So I’ve decided to handle my desire for infinte colors and designs by making stylesheets, a la the old Mozilla start page. Complete instructions for live stylesheet swapping can be found at
A List Apart. I also
found a cool and geeky blog, Dive into Mark.
In honor of my new version of MoveableType, I though new templates
might be in order. In fact, I thought I might even be wild and crazy
and use web-unsafe colors. I’m a rebel.
Familiar I am, in the web-Jedi way, with the 216 web-safe colors,
meant to guarantee consistency across different monitors, operating
systems, and color depths. I know where to find the websafe colors
listed by value,
am intimately familiar with Visibone’s lovely
my time in their color
lab.
Rumor has it, there are only
truly safe colors. Although three of those colors are my
favorite sunshine-yellow spectrum, I cannot advocate such
extraordinary abstinence in web design.
Yet there comes a time in a webmistress’s life when #ffff00 just
doesn’t cut it anymore. Where does she go for illicit colors, for
the #a4b217 her mother warned her against? After asking a
few unsavory characters, I came across a page devoted to using
palette. Behold the
Mix and match your
poisons. Read a
Watch this space for a whiter shade of pale…
The minute, practically the second, I upgrade MoveableType, they come
out with a new version. Now I have to upgrade to 2.5, since I’m so
on top of things at the moment. Somehow, Bill of mt.el fame found my
post, despite it being only a day old, and freeshell being
down most of today. I haven’t even figured out this thready pinging
stuff yet, so that can’t be what led him here.
Anyway, for Bill’s information, I’m running Emacs for MacOS X, and I
built it from the CVS source just a few posts back. I assume that’s
why it didn’t have any packages installed. I’m not sure they’re all
that happy now that they are installed - emacs froze during my
“whoo-hoo” post last night. The post got through, but emacs never
returned to operation. Perhaps the problem was that I was re-editing
the post I’d just edited. Or perhaps the problem was the general
Carbon emacs problem with spawning subprocesses that I was hoping my
bleeding-edge emacs build would cure, but didn’t. Sigh.
That’s more geekiness than anyone wants to hear. I suppose I should
head over to the freeshell bulletin board and see what the downtime
was all about.
[P.S.] It was just a disk upgrade, and some good news: freeshell
is now tax-exempt.
[P.P.S] I almost forgot the Link of the Day:
into Accessibility, thirty days to HTML Correctness.
While surfing the blogs, I came across a
guy who wrote an Emacs interface for MoveableType. Just the thing for me, I thought; all my geekiness in one convenient elisp package…but it wasn’t exactly a convenient package. First I had to download SOAP for MT, so MT could communicate with metablogging tools. Then I had to download a laundry list of things that mt.el, the emacs mode, required: xml-rpc.el, the url package, the w3 package and the elib package. The author provided the first, but I had to check url and w3 directly out of source, and then it took me a while to figure out that yes, elib hasn’t been revised in seven years. (I was reluctant to download something from 1995.)
Nor was this post posted from emacs. When mt.el was finally working, I got an error back from MoveableType itself, saying it couldn’t find the metaWeblog perl module. I think that means that I can no longer put off upgrading to the latest version of MovableType. Wish me luck…
[P.S.] I upgraded to 2.21, though it looks the same as 2.0. There are new geeky things lurking beneath its placid blue exterior, though.
[P.P.S.] Testing from emacs…1..2..3…
[P.P.P.S.] Whoo-hoo! Now there’s an evening successfully
frittered away.
Due to technical difficulties beyond my control (antique phone lines), I
was unable to blog yesterday. I did collect some cool and geeky links, though.
If you don’t know already, you should be using
Mozilla, the coolest browser on earth,
open-source and
popup-proof.
(Popup-killing advice compliments of
blogzilla, the Mozilla blog.)
To brighten up your Mozilla, try my favorite mozilla skin,
Orbit,
available from DeskMod. For the
truly geeky, or just those who want an easy way to clean up the cache and
history files after a long day of not-working at work, try the
XULPlanet preferences
toolbar. Note the convenient popup-killing checkbox. (I’m not sure why
you’d ever want to allow popups, but the option is there. Or just
the cool reminder of the millions of popups you’ve slain just by using a
real browser.)
On the image processing side, I discovered to my dismay that
Spinwave is forcing you to register before using their on-line image crunchers
to shrink your web images. Fortunately, I found a new site for cutting those
pesky jpegs down to size:
jpeg wizard. Gifs don’t
tend to need as much shrinking, anyway.
While on the prowl for jpegs to shrink, I found a goldmine of totally-free,
public domain images paid for by Your Tax Dollars:
freestockphotos.com. Skip
down past the quasi-religious links to the government photo repositories.
You are 35% geek.
I’ve been thinking about style today, as well as playing with my wallpaper.
I found some nice 2-column css backwards-compatibility advice at
saila.com,
and went with the realworldstyle
approach for my current Sudden and Unexpected web site project. This is,
by the way, not what they pay me to do.
On the wallpaper end, I hit paydirt at
space.com
and decided on a lovely comet-armageddon design by
Greg Martin.
I found the truth about .gif
on the same site as Lori’s Lego link. I’m thinking covetous, copyright-violating thoughts
about his navbar, too. I wonder if I can do that with CSS…
Well, I’ve fixed the Netscape 4.x problem again. Moveable type wrote over my stylesheet last time, because I was trying to be sneaky and edit it on the server instead of through the MT interface. You can set up MT to work that way, but you can’t do it both ways. I wanted to have my cake and eat it too…
I’ve also finished going through my old Blogger entries to give them MT titles and categories. So now, if you look in the Quizzes category, you’ll see all the online quizzes I’ve ever blogged. And so forth. It wasn’t necessary, but it was geeky, so I did it.
There’s a killer thread going in ASC about contest suggestions, and I have more ideas about that alien transmitting messages to me through my molars (i.e., the muse), but for the moment I must keep up the illusion that I work here.
I’ve been wanting to get freeshell into my hosts file for a long time, so I wouldn’t have to type out the full dns name every time I wanted to telnet or ftp over there. Sometimes Mac isn’t quite Unix, and in this case, there was more to getting my mac to read a hosts file than I felt like figuring out until this morning. My mac came to work with me this morning (how about a Bring Your Macs To Work Day, to show the benighted WinWorld what they’re missing?), and I wanted to put the local fileserver in there too.
I found a likely looking link: Mac OS X Hosts Revisited, which taught me not only how to get the hosts file read, but also how to kill ads with it. Basically, it redirects all requests for ads to localhost. There are a lot of ad servers out there, so I’m still waiting for them all to be processed before I can test out my new ad-free mac.
I was up too late last night trying to figure out why my hits had gone down to about seven a day for the past two weeks. It couldn’t be that my hit counter wasn’t working at all, because I was getting that trickle of hits. So I thought, maybe those are the noscript hits, and the javascript referrer bit is broken - but I did get some referrers in my few hits - that wasn’t quite it. I tried the perl script directly; that was working fine. I tried the javascript alone and it wasn’t working, but I hadn’t edited it in months - certainly not on April 9th.
I tried moving the javascript to another directory and presto! I could see it again. The problem was clearly my cgi-bin directory. It must have cropped up when I added the .htaccess file for TWiki authentication. Trying to undo that without breaking twiki took me a while, but eventually I got it. Jemima is watching again…
I didn’t mention while blogging back to Lori that I did enjoy what I skimmed of the article by David Brin she’d linked - much more than I liked his Star Wars article she mentioned a while back. I find the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek is more space opera vs. hard scifi than the political differences he saw - not that he didn’t have a point there, but what’s unacceptable in real life is often exactly what we want out of literature.