robglazebrook.com

Right now, I’m testing a new tool I just downloaded called blogBuddy. I’ve decided not to be biased by the name and actually give it a chance. :)

The cool part about this is, if it works, that means that the XML-RPC interface is properly installed. I’m not entirely sure what that means either, but I ~do~ know that it means there’s a chance I can figure out some nice tools for updating my weblog via my PDA, and so forth, and so on.

In other news, I sign up for my last semester of classes tomorrow morning. After this semester, I have five credits left before I graduate. Five stinkin’ credits. Wow. :) I plan to take a total of twelve or thirteen, I think. I have one required class left, which will probably be fairly tough. Then, I’m retaking two classes I did poorly in (to help boost my GPA). That leaves one class left, which I’m thinking will be some fun little Psych class or something. And then maybe Badmitton. Cause, hey… I’m a Senior, damnit.

In other other news, remember that phone, the LG VX6000, I whined about wanting a couple of weeks back? My friend Justin has one now. He’s not my friend anymore. Though he did let me play with it at the party we went to Saturday night, so that’s cool. He let me take pictures with it and everything. The GUI is totally counter-intuitive but very pretty, so it’s a little give and take. I still want one.

Yano, after I’ve typed this much, I really hope my XML-RPC thinger works. If not, I’ll probably copy and paste all this text into Movable Type with a big long preamble bitching about my host’s poor support of Perl modules. The funniest part is, I just sent them an email asking if I could get some help installing some of these modules. Then and only then, I decided to test to see if any of them worked already. :)

I must be in a web design mood again. The signs are all there: I’m making time to write here when otherwise I’d do homework, I’m visiting the css Zen Garden daily (they’ve updated again… check it out) and getting jealous every time, and I’m also doing web design. Go figure, eh?

Megan’s website was the victim yesterday. She’d asked me to redesign her site a while back, but I’d been putting it off, as much out of time constraints as a lack of inspiration. She knew she wanted “music-type stuff.” That’s not as helpful as you’d think. *g*

Yesterday, however, I was inspired. I sat down at the computer at 10am, and by the time Megan got home from work around 3pm, her site was nearly completed. I got her approval on most of the stuff, a few suggestions on a couple of things, tweaked it a bit, and now it is as you see it. If you haven’t seen it, check it out.

In case you never saw the ‘before’ version, or can’t remember what it looked like, here’s a screenshot (as almost always, click to enlarge):

It wasn’t a bad design, per se. It just wasn’t great. The colors were a little vivid, the boxes were a little clunky, and it lacked a lot of personality. Mostly because it’s a minimal variation on one of the stock Blogger templates. And it was all basic CSS and crude tables.

Here’s what it looks like now:

I think it’s an improvement. The colors are more subtle and easier on the eyes, the boxes, through shadows and backgrounds, are softer, and the page looks a whole lot more “Megan.” It’s also structured with divs and styled entirely with CSS, which turned out to be a helluva challenge.

The layout still has one big flaw in just about every browser but IE: the menu background only extends to the bottom of the screen. If you scroll down, it’s gone. I’m considering this a flaw in the design of the other browsers, though I’m still trying to figure out a work-around. The menu, which is contained inside a div spanning the entire length of the site, is set to have a height of 100%. IE makes the menu 100% of the containing block, and the background stretches accordingly. Everything else stretches the background to 100% of the screen, which is quite different.

You know what? Forget what I just said. I just had a minor revelation. I’m using absolute positioning to get the menu where I want it, which takes it out of its containing box. A height of 100% would be 100% of the screen. This background might be working through a flaw in IE. Funny stuff. :) I’ll let you know if I figure out a better way of doing it. Floats weren’t working well earlier, but maybe I can make them work.

Sometimes, the thought of using tables for layout purposes is damn appealing. :)

Megan and I just got home from a party at her friend Jaqui’s place. It was a pretty good time, though there were half a dozen conversations going on at any given point that I simply could not participate in. The crowd was 95% Music majors. English majors are less friendly, but less afraid of drinks. *g* Music majors, it seems, are far better at trivia games. Though, I could just be a bad sample when it comes to English majors. There’s quite a few people in my poetry class that can pull names from their nether regions that I’ve never heard of, yet cause a good portion of the class to laugh. I find a wry smile fits those situations well. Sort of like, “Yeah, I get that, but I’m too cool to ~really~ laugh.” And all the while, inside, I’m thinking, “Shit! Was he some marauding general in the 15th century, or a pitcher for the Yankees, or some obscure songwriter or what?!” I just have a hard time remember names. And numbers. And I have no idea what that leaves me to remember. Verbs, I guess, and adjectives and adverbs and other non-nominal nouns. I guess I was destined to be an English major.

No one else has any comments on my new site skin? Nothing? Anyone? I checked, and it works great in Opera, as well, so most people shouldn’t have a problem checking it out and giving me feedback. Not that I’m hinting or anything. I’m far to evenly toasted to take the subtle route. I’m ~telling~. *g* Get to work.

Megan’s hinting that it’s time to go to bed. Since she has to get up for work in *checks clock* three hours and twenty minutes, I suppose she has some sort of say in the matter. Have a good night, all.

Remember that summer-themed skin I mentioned a while back… like seven hours ago? I took a look at it when I got home from work and after I’d had something to eat, and realized I didn’t have all that much left to do. I had a couple of decisions to make about the menu navigation, a few pixel-precision changes to make here and there… but largely, it was done. So I spent a couple hours hacking away at it and got it far enough along that I was willing to upload it and share it with you-all.

I present to you: Summertime Blue.

That’s the working title, at least. Suggest a better title if you’re linguistically inclined. Check out the skin one way or the other. :) Click the above link, or use the link under “Select a Skin.” I’ve tested it in IE6 and Mozilla Firebird .7, and that’s all I’m really concerned about at this point. *g*

I’ll probably tweak a few things here and there over the weekend, but the basic framework is in place and is behaving itself quite nicely. And it looks nice, too, at least in my humble opinion. It’s my new favorite.

Alright, it’s time for bed. I’ve been awake for far too many consecutive hours on far too little sleep. If I don’t get a chance to say it, have a good Friday.

Went to bed fairly late last night, slept horribly, and was up again with Megan at 4:50 this morning. Well, shortly after Megan. I fell asleep for a couple of minutes, but she came to check up on me. The good news is, I got enough of my homework done to satisfy my teachers. My 4-page thingie came out particularly nice, in part because I printed it on 11″x17″ paper so it could be folded into a booklet.

I’m ~really~ hoping to get a chance to work on my website this weekend. I’ve been in the mood for some changes for a few months now, and just plain haven’t had the time. I started a summer-themed skin for the site during the warm summer months, and it seems silly that it isn’t done yet come autumn. I’m hoping to finish that skin, upload it, and also make some bigger sidebar-related changes. What, I don’t know yet. But I’ll get it figured out sometime, hopefully, this weekend.

I have to leave work in a minute to catch the bus home. So I can run inside, wake Megan from the nap she’s almost definately taking, give her a kiss, and head off to work again. :)

Thanks for all the comments, by the way. Good readers. Way to play with your parts.