Yearly Archives: 2006

One Blog or Two?

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Hi everyone, Just a quick informal survey. When you read a blog, do you enjoy it covering two unrelated topics or would you rather see the author publish two blogs, one for each topic?

Specifically, what I’m thinking of is that my blog is pretty evenly divided right now between posts about web development and personal posts, and that will only get more noticeable once I’m posting baby photos all the time. Do you think I should spin it off into a work blog and a personal blog, or leave them rolled into one?

Everyone who is reading this, please take a quick second to comment with your preference.

Christmas Lights

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The Big Tree

Here’s a shot I snapped of the big Christmas Tree in Pioneer Square in downtown Portland. They ship this giant thing in on a flatbed truck, and then a crew of guys in cherry-pickers frankenstein it back together over the next few days. As you can see, when they get it done, it looks pretty sweet.

I posted this and a few other to a Christmas Lights 2006 photoset on flickr, which I plan to add to over the next week, especially when we go through Peacock lane, where they typically put on a good display. You might also like this photo of the lights at our house.

We’ve got cats who eat power cords, so I couldn’t put lights inside the windows, and I’m too lazy/incompetent to properly string lights outside. Because of this, I was pretty happy with myself when I figured out that I could string a red and green light bulb in the attic windows to get a nice effect.

Our Christmas Lights

Like the Wind Blowing Through a Pile of Skulls

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I actually couldn’t watch the “rap” all the way through the first three times I attempted to. Gabe had only caught about seven seconds of it when he began to bleed freely from the nose and mouth. Was this some haunted video, then, like the one in The Ring? Would I soon die? I have wished to; since I took in the vile width of this thing thoughts of my own death are the only salve. There is an especially demonic portion of the video – let us say thirty-one seconds from the hated beginning, which was the end of all pleasure on Earth. Their Godforsaken stooge begins to wave around a PSP faceplate he has printed out, but they have sped up the footage so that by thirty-six seconds in there can be no doubt: the man has been lobotomized. There is no man left. In the video, the meat continues to twitch, electrical accidents birthing grotesque jerks in the unknowing beef. It speaks! But it is not language. It is like the wind blowing through a pile of skulls.
– Tycho, from Penny Arcade, discussing Sony’s “viral” marketing video for the PSP

Redesign: Widescreen Holiday Edition

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Holiday Edition

Over the weekend, I upgraded the theme for Space Ninja. Firstly, I changed the header and footer color scheme and pattern for the holidays. I think it’s nice, and the little sprig of mistletoe over the logo cracks me up.

Secondly, I upgraded the site to “widescreen” format – which really just means that I’m targeting 1024px screen resolutions instead of 800px. Now that 95% of the viewing population is on the larger screen, I can upgrade to two sidebars, which is good, since it was getting pretty lengthy with just the one. Now the delicious links are near the top, but don’t interfere with the blog functionality like recent comments.

The other cool thing that widescreen format gives me is the ability to post larger photos. The previous design only let me post 450px wide photos, which causes problems for me, since flickr only offers photos at 500px and 250px. This new design is specifically formatted for 500px wide photos, which means that I should be able to post more photos in the future, and will make life easier once Zoe is born.

Speaking of Zoe, you’ll notice that there’s (still) no mention of her in the redesign. That’s coming soon, too. In the meantime, if you’re looking for baby information, head over to baby.spaceninja.com, where you’ll find my information program running. Annie’s convinced the math I’m using is faulty, so that will be revisited soon, as well as adding other content to the page.

Not many changes under the hood other than that, though. I did some minor cleanup in the markup and CSS, but left things largely intact, since this upgrade was focused on widescreen. I may revisit this at some point, though, and get the code a little neater.

If you’re using IE6, it probably looks horrible. I haven’t had a chance to test for it yet, since I’m running IE7 at home, and haven’t installed the VirtualPC image yet. Sometime in the next week or two, I’ll get IE6 compatibility working, but in the meantime, I’ll just encourage you to check out the site in Firefox or IE7.

Bulletproof Web Design: One Paragraph Review

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Bulletproof Web Design by Dan CedarholmHaving already written a book introducing readers to the web standards movement, Dan Cedarholm returns to cover more advanced material. While his first focused on markup and basic scenarios like grocery lists, this book focuses on CSS and accessibility. In particular, he explores how to let a web page flex around things like large font sizes or lengthy headlines without breaking – hence, bulletproof. While this material is all certainly all available online, this is a handy reference to some of the best practices and techniques that the gurus in the field have been using, and I would recommend it to anyone who feels like they understand the basics, but need a little boost to get to the next level. (If this book were a college course, it would be 300 level.)