I joined MySpace a while ago simply so I could see some friends’ profiles there. But I never felt the site was useful other than that, and the autoplaying embedded music on everyone’s profile pages and atrocious layout kept me from visiting it much.
So when I got a Facebook invite I ignored it — it was more of the same, right? But on forums I kept seeing people talk about how Facebook was pretty cool and saw a few times “it’s like MySpace but doesn’t suck”.
It’s true. You can’t make your profile look like garbage, there are no embedded music players, you register with your real name and the user interaction and groups are really well done.
So here’s my Facebook profile.
So what’s it good for? Well, you can create user groups for discussion and organization, and I did: Road Hockey Vancouver. If you’re interested in getting some regular road hockey games in the Vancouver/Burnaby area going on, join Facebook and join that group. I’m itching to play without having to drive for an hour.
Ok, I stole the title from Walter…
“The site” I’ve been working on these past few months has gone live today — it’s the official site for the Full Metal Alchemist Trading Card Game.
Holy Cow Design created and set up everything on the site — template, installation and modifcation of the CMS(Content Management System), additional plugin coding (including the cool card preview mouseover seen here — it’s Overlib, but we created the “mambot” that makes it incredibly easy to add to an entry). Coming soon to the site will be a Flash Game Demo, and the Store Locator module.
It’s a Blogging Survey. If you blog, help increase their sample size and do the survey.
I’ve been crunching HTML and PHP code the past ten days. I’ve got a new contract and the site layout is due soon, with a strong content management system in the background and a specific (and great) layout created by my main design man Walter. I’m in charge of the whole deal.
It’s been a while since I’ve jumped this in-depth into coding. I’m doing a lot of it by hand, which I haven’t done in a while, and it’s all coming back to me. The tricks and techniques involved in making the page appear the way you want it despite some troublesome (but cool!) layout choices are incredibly satisfying. Today I hit such a big breakthrough that I literally jumped out of my chair and did a series of pelvic thrusts while shouting “YEAH!”
I guess you had to be there to appreciate it.
The site is coming along great and I’m really proud of it. The work Walter and I have done in the recent past usually involves creating the templates and letting the in-house web programmers for the clients deal with it, but this time that programmer isn’t in-house — it’s me. I’m still annoyed at a few of the classless tables that the CMS(Content Management System) (Mambo) is spitting out, but I’m confident I can track them down and force a class to them. Was that too technical? Basically if a table has a “class” I can easily set up how it appears. If it’s just a “table” then it has nothing to distinguish it from any other table on the page and it’s hard to set its layout properties right.
Back to work!
My buddy Fahrv is getting married this summer and has set up his wedding blog at HolyFuckingMatrimony.com. He had asked me a while back if I’d do up a Wordpress design based on the artwork they had commissioned for their invitations and I of course said I would. If you visit the blog you’ll see the design. It’s based on Wordpress’ default “Kubrick” layout but with a lot of graphical changes and only a few tweaks to the CSS.
I mention it here not only because I’m proud of my work, but also because I like saying (and typing) Holy Fucking Matrimony.
If you can see this, you can see the content on my new virtual dedicated server. I’m going to try to do more web work this year and with this I’ll be able to offer stable hosting to any new clients I pick up.
As opposed to most “shared” servers, the new holycow.com is entirely mine and has no arbitrary limits on domains I can host here. What this means is that I can offer hosting for friends who want to get their own blogs with their own domain set up, and all they have to do is register their domain (I like GoDaddy.com because they’re cheap but good) and then drop me a bit of money to help cover the costs of the server (I’m thinking $50/year) and they’ll have their own server with full control, a nice amount of storage and more bandwidth that holycow.com in its entirety normally uses. I’ll also set up Wordpress for you so you don’t even have to figure out how to set up the blog.
If you’re a friend of mine and this interests you, drop me an email.
Those damned blog spammers have been at it again. I just deleted over 300 spams from Jess’ blog.
This seems to be happening to everyone running Wordpress. Some asshole has managed to get his trojan installed on hundreds of peoples’ computers (why aren’t you running anti-virus and anti-spyware software?!) and is using them all to auto-spam every blog he can find with Google (he’s searching for the comments-post page).
I’ve stopped the mass flood of spam coming through my blog by renaming that page and changing the reference in the blog software’s code so *it* knows where it is still, but the spammer doesn’t. Doing this has stopped the big wave of spam coming through but I still get a few that get through, probably being posted by an actual human being, though really if that’s your job I’m casting my vote for your removal you service-stealing jerkwad.
So I’ve installed Spam Karma which seems to be the thermonuclear bomb of anti-blog-spam plugins. I’ll give it a test run on here — supposedly if it finds a false-positive it will give you a chance to prove you’re not a spammer, so hopefully it doesn’t nuke anyone’s legitimate comments here. If it works out well enough I’ll remove the auto-moderation for comments containing more than two links and maybe this blog will become useful again. I’ll also install it on every friends’ blog that I can.
I’ve also added a live-preview for comments, so you can see what they’ll look like before you click “Say it!”. It requires javascript turned on, of course.
Yes, it’s 4:30 am. I was going to go to bed two hours ago. Look what spammers do to me!
Remember back in the old days when Yahoo didn’t suck? When I was helping out friends new to the Internet, I’d bookmark Yahoo and Google for them and tell them how to use both, but I’d always note “Use Yahoo first, because everything listed there had to be approved by a person, and it’s organized much better”.
That’s not true any more, and I’ve found out why.
I recently finished a site for Global Simulation, operators of North America’s largest mobile flight simulation ride, and of course they’d like to show up in online searches. So I took some time and submitted them to the main ones, and headed over to Yahoo. I clicked “Submit a site” and was told that if the site was commercial, a listing would cost $299 USD.
Yes, that’s right, $299 US Dollars for a link from Yahoo.
PER YEAR.
It’s insane, and it explains why nobody “yahoos” much any more. They’re driving away useful (but albeit commercial) links with that pricing structure, which therefore reduces the usefulness of their site, which makes it less worthwhile to pay to get a link on their site. The thinking behind it baffles me. But it’s no big deal. I simply won’t bother submitting that site, or any others.
Yahoo, you used to be cool.
I’ve added functionality for Gravatars in my comments.
What are they? Well, if you’d like to have an 80×80 icon beside your comments on this (or any other Gravatar-enabled blog!) go to Gravatar.com and sign up with the email you use on blogs, and after activating it you can upload your avatar there. Whenever you leave a comment here (with that email address) my blog will automaticall add your avatar beside the comment. Nifty, eh?
They’ll even rate it based on MPAA ratings so that blogs who, say, only want G-Rated avatars displayed can do so.
Me, I allow R and under. I’d rather not worry about people getting “goatse’d” while reading my comments, so I left the X-rating out.
To see my avatar, read my first comment in this post.
This is the basic blog layout that I’ve had planned for a long time. I’d wanted to do it with MovableType but their code layout was a real pain to work with. WordPress‘ CSS was much cleaner and easier to understand.
I still have to add my webcam and DHTML display code for it, and probably tweak a few things, but this is the way the site will look for a while.
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