Posts Tagged meta talk
Not hard to say goodbye
For the better half of the last decade I’ve been in what now seems like an abusive relation - a relation I chose to have and uphold for about 7 years now. At the outset the relation was all I could hope for. The lack of change in the relations has however, over time, eaten away at its foundations and is now about to collapse. I’m leaving my hosting partner.
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Messing with it again
So I have now 19 minutes of battery life left on the laptop, and I’m just too lazy to get the power cord. And lazy I am, it’s a whole 6 feet away.
Anyway that’s not what this is about. I’ve been messing with the Theme of the site again. While I liked the HemingwayEx theme very much, there were just a few things that I could not live with. Particularly the fact that there were only two or so posts on the home page.
So I’ve put up a new theme for now. I haven’t found one that completely suits me yet so I guess that I’ll hack one together. Not today though. I only have 15 more minutes of battery life.
v3 Launched
8 hours after “Hello World” version 3 of the site is fully up and running. Most of the work went to re-organizing (tagging and categorizing) the posts once they were imported to WordPress. Everything else was a breeze. I have to hand it to the WordPress community. The tool has shown to be outstanding.
There is more work to be done, for sure, as the design does not completely meet the usage expectations I have and a little house cleaning still needs to take place. But for now I was happy enough with it to be able to go live. Do let me know if you have any thoughts on how the design is panning out.
Graph that site
Following a Flickr post from Splorp I got to look at a cool little tool which graphs out a website. It makes for some pretty pictures.
Holiday season skin
While we’re still paining over the X-mass cards I’ve managed to brush up this new skin for the holiday season. Built from the ground up with a few scraps and ideas found here and there it took 5 evenings to complete. The integration to the website only took a few hours which is no real surprise considering its all CSS. That reminds me, if you hate this skin you can change it on the fly with the StyleSwitcher.
If you think the interface is a little confusing you’re right. It was done in the hope that you would click here and there to explore the site some more - futile, I know. So with no further adue I present the
Badsoda 2003 winter skin.
Introspection - MetaSoda Revisited
Posted by Thomas in Reflexive blurbs, meta talk on August 27th, 2003
Paynter was recently heard to say:
I started blogging because I wanted to learn to write. “Write what you know,” Isaac Bashevis Singer told the creative writing undergrads worshipfully assembled at the University of Wisconsin 40 or 50 years ago. I took him at his word and shut up.
Leaving aside the obvious conflict between keeping a blog and shutting up, the words prompted me to go back and re-assess the existence of this particular blog. Poring over the posts since its inception, I realise that there was one attempt at explaining why this personal space exists: “To support my creative process”. On retrospect this sounds a little silly, even if it did provide a plan for the development for the site (in the technical sense). The purspose of this blog was thus defined as a medium in which to express my creative process around the medium itself. As Rory Blyth puts it:
Imagine this: You go to a newsstand and buy a copy of the New York Times (for example). This is the headline: NEW YORK TIMES ADJUSTS WHITESPACE
To this I say: No. Hell no. This will not be yet another blog of a blog. Caught by a sudden doubt regarding my objective setting and accomplishments in this blog (if any) I’ve resorted to re-visiting all the posts of the last year trying to categorise them as I go along. As I read over archives I noted the following:
- Many self-centered posts with little relevance for those who do not know me personally. This leads to the obvious question: Do the people I know actually read this mental masturbation?
- A number of short articles relating to web development, standards and IIS development. That’s my techie inclination
- A few attempts at humoristic or even realistic autobiographical stories.
- A whole slew of posts regarding the various trips I’ve taken and the pictures I’ve put up on the site.
So where does that leave this blog?
Going back to the opening quote I feel I should write about what I know, an opinion I’ve expressed before. Besides that, I feel that for blogging to stay fun for me it should stay raw, unedited, an opinion I share with David Winer. I may from time to time attempt something more erudite like Andrew Sullivan so masterfully does, but by and lagre this should stay simple. “Download thoughts directly to the machine” I wrote last year. Perhaps this is not so far from what I still feel.
As far as content goes, I think I’ve managed to get past the stage of blogging about this blog (expection taken of this particular post). I still need to weed out some of the navel-staring blab but otherwise I feel pretty comfortable with the whole thing.
