Erstwhile Muse

Self Analysis

According to Google Analytics, which I've recently begun using to see just what sort of traffic I actually get on this site, the top four search queries that lead to my site are:

1. Scribus
2. beeblebrox's gambit
3. fucki
4. bitTorrent electro stim sex

I'm not even sure where that last one came from, as I'm fairly certain (after having recently reviewed almost all off my content here to get it properly tagged) that BitTorrent and the electic flyswatters have never been mentioned in the same post. I at least have a vague idea from whence the rest of them derived…

Labels: random, site design

Primitive Pixel Pushing

No, I'm not talking about MS Paint…

Lego Creator Mosaic as icon design tool

Sample 16 × 16 icon design using 1 × 1 Lego bricks as pixels. Note the second editing layer utilized for the blue dots (later dropped from the final design).

I'm talking about plastic bits as opposed to electronic ones. Lego bits in particular, as 1 × 1 bricks make a wonderful analog er, well…analogue for pixels. Why Lego (again) you ask?

It was really one of those lucky happenstances of the thought process. Last night I had been doing a bit of research into hosting a favicon for blogspot.com hosted Blogger sites. Normally all such sites show up with the default orange and white rounded B icon that's the Blogger trademark, but there's nothing inherent in the code to prevent you from linking to a more personalized icon somewhere else. Sadly, as I was reacquainted with last night, free web/file hosting is really a hideous morass of nightmarish sites with onerous terms of service involving what you can do, what you can't do and how much advertising and spam they are going to try and shove your way in the meantime. I gave up on that aspect and focused on the actual graphic design as I had not yet decided what exactly I should use as an iconic representation of the ol’ Muse.

Out I went looking for inspiration. I don't recall which site in particular triggered it, but I do remember seeing an example that was basically a reddish-orange exclamation point. Of course I says to myself, my old friend the Interrobang would be perfect! If only I weren't so *yawn* tired I'd…work on it right *zzz*…now. Rather than fall asleep at the keys, I gave into the temptation of a nice soft warm bed.

In a half awake state I stumbled towards bed thinking about how I'd go about creating the 16 × 16 image I'd need when the inspiration hit me—the Creator Mosaic kit! The standard Lego baseplate is a 32 × 32 stud configuration, smaller ones are often an even divisible of that, and the Mosaic set had a cool transparent one included. Lurching over to grab the baseplate and count up the studs, I found that yes indeed, it was a perfect icon designing workspace of 16 × 16 studs. Woot! I dumped out my containers of 1 × 1 bricks in a variety of colors and got to designing right there in bed. I probably should have fallen asleep, but inspiration had struck, and the muse must be heeded when she calls.

Now with Layers!

Pixel design with Lego bricks has definite benefits; no electricity is needed, it can be done anywhere you have space to dump out some 1 × 1 bricks, and it comes with the inherent layering ability (unlike Photoshop which lacked this ability until version 3). Depending on your inventory, a rather wider variety of colors is available than most people would initially think possible. This of course points out one of the obvious weaknesses of graphic design via Lego—your inventory can restrict your options. That is why the image above of my initial icon design is radically different in color from the final image (which should be live by the time this entry is posted). In my case this was little problem as I was more concerned with pixel placement than coloration, but I may have to use it as justification for purchasing the larger mosaic set since it contains a decent amount of both the orange and lime green(colors very similar to those used in my current site design) 1 × 1 bricks. Undo/Redo functions are also significantly more time consuming processes to engage in, but I guess that's the tradeoff for portability.

Having wasted valuable sleep time working out the design the night before, creating the icon in Snico Edit the next morning was fairly easy, but I was still no closer to implementing it on site for want of a hosting solution. Luckily my google-fu mojo had been somewhat refreshed by a bit of rest, and I happened across the article entitled Adding Favicon icon to Blogger URL. The title of the article is not particularly unique (although it is succinct and to the point), but it had a particularly valuable insight into hosting the icon image that made it a worthwhile find. In its ever expanding range of services, Google has added Google Page Creator to the Google Labs. In addition to allowing every Alice, Bob and Charlie to make a random web page about their pet parakeet or terribly mundane vaction, Page Creator allows you to upload files to Google's servers for use on such pages. It's also quite possible to utilize these files elsewhere, and since Blogger and Blogspot are also Google owned properties, I figure there's really no harm in doing so on this site.

Labels: Lego, site design

*pantpantpant*

Ok, I think I'm done adding tags to past posts for the moment. Hopefully that means the feed weirdness should clear up in a day or two, provided I posts a few more things fairly quickly.

