My Little Corner of the Net

Bowling for Soup

Written by Kodiak on 03/08/2005 — Leave a Comment

Have you ever loved a song you’ve heard on the radio for no apparent reason? That’s the way I feel right now for Bowling for Soup’s 1985. I have no idea why I like the song so much, other than the fact that it has a good beat and catchy lyrics. I suppose I can relate to it to some degree, although I was only eight years old in 1985 and, while I still like listening to some 80’s music now, I don’t think that I’m stuck in the 80’s. I don’t drive a yellow SUV, either (although I do drive a black version of the SUV that got the yellow SUV craze started).

The song has a cool video, too complete with parodies of 80’s icons Robert Palmer, George Michael, and Poison (who were they again?). I can’t figure out why I’m so hooked on this song! I like it so much I even cashed in a Pepsi iTunes credit to get it.

Maybe I should go seek professional help…

Posted in Cool, General, Weird

TRBL">Cascading Stylesheets: Keeping out of TRBL

Written by Kodiak on 03/01/2005 — Leave a Comment

If you’re a web developer, you probably started using Cascading Stylesheets a long time ago. If you haven’t, go get yourself a copy of one of Eric Meyer’s books (1, 2, 3, 4) and learn about them. They will make your HTML cleaner, make your pages smaller (so they load faster), and make your sites easier to maintain and update.

OK, now I’ll step down off my soapbox and get back to my original message.

One of the features of CSS is that you can often condense multiple statements into a single statement via shortcuts. To control the margins of a block element on your page you could specify each edge, which is easy to follow and pretty clean, but it takes four lines of code just to control a few pixels of space:

#someblockelement {
margin-top: 5px;
margin-right: 2px;
margin-bottom: 5px;
margin-left: 2px;
}

If you set a lot of elements’ margins (or padding, or …) this could add up to several hundred kilobytes of data. Therefore, the creators of the CSS specification came up with a shortcut:

#someblockelement {
margin: 5px 2px 5px 2px;
}

This is much more compact, but what does it mean? If you have no CSS experience, that line is meaningless. Even though I should know that they are set in a clockwise order, I could never remember which number went with which edge until now. Today, while helping a colleague figure out some CSS code, I had to go to my favorite CSS reference site to figure this out. Reading the description on the site I said aloud “top, right, bottom, left—T, R, B, L—trouble!”

I’ll never forget the order of these sides in a CSS definition again, and now neither will you.

Posted in General

Congrats Pats

Written by Kodiak on 02/07/2005 — Leave a Comment

This is definitely the year for Boston with back-to-back Super Bowl wins for the Patriots and a much-deserved World Series for the Sox. Even the Celtics are leading their division (and they only have a 50% average—pathetic!), and the Bruins have yet to lose a game (granted, no other NHL team has either).

I spent the night at Jerry’s place, eating way too much food—including some great BBQ ribs. Of course, just about every time the Pats scored I was either talking to somebody or not looking at a TV, so I missed most of the action. But I’m still happy about the outcome.

As for the commercials, there were several good ones, which I’ll probably post about later. My vote for worse commercial of the night, however, goes to a local law firm’s Asian village. I’m not Asian, but if I was I’d have been offended and my sentiment was shared by the rest of the party guests in the room. I’ll have to watch the local media to see if the community reacts at all.

Posted in Current Events, Massachusetts, Rochester, Sports

Transition Complete: WordPress is Operational

Written by Kodiak on 02/05/2005 — Leave a Comment

Well, its is finally done: the transition to WordPress is complete. Getting WordPress installed and running on my test site was a snap, and moving the posts was easy (since I only had about 20 of them to move, I basically just copied from phpMyAdmin and pased into WordPress). The most difficult part by far was getting my WordPress site to look like my original.

To make it “easy” for developers to build WordPress-powered sites, the WordPress team implemented a bunch of PHP functions to add specific items to a page. For example, to insert a post’s title, you’d just insert
< ?php the_title(); ?>
into your page and at runtime WordPress would replace that with the title of a post. Unfortunately, my original site was built to utilize PHP Application Tools’ patTemplate. patTemplate allows you to totally separate page design from backend code, but with the way the WordPress functions work, the two tools don’t play nice together. I could have hacked the hell out of WordPress to get what I wanted, but I’m not ready for that yet and I wanted to get the site running sooner rather than later. So I ended up reworking the template files into a format that WordPress liked and I’m finally happy with the result.

That minor setup headache aside, I think I’m going to like running WordPress. First, the posting interface is 110 times better than the one I had written before. Second, the bookmarklet that I’ve added to my browsers’ link bars will make it easy for me to make posts whenever I come across interesting things as I’m surfing (read: the site might get posted to more than twice a year now). Third, I have working comments features (so please post some!). I also like the ping features of WordPress–whenever I post something a ping about the post is sent to several blog directories, which in turn add links back to my post and hopefully will bring new visitors to my site. It seems nerdy, but posting has become strangly addictive now.

The next steps for the site are to improve on some of the CSS settngs and to build in my photo gallery. I plan to keep my digital camera on me more often now too, since lately I’ve been missing a lot of great “Kodak Moments,” and as I snap pictures, I’d like to share them with my fans. I also plan to redo the links page to pull links from WordPress (since it has very nice link management features) and update my personal info, adding my resume and whatnot.

So welcome to Kodiak’s Korner. I’m glad you found “my little place on the net.” Feel free to stay as long as you’d like and please come back often.

Posted in General, Site News

It\’s Not Every Day You Come Across Something From Belchertown

Written by Kodiak on 01/21/2005 — 1 Comment

I just went to the opening of Tom Barker’s Earth Images exhibit at our Dyer Arts Center. The exhibit was up yesterday, and though not officially open, I was browsing it with two colleagues. One of them mentioned that it would have been nice if the photographer had put up signs describing the images. A few minutes later I saw a picture of two old-school VW Bugs and I mentioned how my sister would have liked that picture.

Today I headed down to check out the exhibit again during its official opening and Barker had added the missing notes to the photos by the time I got there. I looked at the VW picture again and I was shocked to see the words “Belchertown, Mass” listed with it. Turns out Barker’s daughter lives in good old B’Town now (as does my sister). Strange.

Posted in Belchertown, General, Massachusetts, New York, RIT, Rochester
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