Archive for July, 2007
Seahawks tickets went on sale this morning at 10am. I tried my best to get tickets to the Chicago Bears game in November, but to no avail. Then I moved over the the home opener against the Tampa Bay Bucs, but that didn’t work either. The longer I took to find something, the more I noticed that the games’ descriptions were being changed to read “standing room only.”
Fearing that I might not end up with any good tickets at all, I took a shot at the game that will be played the weekend before my birthday, against the New Orleans Saints. I lucked out and managed to get two tickets way up in the nose-bleed section. However, that’s a place of the stadium my fiancée and I have become quite familiar with (the fans up there are great, too), so I’m very happy I was able to get something before all the games sell out.
I can smell it in the air. Winter. Spring. Summer. Football.
Adobe at the Open Source Conference
Closed Published July 30th, 2007 on Ryan Stewart - Rich Internet Application MountaineerI got back Friday from OSCON down in Portland. It was my first time at an open source conference and I was impressed with how energetic the OSS community is. Adobe didn’t have a booth or anything, but James Ward and I were both there to mingle, ask questions and get feedback. James was also […]
Since I’ve been dabbling in WordPress recently, I spent a good chunk of time tonight doing some theme research to try and get an idea of the extent of what’s out there. Rather than wasting my time at the official theme viewer site (which didn’t prove very fruitful on past visits), I decided to focus on the themes available at Wordpress Themes.
I’m personally looking for something clean and simple for a new blog I’m starting (which I’ll announce here later), but I evaluated the following themes more generally, based on their completeness and the quality of their design. I looked through about 10 pages of random themes, then 10 pages of their most downloaded themes, and then 10 pages of their top rated themes, and eventually settled on the following themes as the most solid of the bunch (in no particular order).
1. Zweipunknull
I like this theme because it’s clean and simple. The blue hues go well together (you’d be surprised by the number of themes that I looked at that were color scheme-challenged) and the small font works nicely. The only downside to this theme is the strange sperminess (new word) of the main header area.
2. IAMWW w2 DnD 0.5 and Grid Focus Public 1.0
I grouped these two together because they are very similar. IAMWW w2 DnD 0.5, shown above, stands out a little more visually because of the larger fonts, but they both share a 3-column layout and a dark color scheme. Grid Focus Public 1.0, shown below, is strictly monochrome, but it pulls it off quite well.
3. Stardust 1.0
I like this theme because it reminds me of the very first time I saw The White Stripes perform on television — their clothing, gear and entire set overpowered by red and white. Some of the items in the header section of the theme seem a little out-of-place, but other than that this is a pretty decent theme.
I really like the shininess of this theme, especially in the “Search Tags” box in the sidebar. The candy color scheme makes this theme a perfect fit for hip bloggers who might want to cover things like fashion or celebrity gossip. I also like how the blog title area allows the words to overlap a bit. It might not work as well for other word combinations, but it sure works for “Wordpress Themes.”
I think this theme stood out because it feels like the type of theme I’d see at one of the tech-related blogs I follow. I suppose the Ubuntu and Firefox ads and the big feed icon might have something to do with that, but the menu at the top and the grey colors do, too. This one’s pretty straightforward, but I like it.
This one really stood out from a thumbnail point-of-view. It caught my eye immediately, but once I saw the theme in action, I wasn’t as impressed. I think the color scheme and some of the design elements down the page are really well done, but the placement of the items in the main header area ruin it for me. Needless to say, someone with a even the slightest amount of skill could use some hackery to fix up the header and end up with a great overall theme. Plus, you gotta love a name like “Internet Music.”
7. Rounded V2 blue edition 1.0
This theme stood out mainly because of the interesting blue floral design at the top. I don’t like how much space was wasted up in that area, though. The general roundedness of the main page elements is pretty cool and I’m a big fan of the footer on this one. If someone could find a way to waste less space near the top, fix the padding around embedded images and make the links stand out differently, they’d really be on to something.