Random Windows trivia: I just discovered that by holding down the Ctrl key while using the arrow keys to move the cursor jumps it by individual word units instead of single characters. Woo, tangent…

So what's the leading topic here on The Erstwhile Muse? Sadly it appears that my writing to date is a pastiche of postmodernism, as self referential posts to the site design match the number of posts marked as random, with music following close behind. Site design was poised to take the lead with this post before I discovered the word hopping trick above; for now they will remain locked in heated battle.

Labels: random, site design

Tag-O-Rama

And that's mine, and that's mine, and that's mine….

You'll have to forgive me, I've been enjoying a bit of Red Dwarf with Lee lately, so the concept of tagging is currently very tightly linked to a black man with a pompadour and a spray bottle in my mind.

As a further component of my recent drive to make changes and pursue more data about the actual usage of the site, I have started using the labels function of the Blogger engine (what would be called tags most other places, hence the British television references) to categorize my rambling monkey-typings. Now, there are certainly times when the labels used will make little sense to anyone by myself—most anything listed under girls will likely fall under this category—but it does mean I can offer the ability for people to browse the archives by topic instead of solely by date. You will find bright shiny new links in the right hand content menu specifically for this purpose, browse at you leisure should you feel so inclined.

There are some benefits and some oddities I have noticed in the process however. As I go back and label some of the older posts, they also are set up to accept comments as that is the default for new entries these days, saving me some effort on that front. The oddness arises from some arcane interaction between the new method of publication in Blogger and Feedburner, which is the service I use to provide my RSS feed. I suspect it has something to do with the way the Blogger servers ping the Feedburner server with updates, but I have no specific proof of this, nor do I really have the inclination to track any down; the practical side of the issue is simply that it appears that some older entries may show up at random intervals in my feed, at least until I am finished tagging everything. So those of you that are seeing things that you are sure you've read before creep into the little feed widget I recently added to my MySpace page—you're probably right.

Labels: site design

Super Comment Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!

In a fit of piquant boredom today between work and classes, I decided to have another go at setting up Blogger's comment system in a way that I could tolerate. Hence you will notice the new links at the bottom of new entries (and older ones as I go back and enable them). I may still make some minor design changes to the look and such, but for the most part I think I have it down mostly how I want them to work.

Some minor details should be noted:

1. The link listing a certain number of monkeys is connected to bit of javascript that hides or shows the comments as desired. By default, comments are hidden, but can be shown by clicking this link.
2. The following link takes you to the comment posting page. I have currently set up the comment system so that you do not need a Google accounts sign-in (although it's terribly easy to get one) to post comments, but please do me the favor of at least using the Other option and putting your name down. Regardless you will have to fill out the captcha form so as to cut down on possible comment spam.
3. I also have comment moderation turned on, so if you don't see a comment appear right away, it's because it's waiting on me to approve it. I'm doing this mostly as a further preventative measure against comment spam, and as a way to encourage people to put their names down.

Labels: site design

Grr,brain smash...!

or A spot of writers block ol' chum

I've been having some hellish writers block as of late, probably largely because what I want to write is the stuff I put up here, and what I need to write is for school, and sadly at the moment the twain doth not meet. After spending far too long this morning bashing my mind against the (quite shitty) keyboard in the computer lab trying to bang out the last bit of an assignment, I've decided I need to do something to clear a little of this blockage.

What this means for you dear reader is that I'm going to be going back today and hashing out a few of the stubs I've left lying about the page recently via my cell phone. Unless I have valid reason to do otherwise, I will most likely just amend the entry in the spot currently taken up by the emailed message, effectively retroactively adding new content.

Speaking of retroactive....

Bonus Links!

From the Desk of H. Peabody

I've also been mucking about with some ideas for typographic revision to the site here as a whole, and as part of that I went to the Wayback Machine to look up some of the old designs from back when I had my own domain name (which is currently redirecting to some strange Chinese site at the moment). Now you too can marvel at the craptasticness of its initial layout, and the marginally better curved box version (the copy of which is actually missing at least one or two image files). Actually, there are a few ideas in there I wouldn't mind revisiting in some form,now that I have a slightly better grasp on what the hell I'm doing here. Maybe someday soon, when I have a chance to work it out some more.

Labels: site design

Tweakin'

Just figured I'd drop a note here to alert folks of the changes I've made to the side bar content, as the some of them are rather subtle.

• Removed old Flickr Beta button from the Ubiquitous Buttons section and replaced it with the Random Photo widget which displays a random photo from those I have uploaded to Flickr.
• Removed the K-Meleon button from Ubiquitous Buttons. As much as I still appreciate K-Meleon for what it is, I don't really use it anymore.
• Added HTML entities to the Scary-Go-Round link to allow it to properly break at the hyphens at smaller display resolutions.

