Christmas and Computers
Well it has been an eventful few days. On Monday my computer completely died. It's been interesting not having on. I did finally get my laptop fixed. I had tried to install norton internet security and the avg kept erroring on uninstall so it broke the whole computer. Thankfully nothing important is on my laptop so I just reinstalled it. However when I do that it doesn't have the ethernet or wireless driver so I didn't get around to downloading all that until today. So my laptop is now functioning and I can keep up with my email and the likes with out bugging Shea.
It took three days to get the loan approved for my new computer. It's a dell, it's much better than what I had: Intel® Core™ 2 Quad Q8300 (4MB L2, 2.5GHz, 1333FSB), Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium, 64bit, English
It has 6G of RAM and a 500GB hard drive. I bought the latest version of Office with it and a 3 year warrenty. The only bad thing is that I won't get it till the middle of January. It really kinda sucks but I'll live.
Christmas was good. The girls made out like champs.
Kathleen and Samantha got a tent to share, a tinkerbell sleeping bag each, a princess dress up trunk from Grams T. Grandma and Grandpa got the girls a leapster 2, 1 game and a battery charger with 4 rechargable batteries, each. Santa gave them a buzz lightyear stuff toy and blanket, and a princess basketball, panties, m&ms, a toy story flash light and a little pet shop figure. I started a new tradition with the girls gifts from us. Something they need, "want", a game, read, and wear.
They needed more sheets for their bed so they both got a mickey sheet set. They got their "want" which isn't necessarily something they wanted but something I thought they'd like - Sammi got a large truck carrier with about 20 little cars inside it, Kathleen got some playdoh and a white board drawing and lettering set. They got the Elefun game to share (catching butterflies in a net). They each got a colloring/activity book to "read". And a red "christmas" tunic and legging set they can wear after christmas still.
They got from Shea's side of the family different things. Sammi got a talking truck she's afraid of because it moves by itself, some Barbi dvds, an outfit and a princess drawing book and a bath set. Kathleen got a dance video game to play on the tv, a simple "simon" game, an outfit and a bath set.
Mom and Dad also sent the girls a collection of books and coloring books that they love.
We also had the first of Kathleen's birthday parties. We had cake and icecream and she opened up some presents. She got a fairy popup tent, an arizona fleece sweat shirt, a tinkerbell blanket and some drawing books from us. She enjoyed it.
I got the new super mario brothers game for wii and Shea will probably be getting a smoker for christmas.
All in all we had a good day and I think everyone enjoyed opening presnets with both my parents and Shea's. It was a good day.
New Front Page
I've always struggled with what to put at my root domain. Mainly because some hosting providers don't really let wordpress work on a base domain, typically ones that don't use cpanel for their subdomains. One of my prior hosts used frames to do subdomains which was really annoying so if you enabled it then you couldn't do anything really with the root cause it was basically just a redirect portal.
Lunarpages lets me put wordpress in so I installed wordpress at my root and now have a life stream which can and will pull in all my online activity to it, as well as provide a landing page for me (and my "users") to use to go to various other sites located on my domain and other useful links I need regularly.
So now I have a working front page with useful information and the potential to do more. I'm thinking of adding in my WoW characters as there is a wow armory link that is really cool thus far. It is something I wanted to do as well. I might do that as well for Shea since he's been bugging me again about a webpage lol.
LJ take that :P
I love Google Reader. I mean LOVE it. It's been so awesome to keep track of my feeds and to do things, however it has one very bad drawback. It does not pick up Livejournal's friend locked posts, which is very bad when I have friends who only post within the locks. So I've been searching for a solution and I found one finally.
It's open source code that is the base of feed proxy, but LJ blocked it so it's no longer usable. But the same open source code can work from your own server.
Here's is the most awesome post lol. Follow the directions in the notes and you shouldn't have a problem.
Though please do note that it will take a while for the feed to propagate. I did one yesterday and I didn't get the feed until this morning. So let it sit and be watchful for it to show up if it doesn't then take a look at it. And the subdomain is required if you read the comments in the post so don't skip that step.
SO all you LJ friends out there, if you use your friend lock alot please let me know. Email me or post a comment and I'll grab your feed that way!
A post a day? – PSD to XHTML/CSS
It seems I'm going for a goal of a post a day on my blog, I doubt it will actually work, but we'll see. It really does depend on the weekends. During the week it's an easy feat just have to think up something to write about, we'll see if I can manage that this month. Maybe writing my fustrations down will help lol.
But anyway, I'm looking for PSDs to convert to HTML/CSS templates, more importantly to convert into functional wordpress designs. I have downloaded about 20 different PSDs to use as my learning base. This is actually what I love doing, so for a limited time ONLY I'm looking for other people's creations to create into wordpress designs they can use.
While I can theme wordpress with the best of them, I'm looking at this more from a development point of view. I have two goals in mind here. 1) to take the psd of someoneelse's creation and make it look like it's suppose in XHTML and CSS and 2) to create a customizable theme with al ot of features that do not require a plugin.
So for a limited time, like two weeks from today I'll take a stab at anyone who can send me a PSD to convert into a wordpress theme. This work is free, but because it is free I can't make any guarantees, this is a learning process and I may or may not finish it, or it may not come out quickly or exactly as you had intended.
Right or Left? How about both?