I really like the contrasts of this theme, combined with the fact that it kind of comes with its own identity. Most of the other WordPress themes I’ve seen don’t really distinguish themselves in any way. Illacrimo 1.01 has its own logo (which even shows up as the favicon), even if it does unfortunately remind me of Degree deodorant.
While this is technically only a 3-column layout, you almost could count it as a 4-column layout because of the left-most bar reserved for the post dates. I hate to see all that wasted space that could otherwise be used for the main content, but it still adds a unique feel to the theme. The fonts are nice, too, and the little graphic elements that have been thrown in are a nice touch.
9. Japanese Cherry Blossom 1.0 and Hemingway 0.19
I grouped these two together for obvious reasons. They both employ the reverse-mullet strategy of blog design — long in the front and short in the back. I like Japanese Cherry Blossom 1.0, shown above, better than Hemingway 0.19, shown below, simply because of the added touch of color. They’re both pretty well done, though.
10. Dark Black 1.3
I like Dark Black 1.3 because you can tell some real thought was put into it. I really like the links in the header and I like the fluidity of the theme. The blockquote elements look good, the pagination elements are very cleanly designed and the Recent Posts/Blogroll section is nicely done as well.
Honorable Mention: Free Fu 1.0
I would have loved to include this one in my top ten, because I really like the way the sidebar juts out at the top, and the subheader and out-of-bounds areas of the design have a nice look to them. However, the stuff going on in the main header really confuses me and the text in the main content is just too squished together to really consider this one as is.
Honorable Mention: PinkLove 1.0
I just had to include this one because October is, what, three months away now? If you’re planning on going pink and you don’t have the time to whip something up yourself, this would be a good alternative. Other than the unfortunate misspelling of “Search” in the search bar, the design elements are all pretty nicely done.
So that’s that. If you agree or disagree with something I’ve said here, please be sure to comment. Also, if you know of another strong WordPress theme, definitely share a link.
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you probably know that ever since I got my first taste of Linux I’ve pretty much been a Red Hat/Fedora user.
It’s been a while since I’ve had an excuse to install Linux on a computer, but this week I needed to install it on a work computer. I’ve heard and read so many good things about Ubuntu that I ordered free Ubuntu install discs a few weeks ago, and so I used one of those to install Ubuntu 7.04 on the computer.
The install process was simple as usual, maybe even more so than I’m used to. My first impression of the user interface was positive. I’m not a huge fan of tan and brown, in general, but they found a way to make it look somewhat professional. I had to turn on the wobbly windows feature, just ’cause it adds a somewhat unfamiliar feel to the experience, which is nice when talking about an operating system.
The two things that impressed me the most, though, having installed and used Linux many times in the past, were very minor things.
First, when I tried to run a subversion command from the command line, I either expected the command to work, or to get some kind of message back like svn: command not found. What I got was something somewhere in-between the two. Subversion wasn’t installed by default, but rather than telling me the command wasn’t found, it told me it wasn’t available and how to install it! I saw something along the lines of:
To install subversion, type:
apt-get install subversion
One of the other things that’s always bugged me about Linux desktops is how you almost always had to add newly installed applications to the graphical menus yourself. Whereas Windows will add a new application to your Programs menu, for example, Linux has never been all that great at this. Therefore, I was very happy to see that Ubuntu was able to handle this. After running the following command:
apt-get install ntfs-config
I had a new menu folder under Applications called “System Tools” that had the newly installed “NTFS Configuration Tool” listed as a selectable menu item. Pretty cool!
Admittedly, I haven’t really had enough experience with Ubuntu yet to really weigh in, but it was nice getting such a positive first impression. I’ll doubtless post more once I’ve gotten more Ubuntu experience under my belt.
You know, I was going to do this big, huge post about getting married and the awesome honeymoon trip to Belize, but I’m not really sure anyone wants to hear about that. Apparently what everyone wants to hear about is…
One of the new features of my latest web design is the random, rotating song lyrics that appear just above the sidebar. In order to ensure that I could select a random lyric with every page request, I needed to be able to select a random row from a lyrics table in my database.