Labels: site design

Hey Google...

How 'bout you leave the fuck well enough alone already?

I guess a bit of explanation is in order to properly frame the above query to faceless corporations. The last post was supposed to have the subtitle Design/Dinner Lust du Jour. Most of you who have read this site before are well aware of my fascination with subtitling posts. What most of you were probably not familiar with was the design kludge I was using to do this, namely abusing the Link field in the Blogger post template to do my subtilted bidding. Now as is quite obvious from the name of it, the folks at Blogger back in the pre-Google days obviously intended this to be used as a way to post a main hyperlink related to a particular post, but it never required it to be in any particular form. Trying to hash out what the fuck was going on, I noticed the following line tacked on at the bottom of that help page:

You must specify a protocol when using the Link field, i.e. http://www.blogger.com — www.blogger.com isn't sufficient

Grr...great, so as part of Google switching everything over from static webpages on a server to dynamically created crap out of a database, some code monkey along the way decided that the link field would hereby force you to put things in a specific format.

Ahh, fuck it...seeing as how this post is likely the final nail in the coffin that is my chances of ever getting AdSense monies out of this site (not that that was something I was really concerned with anyways...), maybe it's time to go check out WordPress and see if maybe they can manage to not fuck up my site on a regular basis.

Labels: site design

Experimental overrun

Shoulda saw this coming...

Just a brief note to let folks know that I am removing my Gmail address from the site...my experiment in testing Gmail's spam filters has officially reached a point where I am annoyed by the amount of crap that slips through to Thunderbird. I'm not entirely sure how some of these spammers got it into their heads that my name is Pablo, but suffice to say it has ceased to be amusing.

I figure most folks who actually read this either have my Gmail address, or know how to get in contact with me via MySpace, et al. Speaking of which, I still have a metric asston of Gmail invites left over should anyone want one. It's actually a pretty handy webmail system when you don't leave the address out there in the open for spambots to harvest.

And yes, I know that I have been decidely slacking on this thing as of late...two months since the last (drunken) entry. Fear not (or perhaps, begin to fear, depending on your proclivities), the muse has begun to stir again as of late, I may become a bit more prolific in the near future. In the meantime, those of you with Gmail accounts can enjoy these handy instructions for setting up Thunderbird to check your Gmail account.

Labels: site design

The value of Pictures vs. Words

or <q>How Blogger let me cop out and get lazy again.</q>

Interesting...

Blogger keeps tweaking things and adding features, which is to be appreciated, especially in a free service. The latest is apparently free image hosting for Blogspot.com hosted blogs. I have yet to test it out, so I'm unsure of it's functionality as of yet, but it's definitely an interesting idea. And 300 megabytes of space is quite a healthy allowance for a completely free addition.

Hmm, I suppose the easiest thing to do would be to run a test then right? But what to test it with? I suppose I could try and outdo Andy's tagline, but no, let's not go there. No,on second thought, I know the perfect thing to append to posterity...

The Majestic Ballrus

Postscript:

So, after testing, this is the code that initially pops up using the Blogger Add Picture form:

Now, I'm not going to get into a terribly detailed breakdown about what all the above means, other than to point out the difference in the two addresses seen in the code. The first uri listed (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7898/374/1600/ballrus.jpg) is the image in it's original size, whereas the second one (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7898/374/320/ballrus.jpg) is the altered image displayed at whatever size is chosen in the upload form, in this case Medium, or 320x240 pixels.

The reason I bring all this up, as well as the subheading to this post, is that armed with this knowledge, it is now possible to have a site completely hosted on Blogspot.com's servers, and include images in the design of the site itself. Thus ends the era of text and CSS only designs, allowing me to get lazy again and fall back on imagery jiggery-pokery to make this an interesting looking site, as well as one that's interesting to read.

Ah well, it might be fun though to give it a try. Who knows what may come of it...

Labels: site design

Let's test this Flickr out

Ok, so I have had this Flickr account since June or something of last year, and have yet to really set it up for proper use with Blogger. I guess I'll do a bit of that today, so don't be surprised if entries disappear and reappear.

There, a quick test using some of the botany photos I took down at the Franklin Park Conservatory during Dan Monk's wedding ceremony. Now time to go tweak a few things, see if I can cut down some of the hand editing. I may put a few more up later, but not guaranteeing anything at this stage.

Labels: site design

Well, congratulations Blogger...

Way to fuck things up for the rest of us.

