The Latest

While i take a quick break from my dad’s insurance website, I’ve picked up a side project. I want to make a blog about various bits of media news.

It was entirely inspired by a sign Cindil spotted driving home. There’s a chiropractic office in Ypsi that always puts funny/random things on their sign, this night it read “Don’t let the media kill your dreams”. Of course I had to take a picture… and when I got to thinking later, that would be a marvelous title for a blog I’d been thinking about starting on media news, with my insight.

And so, I’ve purchased that domain, and I’ll be working soon on getting a very customized wordpress up and running. Maybe it was a bit spontaneous… we’ll see where it goes. At any rate, I’m just out the price of a domain name, whatever.

$25 and a new adapter later, my laptop is back up and running, though it’s anyone’s guess as to for how long. This is all the more reason to get the most out of my time.

My dad’s “Auto Insurance Advice” website is in its testing phase… definitely alpha, but coming along. I’m using PHP to save me a few steps, and CSS (of course). With PHP, I don’t even really need a seperate style sheet; I have the styles built into every page. So far, I haven’t seen how this could backfire.

I’m trying my best to keep my code extremely clean and presentable. This being my first ‘commercial’ project, I’d like the quality to be at a level worthy of inclusion in a portfolio. When it gets a little further along to a ‘beta’ pre-release stage, I’ll add it to the projects list. Hopefully within the week?

I finally get a website and my computer dies. My laptop won’t charge, I believe the DC connector on the Sound/DC-In board is just worn out (it’s been a long time coming). To replace it (or the whole board) involves removing just about everything inside my poor old Powerbook… keyboard, logic board, heatsinks, speakers, modem, wifi, expansion slot, etc. A new Sound/DC-In board runs $99 plus S/H. So my frankenstein workaround involves stealing the DC connector off an old Powerbook (died in a house fire) and soldering it onto my existing board… I’m not very good at soldering, so the odds that this will work are optimistically 50-50. Then if(when) that fails, I can just order a new board and throw that in.

In the mean time, my fiance has been letting me use her Inspiron when she’s not using it for schoolwork. My brother will be loaning me a clamshell iBook soon to help me whether the storm too. It’s amazing the battery life those things get.

At any rate, I probably won’t be back up and running on my system for another week or two… or three… so it may be a little while until I really get back to working on the site.

After hours of attempting to design a wedding website with just HTML, I’ve given up. I surrender. Even once I sorted out all of my issues with the tables to create the look I wanted, it still didn’t look… quite… that good. A little cheap and amature, to be more precise. I was trying to make something on par with the other wedding websites I’ve seen, like this one for instance. But no luck. So now I’m thinking I need to approach it differently, probably design the whole thing in Photoshop and just imagemap the the links where they need to be. I know, it’s cheating. Maybe I can find some middleground…imagemap some parts, go with a background image instead of a solid color… work something out. Either way, it’s going to mean a lot more time working in Photoshop, and with a pad and paper. Cindil’s not the hardest critic to satisfy, but she has taste and she knows if something works or not.

For now though, I’m taking a break and installing 10.5, we’ll see if a fresh install fixes my Developer problems.

Quite obviously, I’ve installed wordpress. I like the fact that I can post by email, which could be useful while travelling, or other times when I’m away from the computer. It’s free to use for private or commercial use, and can be modified in many different ways (if I want). Seems like a good way to chronicle what I’m learning as I go along. I doubt there’ll be much public interest in this, as it doesn’t really hold any info useful to anyone but myself.

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