January
28
Before
After
This blog redesign is still a work in progress, my strategy has been to get something out there that is functional and then add onto it piece by piece until it’s perfect. I’d always noticed that the posts themselves were a little plain, but I just couldn’t find something that fit the style. I thought it would be cool to have a sort of Apple-ish calendar poking out of the top of every blog post…. so that’s what I made. Doing these little things is a good way to keep my design skills fresh in between actual paying design jobs. Which are few and far between.
On the code side it’s not that much of a change, just added a fee floated divs here and there and a couple lines to the CSS file. I’ve pushed this template so far that I’m begining to think I should make an actual theme out of it and submit it to Wordpress.
Maybe I’ll get there eventually, but it’s not perfect yet.
No commentsOctober
16
I’ve been thinking about this blog more and more this week. I’m helping my friend Sean redesign his layout and move to a new server. It will eventually be on SeanWelker.com/blog but for testing im hosting it on welker.swalrus.org Modifying the theme is a little more tricky than I would like, but I’m coming along with it. It’s going to be a simple design but very tightly designed. It makes me want to redesign this theme… and I probably will in the near future.
It also makes me rethink having two blogs. mark5four0.swalrus.org was supposed to be some kind of middle ground where I could dump anything that I was working on and not be afraid to show it. I was trying to keep some distance between my professional side, my personal side, and my artistic side. What I’ve realized is that no matter what I’m only one person. If I put Mark Schumaker in the meta tags of all the pages, I’m really not separating anything. So I might as well just put all my blogging and art in one place and have a portfolio site in another. So I’m shutting down that blog and bringing all the content over here.
I’m still keeping MarkSchumaker.com… because everyone should own their name.
No commentsJuly
18
It looks so good. But looks can be deceiving. The upgrade hosed my catergories, all of them are now blank. Really it’s not that big of a deal, I’ve been wanting to get rid of a few of them anyway. I’ll just use this as an opportunity to fix my catergory system and maybe add a few meta tags while I’m at it.
Later!
No commentsSeptember
21
I figured out how to upload pictures directly to this blog… it was in a box 2 inches below where I type the blogs in… and I design web pages for a living. Oh well, it’s working now, so I think I’ll spice the place up a little with some camera phone pics of whatever I’m talking about. Could be fun.
In the same vein, I’ve also decided to use the “notes” feature on the 8125 to get down all the little tidbits of blog comments that I think of. When I’m on the Metro I constantly think of little things to say. But I never have the time to get them up on the blog, not that it really matters because nobody reads this thing. But it would be nice to get the old ideas out of my head (to make room for new ones). I’m pretty sure I can only have like 30 things going on in my head at the same time, that includes appointments, projects, upcoming birthdays.
Today on the way home I’ll try to set up the mo-blog again. I had it working on the Treo but it was never a smooth system. With windows mobile I’m hoping I can just call up this page and log in like normal. Should be a pretty smooth process.
Later!
No commentsMarch
23
as of a few seconds ago there were 256 posts on this site. This making it 257. My first post was from December 2004 a long time ago in a small office in Arlington. The old blog has come a long way since then.
Two hundred fifty-six is also:
* The number of characters in the new Braille 8-dot system.
* The number of different values in one byte, which makes it the typical number of different values in each color channel of a digital color image (see color space encoding).
* The year AD 256 and 256 BC.
* The Split-Screen Level in Pacman
* The number of counties in Texas.
* The number of characters in Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita.
* An area code in Alabama.
* The number of regular season football games in the NFL.
* The frequency of Middle C on a piano in hertz.
Later!
Mark
January
24
New year, New Friends, New Blog!
All that’s left is to get the gallery back up and functioning and this thing will be ready to go. I was thinking of moving the site to a better URL, Hopefully that just means linking the other wordpress installation to the same database. But I really just want to get back to writing, I feel better when I write down the things I think of. But it’s late now and I have to make up sleep that I missed last night.
See you around, Internet!
No commentsJanuary
15
So I’m moving the blog. For technical reasons this website has much better hosting and Wordpress has much more to offer than Blosxom. It’s not like Bloxsom is a bad program, I just think that it’s development has stalled and It’s too hard to configure. This one should be easier to work with and it’s database driven so searching is much easier. I’m still trying to get all the plugins to work and I don’t feel like messing with perl scripts anymore so I’m copying the old entries one by one and changing the dates, which should take a while. But I think it’s worth it.
*UPDATE*
I finally finished!
No commentsDecember
30
I need to keep up the blogging. For my own sake, because who would actually read this.
No commentsDecember
21
Not much looks like it has changed on this page, but that really isn’t true. I wanted to be able to change the CSS styles dynamically so I used the Bloxsom plugin blosxcss. It allows the user to change to the flavor that they want to. But while I was researching this I discovered CSS Zen Garden this is a site dedicated to using css to its full potential. It is really amazing how different they can make the same exact HTML page look. After that I looked at my HTML code and realized that it was not ready for any css flavor changing. I went into it and added nested div statements so that i could change the look of the page. I then went into my css file and added those divs so I could use them. So anyway hours later… I had it looking the same as when I started… but it is different underneath. So then i needed another css file. I created the “splattered” flavor in about an hour. I really like the title image and I think I will continue to modify it. These two are layed out exactly the same but it dosent have to be. I will be continuing to work with these and adding more. Just click on the one you like in the left menu and the whole site will change to that flavor.
ps…I just tested the plugin, it works in all browsers except Opera… but who cares?
