Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Word count: 300

[Update 9/17] Seema gave it a shot and couldn’t find the Site Feed tab. I tried with my old Blogger account and had no luck either. So skip the instructions below and go straight to complaining to Blogger. Or get a real blog - the people from MovableType now host blogs at TypePad. All levels have RSS feeds (the XML Syndication in the TypePad feature table). [/update]

Now that BloggerPro features have been added to non-pro Blogger, you too can publish an RSS feed! All you need to do is follow these simple instructions at Blogger.com. I’d prefer it if you pick “full,” so I can read your whole entry in my RSS reader rather than just the summaries. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read the Blogger intro to site syndication.) If this doesn’t work, leave a comment but also bug the Blogger people. Even LJ has RSS feeds!

You should also link the RSS feed somewhere in your template, preferably using one of the cool buttons that are everywhere these days. Pick one out of the huge collection at gtmcknight (under feeds) or make your own with Kalsey’s button maker.

Word count: 167

I added several new tiles to the Tile Gallery in the Life section, and made a tile demo. The demo is the coolest part - if you click on any tile within the Tile Gallery, you’ll get a sample page with the tile tiled in the background. If you just open the demo page alone, you get a form asking for the URL of any image you want tiled. There’s also an option to add sample text on the demo page, and you can view the source.

A new Stargate drabble is up, Alien, in the Third Snakehead POV. I also posted my first link in Heliopolis, for This Worm a God.

Word count: 100

Instead of writing more than my daily drabble, I’ve been working on the site preference picker. So far it does everything - saves your preferences, displays your chosen style, etc., but only for the one demo page. Soon, though, it will work for all story pages.

Word count: 0 and counting

I wasn’t in the mood for Colony today so I made a new splash page based on the W3 tip about confetti menus. If you look at their stylesheet, you’ll see that’s it’s all done with margins. Unfortunately, I was having a lot of trouble with WinIE cutting the words in half (vertically) and both WinIE and MacIE mispositioning them (presumably by adding up the pixel values incorrectly), so I switched the whole thing to absolute positioning. Now it looks more or less the same in IE and in competent browsers.

The splash screen is pure CSS, using your system fonts. For example, if you have Final Frontier or the Stargate letter font, then Voyager and Stargate will show up in their respective font. Colors were picked from the color table of the background image for the main FicML page. I also added a dotted border as a hover effect. You can see the CSS at the bottom of my stylesheet, jp_tab.css.

Word count: 1025

I made a few changes to the preference picker to allow users to see the generated CSS code. You can also view the PHP source. Soon users will be able to save their preferences as well.

The color wheel is missing some colors, as I suspected. I’ll have to figure out the algorithm and fix it, but not today. Today I’ll just list a few cool links: NASA’s Flash Mars page, Destination: Mars; the latest cool designs at CSS Zen Garden, Entomology and Hedges; and a cool new, somewhat free landscape generator for the Mac, terragen. Check out the image gallery, especially Mars.

The 4096 Color Wheel is new and improved for Version 1.2 with a sidebar of clicked color choices and some basic instructions. It still needs a blurb about the 4096 web-smart colors, or at least a link to moreCrayons, home of The Cube.

The new image and a choice of wheel sizes will have to wait for later versions - I’m all geeked out tonight.

I’ve been looking for a nice 4096 color picker forever. Yesterday I found one by D10n, somone who is long 404, which was close to what I wanted. Unfortunately it didn’t work in Mozilla or Mac IE, which meant it was useless to me. After a lot of struggling with javascript events (for which mozilla.org and Experts Exchange were quite useful), I managed to get the script working in modern browsers.

I also changed the script to display both the nearest 4096-ed color and the true hex color. I may add added the nearest web-safe color as well. So, without further ado, click on over to the 4096 Color Wheel, Version 1.0 1.1.

Another improvement I intend to make is in the image quality and size. I’m going to make a full-color 512×512 pixel PNG to replace the rather compressed 256×256 JPG I got with the original script. eDev Cafe seems to have all the information I’ll need to do that.

For a note on web-safety of the 4096 colors, see Web Color’s 4096 Color Picker and screenshots.

Word cound: zippo

I know what happens next in my story, but I wasn’t excited enough about it to write today’s scene. Instead, I’ve been playing with Javascript color pickers like this one. It’s an antique, so it won’t work in modern browsers, but the concept seemed cool. As far as I can tell, though, it doesn’t actually show the 4096 colors - it shows either a different set of 4096, or more than the 4096.

Speaking of antique Javascript, the moreCrayons color cube was updated to work with Mozilla a while back, and they’ve linked Eric Meyer’s color blender in their blog.

I discovered a flaw in my clever scheme for handling the move-induced renumbering of my blog entries. Due to the oddity of MovableType search templates, my search results were formatted with pad=”1″, while my other blog templates don’t use padding. The upshot was that the search result links were broken.

The best solution for this sort of thing is to use individual entry archiving. I didn’t use them back at Freeshell because of their limit on the number of files per account. That’s no longer a problem here, so I’ve added individual archives with user-friendly file names, based on Anders Jacobsen’s instructions. Check out the permalink to see one in action.

This change will break yet more links, but I have a clever scheme to fix them…