Well, in it's continuing attempts to pander to anyone and everyone, Blogger recently implemented a WYSIWYG editor into the main posting interface. My initial reaction was to cringe in horror. It's not like this shit is that hard to learn folks, but there's always the lazy assholes who can't be bothered to pick up the bare bones basics necessary to effectively convey a thought in the given medium, so we get shit like WYSIWYG editors and the crap they spew.

After my initial apopleptic fit of rage, I went over and read the articles that Blogger's main coder for this little project had written, just to see what the explanations were for forcing those of us with half a fucking brain to deal with the short bus interface. It was a decent little article explaining the reasons why they started the project (content before code) and some of it's benefits, such as increased standards compliance in the generated code. This is where they got me, I'll have to admit. I let the promise of standards compliant code override my niggling concern for a tacked on WYSIWYG editor.

Until I used it that is...

Or more correctly, until I tried to use it, at which point I became a fount of profanity. Apparently the default choice is for the posting page to come up in Compose mode—or Retard mode as I have been calling it for the past hour or so—with the older style of HTML editing available by selecting a tab. Not very fucking useful though when errors in the javascript running the whole thing produce no tab, and leaves the text area for posting unavailable. At this point I fire up the shitty ass backup browser that is Internet Explorer, just to see how things worked in that arena. Lo and behold, what should I see, but a perfect little interface all bedecked with tabs and buttons and other overwrought useless paraphenalia. I think you can all guess what my reaction was at this point...

It went a little something like this:

Fuckity fuck fuck fucking fuckholes!

Now even in IE the post editor comes up in Retard Mode by default, so I figure, what the hell, I'll try something on a wild hunch, just as an experiment. I click yon tab to switch it over to HTML editing mode, see that it looks vaguely reminiscent of the rather more useful Post Editor of yore, and promptly get the fuck out of IE before more brain cells die from association. That part of the experiment conducted, I fire good old K-Meleon back up, this time to a vague approximation of something useful. It appears that it's rendering some weird mongoloid bastard child of Retard Mode and the HTML editor, but at least I have a text area that functions, as well as the Draft and Publish buttons. God knows yet if the spell checker works, but I already know that Preview is fucked beyond belief—it wants to put everything back to strict Retard Mode, which is not, as I have mentioned, terribly useful or usable.

Gah....brain fucking hurty. Expect there to be elaboration on this topic once my goddam grey matter has stopped hemorrhaging from rage.

Labels: site design

Minor Changes

Ok, quick little post here to test a few things out here. The observant among you may have already noticed that I changed the description for this site to something a little more accurate. I'm also going to experiment with the whole commenting system that Blogger has going on here, so a few minor template changes will more than likely ensue in the near future.Well that was a quick abortive little attempt. I found out rather rapidly I do not like the way Blogger implements commenting, so I have removed it. That lasted all of five minutes...

Labels: site design

Kingboy.net is dead!

Long Live Kingboy.net!

So, being unemployed, I don't precisely put a high priority on paying for webhosting and domain name services at the moment. That's why my original journal site Kingboy.net has laid fallow for quite some time—I won't bother even linking to it since it is no longer accessible. Since it has disappeared from the web in it's original form, I have gone back into my backup files and posted the majority of the entries here, hence the sudden influx in the Archives section.

As a result of that and my continual issues with the fucking sucktasticness of IE I may also be toying around with some template changes soon, so if things get wonky, you'll all just have to deal with it for a while.

Labels: site design

Crush, Kill, Destroy !!!!!

IE must die....seriously, must fucking die already

So apparently, even after fucking around with the template to get it to work—or so I thought—with IE, Microsoft's craptacular excuse for a browser can still screw the pooch at low resolutions. That's the impression I got from Sarah at least. From the sounds of it IE was rendering the <div> for the side navigation slightly too far to the left, and underneath the main content. Better that than covering up the content I suppose, but Christ on a crutch already...

And yes, I am sure that it's not a screen size issue. After I got done swearing I had her load up the site in Firefox, which I made sure to put on her system when I rebuilt it recently. Lo and behold, all is right with the world. Or at least with the html rendering, which is all I'm really concerned with in this post.

Labels: site design

Aaaaaaaaand we're back...

A quick note from the laziness brigade.

Ok, so I haven't been that good on the whole daily thing as of late. Then again I have been moving, and doing a relative metric ass-ton of posing lately, so I think I am somewhat justified.

On a more positive, forward thinking note though—when the hell did I get so much fucking corp-speak into my daily usage—it appears Google is allowing Blogger users a chance to test out GMail, the much anticipated and somewhat maligned email service they are rolling onto the internet. Which at least gives me a quick and dirty entry to get me back into the swing of things.