To accomplish this, I first needed to get a count of all the lyrics currently available in the table. This is fairly straightforward:
SELECT COUNT(*) AS total FROM lyrics;
Then, using the returned count, I needed to get a random number in the zero-based range of available lyrics (so somewhere between 0 and n-1 where n is the total number of lyrics available). This is fairly easy to do using PHP’s built-in rand() function:
$num = rand(0, $total - 1);
The example above assumes that $total has been set to the count returned by the aforementioned MySQL query.
Then, the only step that remains is to query for a single record from the lyrics table using the offset option of LIMIT, like so:
$sql = “SELECT * FROM lyrics ORDER BY artist LIMIT $num, 1″;
I included some PHP code in the example above just to show where the variable returned by the rand() is included in the query.
The offset is included just before the comma, which is then followed by the number of rows you want to retrieve. Since I only need a single lyric, I use 1 as the number of rows, and let the random number I calculated be the offset.
I included ORDER BY artist in the query as an attempt to keep the result set somewhat predictable, but its necessity is debatable.
Whose brilliant idea was it to create little pop-up windows that show me tiny previews of where links will take me to if I click on them?
If I want to find out where a link will take me, I’ll click on it. If clicking feels risky, I’ll middle-click instead.
Your annoying little preview does nothing for me (beyond annoying me to no end).
It’s been a little over a year since I last redesigned my website (unless you count when I went I went pink for October), so it was beginning to feel a little overdue.
One might think that after dubbing that design so depressingly as “Requiem,” I’d try and come up with something a little more lively and up-beat this time around. However, I’ve decided to name this new design “Colorful Decay,” simply because it so accurately reflects the state of the photograph at the center of the design.
While maybe not in name, I do think I’ve addressed the drabness of the previous design somewhat. I like that the navigation bar doesn’t completely obscure the upper details of the photo (that is, as long as you’re not using a lame web browser), as that allows more of the colors to show through. I also really dig how the main title bar and content area jump out at you with their red and green hues, respectively.
Feature-wise, not a whole lot has changed. I did add a new section to above the sidebar where I’ll be putting some of my favorite music lyrics. I’ve got a few up there now, but expect the number to grow quite a bit over the next few weeks. I also tried to finally become a good web standards citizen and start sending my site’s content as application/xhtml+xml for UAs that support it. However, that proved to not be as straightforward as I would have liked it to be. First, I noticed that my Ajax search feature no longer worked once I was serving up the correct MIME type. Furthermore, I realized that a lot of the comments that have been left at my site contain invalid code and I’d either have to run another round (and continued rounds) of wholesale site validation or build in some better safeguarding against allowing invalid characters or entities in comments. I decided to roll back to my less desirable method until I have a better plan of action for those issues.
Anyway, it feels pretty good to finally have a new web design up. I put the finishing touches on it last night around 5am. When I woke up this morning, it passed the test, so I’m pretty pleased with it. I’d really like to hear what you think, though, so please leave a comment. Oh, and if you’re reading this in a feed reader, why don’t you drop on by and check it out?
I spotted an article in The Wall Street Journal titled High-Rise Relics: Ghost Structures Haunt Bangkok.
I was amazed by what I read — this portion in particular:
Ten years ago, Sathorn Unique was destined to be one of the city’s glitziest addresses. Today, its Corinthian columns and four-story arches are nearly lost amid a tangle of trees and vines. Although workers completed the building’s basic structure all the way to the top, its concrete shell starts to peter out about 20 stories up, leaving exposed metal and a half-finished dome on the roof. Steel bars jut out in all directions and mounds of refuse litter the grounds. Inside, two out-of-service escalators climb to nowhere and the smell of urine is overpowering.
It took me 27 years to learn that there are such things as abandoned skyscrapers.
This, much like watching Planet Earth, reminded me just how much there is about the world that I don’t know. Most of us will only know the smallest fraction of its story.