Post Scriptum:
I hate it when you write a couple of paragraphs and then realise there’s no point to it! If you’ve read this far you might even agree. It just goes to show that a short attention span has its problems. Can’t seem to think everything through before starting to write.
We got style
I’ve just changed the main stylesheet of the site. You can still switch styles if you like the grey and somber one by clicking here.
Behind the scenes
In the past I’ve ranted much about what I should do with this site and even gone as far as providing a plan. I finally got around to part of this and have just uploaded a new structure for the graphic section. The content is now divided into 3 topics: illustration, photography and wallpaper. This should make things a bit less cumbersome.
Meanwhile I have also started working on a new skin and a some skinning scripts. If you want to have a little preview of what is to come visit this page.
MetaSoda
Posted by Thomas in Reflexive blurbs, meta talk on December 16th, 2002
I just realized the site’s content has not been updated in a while. This doesn’t mean nothing has been going on though, quite the contrary. I’ve been putting a lot of effort into the site as of late. Mostly this has been behind-the-scenes work though and therefore, even if it is to your benefit (but mostly mine), most of it remains unnoticed.
Since this site’s creation back in August 2002 many things have changed, including the purpose of the site. It started out with a grand idea: “download my brain to the web”. Nonsensical, I know. Meanwhile, I’ve come back to my senses and have chosen to dedicate this site to what I’m able to write and share my thoughts about. I’ve come to the conclusion that when it comes to maintaining your own website, it is best is not to fool yourself into thinking that you will be able (or willing) to do everything and anything. Stick to what you know, experiment if you must, but don’t go off on all the tangents which may catch your fancy.
So what is it that this site is all about? Where do my true interests lie (besides navel-staring)? When I take stock of what’s been most enjoyable about this site I have to say it has been the creation of it, not its maintenance. That’s also probably why it has, in its short lifespan, already gone through 2 entire redesigns. The initial layout was a pure DHTML job, the current one is a mixture of ASP, XML and CSS.
The creative process, be it in the graphic arts or putting together an elegant VBScript is what I enjoy doing. The feeling of accomplishment when you get to that “aah” point is what drives me. You could say my problem is short attention span; I get a buzz from the creation bit then get quickly bored when there’s nothing left to create.
The direction of this site has therefore to support my creative senses and my relative inability to focus for any significant length of time. Currently, the layout and most parts of the site are geared towards the mastery of text and layout. And although I think I’ve managed to have the site come across as a piece of – mostly – text, I must say I’m not satisfied with the layout that much. It just feels too texty – just as this post is getting too texty.
In order to get form here to there I will:
- Create a new meta section which deals exclusively with talking about the site and its inner workings – to satisfy my need to have the behind-the-scenes work noticed.
- Create a section which refences VBScript I’ve developed. In the hope that some other pood sod out there may find it of use.
- Clean up the graphic section to include more than just pictures. It will support Flash and other niceties.
- Next to all this, and to move away a bit from the texty feel. I’ll create a new skin for the whole thing.
Darned, did I just set myself goals? That sounds like actual work! Mediic….
Cross-browser coding woes
Posted by Thomas in Reflexive blurbs, lab, meta talk on November 25th, 2002
Late this afternoon I came across an undocumented bug in Netscape 6. As bugs go this was a pretty nasty one to track down. Sparing you the sordid details, it boils down to the way NS6 handles malformed HTML comment tags when using a Transitional Doctype definition.
Purists might say that if your code is malformed, you should expect it to fail in some manner or other. However, the rest of us coders have grown accustomed to some degree of leniancy when it comes to a browser’s interpretation of what is and what is not malformed.
If you look at the source of this site you will notice that all the pages use the Transitional DTD as seen below:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd”>
The malformed code in this particular instace was the following:
<!—- Begin DYNAMIC CONTENT 2.0 —->
Nothing terribly wrong with that right? Wrong At least as far as Netscape’s parsing engine under the Loose DTD is concerned. As it turns out, NS6 will consider this malformed because the number of “-” in the closing tag is larger than 3.
Lax coders beware of this one.