“Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.” — Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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After letting the amazing code for the new IMGrammarBot sit on my hard drive inactive for months and months, I’ve finally released it today. Go get it! It does amazing new things, such as:
I started my latest college semester today to find that my classes have been placed in classrooms where I can’t pick up on the Wi-Fi hotspot located at the town library, which is across the street from the school. Oddly, I used to be able to get a little bit of signal on the far side of the school, but now can’t get signal even in the middle of the school. I guess maybe they lowered power.
It’s frustrating to be unable to gather information relevant to the classes I’m in, since I’ve been doing that in the last five classes I’ve been in. It might help if I had more powerful hardware, since my crappy laptop has no PCMCIA slot, no built in Wi-Fi receiver, and I have a cheap USB Wi-Fi stick by Airlink. I’d build a cantenna, but I’d have no way to use it since my Wi-Fi stick has no place for an external antenna. I hope to get a decent laptop soon, however, so it may only be a short period of time before I have a big, ugly can sitting on my table in class. That will be hilarious.
Despite the fact that I have one of the most dead blogs on the Internet, on Friday night I was hit with a lot of inspiration, and decided to redesign it and this site. I’ve been working on it most of the day since then, and now it’s ready for the world! I’m still working on it, so a few of my pages are currently unavailable or unstyled, but I still think it’s a lot better than what was here before… especially for Internet Explorer sufferers, since I’m using only CSS that it can handle natively. Does this mean I can finally blog for the mainstream?
This new design utilizes a really cute JavaScript I found recently: Nifty Corners Cube. For where it can create a desired effect, this script solves all of the existing problems with making rounded corners on web pages, such as junk markup and tedious, redundant CSS. The only major downside is that it requires JavaScript, but I don’t think that’s a huge issue, because images can fail to load as well, and rounded corners certainly aren’t a requirement. Nifty Corners definitely gets my seal of approval!
Any thoughts and suggestions on the new design would be greatly appreciated!
It’s been forever since I posted anything here. I’m sure anybody who ever read this blog before no longer does now. Alas, that’s not entirely true… now the wretched spammers read my blog. Just last week, I began to get an onslaught of spam comments… make this body part bigger, gamble online, get free stuff… every few minutes. Indeed, I had gotten spam before, but not on that level. I was forced to install Akismet, a free, collaborative WordPress anti-spam tool that learns from its mistakes as people fix them. It caught 7 spam within a day or two after I installed it.
Now the spammers don’t read my blog anymore, either–Akismet has been dry ever since the day after I installed it. Well, there were two spam that didn’t get caught. However, I do still, for some reason, find it annoying that the spammers go away when I protect myself from them.
Today I read an article claiming that MySpace’s design works. The article extensively makes excuses for the simplicity, ugliness and inconsistency of MySpace’s design, justifying it by claiming that it’s effective for the target audience. While I would agree that a design need not be complex or filled with eye candy like so many sites’ designs are, the article’s other points are fairly ridiculous.
Consitency in design could be attained with less complex code if MySpace would make correct use of CSS. Why waste time to look crappy and inconsistent? Because of the way it’s coded, what consistency MySpace does have is extremely time-consuming to maintain (for example, stylistic HTML attributes are everywhere). Even if the target audience doesn’t care, the exhibited cluelessness of MySpace’s web interface coders is costing them time and money (especially in bandwidth costs, considering this is the 7th most popular English site on the web).
Another point made by the article is equally ridiculous:
MySpace permits users to do almost anything to the look of their profile pages, and the prevailing aesthetic is decidedly “more is more”: more color, more animation, more typefaces, more sound, more of everything makes a better profile page.
Of course, properly styling a MySpace profile is impossible (not that it matters anyway, considering the inherent validity of a MySpace page’s markup). Additionally, since MySpace is stuck back in 1995, using HTML attributes to change the presentation of almost everything, it’s impossible to customize the look of specific elements of a profile. As a result, anything you can do to customize a MySpace profile will look even more hideous than the design of MySpace itself.
