The rose is gone until I can figure out another really bizarre IE quirk. For whatever reason, the text of each entry got 2 pixels wider (one on each side) as they went down the page, without the container borders getting wider. By the fourth or fifth entry, the text was on top of the border, making it hard to read. So I reverted to the ugly old blue skin until I can figure out what’s up.
Archive for the 'Meta' Category
As is obviously the case, there’s a new look to the site. After I made the lighthouse skin for BarneyBlog, Heather desperately wanted a prettier look for this site. So I threw this one together, complete with a sprig of heather, just for kicks. To get the look I wanted, I needed to make use of the alpha transparency that only PNG images provide. That means MSIE users will not get the full effect, because Microsoft decided to not support that features for whatever reason. Any other modern browser (released in the last few years), will render them properly.
I finally took the time to create an extensible layout/skinning mechanism for the site. In simpler terms, that means I can now change the way the site is presented simply by switching out a CSS stylesheet. In plain English, the sites look and feel can now be changed by flipping a single switch. It’s not set up right now, but in the future that switch will reside right here, so you can select the skin you want to see yourself, rather than being stuck with what I select.
Right now, little has changed. However, now that the framework is in place, I’ll be able to make new, prettier skins for the site and transparently switch them in and out, just like I did to BarneyBlog this evening.
Following Simeon’s lead, I set up a primitive webcam on Heather’s computer. It only displays single frames, but they are set to reload every second to give the appearance of video, without the hassles of actual streaming video. Obviously it’ll only work when the computer is on, and even if it’s on, it’ll be pretty boring unless someone’s there. If you want to arrange a Lindsay Viewing, shoot Heather an email.
Comcast finally got it’s rear in gear, and is hooking up our cable internet on tuesday, so we’ll finally be able to connect from home. That will make it significantly easier to post pictures, and will probably result in Heather adding random bits on there more frequently. It’ll also let her be a little more responsive with the email. ; )
As the initial hubub died down regarding Lindsay, I realized that there is probably going to be a lot of stuff I want to post on here that will not be of any interest to most people. I decided, therefore, to split the blog in two. The Boisvert Life will continue to be fo a personal-interest nature, while BarneyBlog will take over for all the technical stuff that will be interesting to a different audience.
I moved the Software section over to BarneyBlog, but left the galleries here, for obvious reasons. Hopefully this will keep things a little more organized, and not burden anyone with stuff they don’t want to read about.
Last night I did the first bit of refactoring of the non-blog pages of the site (namely the software pages) so they fit into the style of the site a little better. Since I don’t have internet access at the house, I had to do it all blind, without the luxury of even looking at the site while doing it, let alone having access to the layout templates that control it’s appearance. So it’s a little rough. I’ll get it more refined over the next little while.
I wanted to get some usage reporting for this site so I could give Paul (my boss) accurate reports of the bandwidth I’m using over time. He was very nice in letting my leech off the company’s bandwidth allotment, and while I’m not using much, I want to make sure I track what I do use. For those crazy people out there, I figured I’d publish the bandwidth graphs for all to see. The data is exposed using the SNMP daemon built into RedHat, which MRTG monitors and feeds the data into RRDTool. Finally, the pages and graphs are generated by 14all in realtime.
I found a pretty slick little tool named Galerie, which will generate web galleries from iPhoto albums. Unlike iPhoto, it uses external templates to control the generation. This allowed me to actually generate JSP pages, which then dynamically include layout files generated by MoveableType (the system driving this blog), and thus have consistent navigation throughout, whether MoveableType generated the given page or not.
I rebuilt all the galleries using this mechanism, and it looks good. I’ll undoubtedly refine the look a little, but that’s all CSS-driven, so I won’t even have to regenerate the pages.
After waiting for over 3 months to get barneyboisvert.com out of the mire that is domainzero/enom/bigfoot, I opted instead to just register a new domain: barneyb.com. That was the domain I’d originally wanted, but it was registered to some guy in Hong Kong, so I opted for barneyboisvert.com. But he didn’t renew, so I snapped it up.
The real meaning is that now you can access this site by just going to www.barneyb.com, rather than one of the longer, harder to remember URLs that I had to use before.