs and this website and Gnomedex (how’s THAT for a lead in?!), I’m thinking about buying a new PDA before I go to Gnomedex. It’s better than spending money on a tattoo, right, grandma? :) I like my Handspring and all, but it does have its limitations. One limitation has always bothered me, and continues to do so. No wireless access! What’s the point of developing a personal computer that fits snugly in the palm of your hand if you have to hook that tiny electronic marvel up to a big, clunky computer just to get new data? It seems silly to me. So my next PDA will have, I hope, WiFi access. ISU is fairly decent in the wireless access department, so most anywhere I go on campus, I could surf the ‘net free of charge. And, while I’d absolutely ~love~ to have a Palm Tungsten C, there’s no way on Earth, in Hell, or anywhere in between the two that I’ll be able to afford that anytime soon. So instead, I’m looking at the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500. It doesn’t have built-in WiFi, but I can buy a WiFi card for that model for under $40. Plus, the Sharp has a built-in QWERTY keyboard that just looks luscious.

Oh! And, in case you’re wondering, I don’t think Megan and I will be heading to Missouri this weekend. We’d love to and all, but Megan has to work all weekend, and I don’t want to spend the weekend without her. We need more than 72 hours notice. :)

I’ll try and remember to post more tomorrow, but for now, it’s bedtime. Goodnight, all. :)

This is actually just a test entry. I’m working on a rather complex PHP script and a nice new way of displaying my PDA updates inside this area. I have a complete copy of this site hidden elsewhere so I can test everything. If this works, expect that mini-weblog sidebar to go the way of the Dodo. :)

Here’s the thing: I’ve had a Handspring Visor for quite some time now. A year or so, anyway. I used it extensively at first. And then I got my cellphone, and tried to start using its PIM (personal information management) software instead. It didn’t work well. So I stopped using my phone for my PIM needs, but I never started using my Handspring again.

So now, I’m going to attempt to start using my Handspring again. In order for me to get into the habit of using it constantly, I have to make it worth the effort. As part of my worth-enhancing efforts, I’ve installed a neat lil’ program called handX webLog onto my PDA. It’s essentially a stripped-down blog program. I write entries on my PDA wherever I’m at, and the program saves them. When I hotsync my PDA whenever I get home, it uploads my entries to a folder on Journal Arcana. I’ve hacked together a PHP script that then reads the last six day’s worth of entries from that folder and displays them in the sidebar labeled ‘Mini-Weblog’. If anyone is interested in the script I’m using, leave a comment or email me to let me know. It’s tiny: it weighs in at just under 500 bytes.

I think I’ve accumulated enough tiny scripts to make it feasible to have a ‘Downloads’ page. I might get started on that sometime this weekend. It could include my PHP scripts, JavaScripts, PERL scripts, and probably some cellphone wallpapers and ringtones. Because a lot of people end up on this site by searching for ringtones and wallpapers on Google (for whatever reason), and I feel bad forcing them to leave fruitless.

Anyways. I’ve also added a couple of new blogs to my blogroll, so check them out. I’ve been reading Chris Pirillo’s weblog daily for quite some time now. The only reason he hasn’t made my ‘Daily Reads’ list earlier is that everyone else ~already~ links to his blog, meaning I could get to his blog easily through someone else’s, so I didn’t see the point. But I always got to Chris’s blog through Jason’s blog, and his blog was recently maliciously hacked. The other new blog (mes absurdités) publishes in both French and English. I’m hoping to keep my rudimentary French knowledge alive by keeping myself immersed in the language. :)

Okies, time to go. I think Megan and I are going out to eat, and then probably grocery shopping, before I start to look for a party tonight. *g*

I’ve spent the last three full days (and also the last 3/4 day, since it’s not quitting time yet) at work, each day in 8-hour chunks broken up by no breaks longer than it takes me to pee or get a cup of coffee, working on the website for the Department of Sociology. This is their website now. It was good for its time, I guess (I never would have liked the colors), but it is now quite aged. The department wanted it done right, so they hired someone outside of the department (but still on-campus) to do the work. She produced a bunch of templates based on Dwight’s specifications (works for the broadest possible range of users, subtle use of color, etc), he picked one, and she created a bunch of page templates and handed them over to me for the dirty work.