That's right, I've got a gig of space, so why the hell not see how quickly we can clog it up with spam. I'll be making a quick change to the template I'm using to allow for anyone with a hankering to email my Gmail—say that real fast to sound like an utter maroon—account by clicking the author credits at the bottom of each entry. Ah, what the hell, might as well add it to the side bar as well. While we're at it, feel like bugging me and very likely getting no response whatsoever? Click here for your mailing pleasure.

Labels: site design

What a surprise...

or <q>IE fucks it up again</q>

So I'm at my parents house today visiting for Easter, and as usual I need to use one of my various and sundry gadgets to do oddish things with their computer. Today's project involves using my Archos to run EAC and copy the resulting .wavs and .mp3s to the external hard drive ( a process which, by the way, doesn't work very well when the external power supply falls out of the socket). All this is running over a USB 1.1 connection, so while it works fairly well, it is on the slowish side, leaving me with some time to kill.

Here's where I get my daily allowance of annoyance for the day, all thanks to the spectacularly craptacular non-compliance of Internet Explorer. Now on my system(s) at home I use K-Meleon as my browser. It's a nice lightweight little WIN32 native Mozilla spinoff project that serves me well on a daily basis. Now obviously, that means I get the benefit of having reasonably up to date Gecko rendering engine in my browser, which is one of the most standards compliant browser bases currently coded. I like standards, they make me happy in strange geeky ways.

IE in it's current form therefore makes me decidedly unhappy. I've spent some time as it is trying to bang Blogger's default template into something a little more semantic and standards based (not that they did a horrible job, they just made some odd choices of HTML elements and such) only to find that, surprise surprise, IE fucks it up once again. It's been a while since I had used IE, and it had slipped my mind that they completely fail to support rather basic element like fixed positioning in CSS. Sure, there are hacks and workarounds, but since this is a personal project and not something I'm doing for someone else, I hate to use stupid tricks to take into account IE's suckness. In the interim, I guess the rightcontent <div> will just have to use absolute instead of fixed positioning.

Labels: site design

Mucking About

or<q>How Cleveland power outages screw me over in Columbus</q>

Ok, so This post is only going up about ten minutes or so before it's no longer the 14th, but c'est la vie. I was originally going to rant a bit about another method for doing curved corners on content areas that was linked at Eric Meyer's site, but apparently the odd power problems in Cleveland have knocked out some servers or another in that area, and I can't get to it right now. So instead I've just piddled around a bit with some minor structural details like adding a permalink structure and cleaning up my CSS. Posted at 11:59 pm EDT...just under the wire.

Labels: site design

The Show gets on the Road

or <q>How I learned to get off my ass and just post something</q>

Ok, so I've had this domain for well over a year now, and what precisely have I done with it? Oh yeah that's right:

1. jack
2. shit

Well, enough of that nonsense. I need to practice my writing, markup and design, and I don't want to have to worry about 'the people'. Drooling half-wit mogoloids anyways...

Besides, if Zeldman can be in a constant redesign phase, so can my little site hiding off here in the hinterlands of the network. Hell, just getting this little bit ready to put online showed me a few new things with CSS positioning and the overuse of div's, some of the errors I was making in setting margins, so it should be a useful tool no matter how 'finished' or polished this site is at any one time.

Labels: site design

Some more Information

or <q>What the fuck is with the monkey?</q>

Ok, so right now this is a fairly barebones, basic page. That's fine with me for now; as I stated below, it's pretty much gonna be random flux whenever I get a hankering to change something or experiment. Just so there is no confusion however, let me offer up the following guidlines I use when updating here:

1. I use K-Meleon as my main browser. I choose to do so for several reasons, one of which is the fact that it uses the Mozilla project's Gecko rendering engine, currently the most standards-compliant cross platform user agent engine out there.
2. As a result of Fact #1, I could give a shit less what this site looks like in IE of any flavor. I may do some testing now and then in Konqueror (and I guess, very vaguely by association in Safari) by loading up Knoppix on the laptop, but I am tired of trying to deal with all of IE's non-compliant bullshit. I like PNG's, I like playing with CSS, and this is my page to play.
3. There is the distinct possibilty, in case you hadn't already noticed, that I may use profanity on occasion. A small possiblity mind you, but an existant possiblity none the less. You have been forewarned.

So what about the goddam monkey you say? Simple, he's a place holder; part of my plan is to have multiple icons that I can tack on to individual articles as I see fit. So far, he's the only one I have on hand. Bits and pieces af a few more are wandering around somewhere, I just don't have access to them on my laptop at the moment.

Postscript:

Some of this post may not make terrible sense, particularly the monkey references, as they reffered to the old design at Kingboy.net.

Labels: monkeys, site design