I was reading the article, Understanding your brain for better design - Left vs Right. I read the descriptions in order, right brain, and felt yep, that's me. Then I read the left and was confused, yep that's me too.
I took the first quiz in the article and scored 50%. I took the second quiz and I scored 51% left, 49% right. So does that 1% mean something? I have no clue.
But I guess that they both fit in their own ways. I don't like verbal instruction, though it's very helpful. When in college I never looked at my notes again, but if I didn't take them I didn't remember what was in the lecture. The physical act of writing it down helped. I find it very difficult for me to pick up completely new things and new concepts with out some sort of instruction and the doing afterwards. Reading a book with out assignments really doesn't work for me. I need hands on or I won't remember it. That's probably why I do so well with my web projects, I continually have hands on time with them.
I also consider myself a programmer more than a designer. I see the code but I know what it's suppose to look like. I do mostly design work, but I'm always thinking how will I code this. I can code a page with out first doing it in photoshop if I've a general idea of how I want to do the layout, however graphics are my down side I am continually trying to improve that aspect. I work on whatever graphics I can and try to insure I learn new techniques all the time.
I don't know if any of this makes me left or right brained, I'm not sure how it can help me really. But it was interesting. I learn as I know what works best for me. I design and code how it works best for me. I know no other way.
New Theme Up
I've got most of the new theme up and running and I'm thinking about making it publically available with some theme options, but that's not priority. I'll deal with that a bit later I've some learning to do in the back end,it should be fun.
New Theme Coming Soon
I still have some tweaking to do on the New Theme but here is a static preview of it. It has to be converted to wordpress. It requires javascript to function fully but at this time I think it's pretty well functioning with out javascript.
Always welcome with comments.
Feed Switched
I have switched my feed to feedburner. You shouldn't have seen any difference. Hopefully all current subscribers aren't having any issues.
Mediawiki vs WordPress
I love WordPress. I like Mediawiki but it has it's downsides, most importantly is the update process. Because I don't have command line access to my server updating mediawiki is a royal pain in the butt. Basically it requires me to reinstall the wiki through the install process and then return the localsettings back to the way there were before hand. While not overly complicated it does make updating mediawiki more complicated than I like. It also provides one very big draw back for me, transferring sites must be done via a database dump and that doesn't always work so well for me when I have to reupload the sql dump. Not something that isn't a problem with other softwares but putting things into retrospec WordPress makes it so much easier.
But WordPress doesn't make for a good wiki by itself. Linking pages is annoying as you have to type in the url code, and if a page doesn't exist it'll just go no where. In comes the plugins. Such an awesome thing is the invention of plugins. I can modify my wordpress to make the wiki links in one easy step similar to mediawiki thanks to Wiki Page Links. I also found a plugin for foot notes (FD Footnotes) that doesn't interfer with the wiki pages.
With these two plugins I can now make wordpress a decent wiki like documentation system. The one thing that I like about mediawiki that I've yet to get on wordpress is the table of contents jumps for pages. But that really isn't something that is overly important as I can do that in code anyway. But right now I've got a good start to making my world building project public in wordpress. yay!
A fun and interesting project
I've been working at a role playing site for many years (Dragonmount). I've had various different positions and various different jobs from it. But right now the biggest thing that it's missing is a role playing character database linked into their message boards.
Once upon a time Dragonmount had a message board system tailored to the idea of multiple characters. It was a custom built message board using asp. It got old quickly and the server we were on floundered under the load, so after many changes Dragonmount had some issues and abandoned the message boards.
Dragonmount doesn't have any different character logins and the chances of it happening again are pretty slim, as the format of Dragonmount has changed dramatically over the 11 years of its existence. But in the general vein that a character database linked into the message board system I've started working on a plugin for MyBB.
Unlike many of the other message board systems out there, MyBB has a plugin system. What this means in layman terms? Basically I can add function and features to the message board with out having to rewrite the core files. So you say? Well when you change core files you have to manually update when there is a patch to the system. And as all web software there is almost a gaurantee that there will be a patch you would have to do that to. With MyBB you don't have to worry about it. All the modifications are contained in new files and thus will not be overwritten unless the changes to the core files happen to add the exact same file name to the new system. So all in all I can make a pretty massive change to the message board system and not have to worry about losing or having to majorly work around them when there are security fixes and the like.
I love MyBB for this very reason. But back to the project.
Back in the day when there were different character logins at Dragonmount each post you made you had the choice to use which ever character you wanted. This is one of the main features of the plugin I am working on. In addition to this is the ability to create a character biography that is linked to the character. Thusly maintaining a character database.
This is a pretty massive project and I'm learning a lot about how to make a plugin for MyBB. Currently I have working on my local copy the Create a Character function and the Public Character Listing. There is still a massive amount of things to do. I'm currently working on trying to get the approval link on the Public Character Listing to only show up for those people who are in the right user groups. Not really an issue, just currently were I stopped before writing this post.
I could really make this an elaborate project, but this is a simplified version of my "perfect" play by post message board system. My way is not the "perfect" way for everyone it's just my vision of what I think is needed for a role playing game like this. Its not even a plugin yet, right now I'm just modifying the system manually, I'll make a plugin later after all the functions are working so I'm not troubleshooting the functionality with the plugin issues of setting up the files appropriately.
It's fun and I enjoy the time I spend on it. It's a good programming project for me and it helps me understand MyBB's underlying system.