Unfortunately (or, possibly, fortunately), the templates didn’t work well for me. For instance, her HTML is quite messy (although, admittedly, they are Dreamweaver templates, and any WYSIWYG editor has somewhat messy HTML) and a lot of her tables aren’t laid out very logically. Things that should be contained within separate cells of one table are actually contained within several individual tables, and so on. Second of all, although Dwight asked her to design for the broadest possible range of users, the final design is a little TOO broad. The site was designed to accommodate 640×480 screen resolutions, which haven’t been popular for ten years or so now. And there wasn’t a ~speck~ of CSS in the templates. Which meant every time I added text to a page using one of the templates, I had to manually set the color. This is a bad thing, as the following story illustrates:

Monday and Tuesday, Dwight was out of the office. The final website is due on the 6th of June, which isn’t a lot of time, so I got fast to work. By the time Dwight first saw the templates in action late Tuesday afternoon, I’d already finished 60 or so individual pages (there are several hundred said pages). He decided that the dark blue text used in the portions of the site (as it was set up in the templates) should be plain black. I had to go through and manually edit all 60 of these pages to make the change. I spent a couple of hours Tuesday simply un-doing what I’d done.

So, Wednesday morning, I gave him my spiel on CSS again. I promised him my CSS would be very simple… nothing more than fonts and colors, which is supported by between 97% and 99% of the user population (any browser version 4 and higher, basically. Version 4 browsers came out many years ago). When I explained why I wanted this so bad, he conceded. I spent the morning eliminating every <font> tag in every template and every page I’d done so far, and then spent a few minutes writing a CSS that did the exact same thing the tags had done, but was editable in seconds instead of hours. He loved it.

Then, he realized he didn’t like the button colors (which are mouseovers, which I don’t always like to begin with). In fact, he wanted the colors reversed (between the ‘rest’ and ‘mouseover’ states). This would have been easy, had the original designer used the same 10 buttons on every page. Unfortunately, she made copies of each button for every section (they look identical, but they are named individually, which means the computer doesn’t know they’re the same). Which meant the end user wasn’t downloading 10 buttons, they were downloading 100. I narrowed it back down to 10 buttons, hacked her templates, and updated the site.

Then, I realized she’d made the buttons editable regions. Which means, for those of you who’ve never used Dreamweaver templates before, that the changes I make to the templates (in this case, the buttons) don’t affect the editable regions of the completed pages. I was going to have to edit 60 pages of buttons.

Then (heh), Dwight decided, and I’m proud of him for doing so, that designing for 640×480 resolutions is somewhat ridiculous. He decided he wanted 800×600 pages. So you know what I did? I scrapped the designers templates entirely, stole her background image, a few of her buttons, a few of her design choices (mostly cause Dwight had already approved them), and started over with a clean slate. So as far as I’m concerned (and as Dwight is concerned, because I asked him yesterday), I’m basically the site designer now. Just not the graphic designer. So when this is all said and done in a few weeks, I’m going to include the Sociology site in a portfolio of work I’ve done. Hell, if it comes down to it, I know how to create rollover buttons and I understand the Photoshop technique she used to create the background image (though it took some thinking on my part… it’s a pretty background and it gave me some good ideas), so I could create my own in an afternoon. It would just save me time not to.

You have any idea how much money the department could have saved if they had just trusted me to create the initial design templates? :) They basically paid some graphic designer a bunch of money to come up with a concept (which ~another~ designer had already done, since they based the website design on some brochures the Soc department had created a year ago), and now they’re going to pay me $8.75 an hour to make that concept a reality.

Really, I’m just angry because now I’m going to take credit for a design that isn’t 100% mine (though it IS 95% or so mine), and I feel a little guilty for doing so. Silly ethics.

Anyway. Back to work with me.

De scores have been tallied and de grades for the semester have been posted. There’s now nothing you and I can do about it. :)

My grades are as follows:

Now granted, I just woke up an hour or so ago, but I’m fairly certain this averages out to an A-. *g* Of course, I think a couple of my professors were nicer to me than they were required to have been. I don’t think my Grammar teacher, for instance, deducted all that many points for my absences, although her syllabus stated she would. Same goes for my French class, actually, though I only missed it once or twice more than is explicitly allowed. Ah, well. I guess personality figures into grades somewhere, even if it isn’t supposed to. I’m not gonna complain. :)

I’m happy to report that this semester’s GPA (3.67) was enough to push my cumulative GPA over the 3.0 mark: I now have a 3.01! That’s up .09 from last semester, up .31 from a year ago, up 1.25 from two years ago, and up a whopping 1.82 from three years ago. :) As I earn more credits and the denominator grows (I’m up to 107 of my 130ish final credits), the number of decimal places I can jump shrinks, but at least I made it over the 3.0 mark. I think I qualify for a reduction in car insurance, now. *g*