found_drama

Two things to say about WP-Footnotes:

(1) I love this plug-in.  Truth be told, I probably abuse it.  The right answer would be to develop a better writing style and use the footnotes only where they’re really needed.  The easy answer is: fuck that, I love my footnotes.

(2) Could we have the “opening” and “closing” syntax¹ be a configurable option?  The defaults don’t work for me and I hate having to go back through the source code and fix this every time the plug-in requires an upgrade.  Seriously, there are so many other settings in the current version that this one seems the logical next step.

Give us a break?

That is all, thanks.

1. The default being ” ((” and “))”, respectively.[↩]

My otherwise limitless love for Quicksilver has recently been tempered by a burgeoning love for the addition of Quick Look to Mac OS X in the 10.5 version.  Pre-Quick Look, Quicksilver was hands-down the fastest way to access and open files.  ⌘+Space ➟ type a few characters ➟ and you were on your way.  In some instances you still had to wait for some Behemoth Application¹ to open up and unfurl its many tendrils into memory.  But it was still a hell of a lot faster than navigating the Finder via mouse clicks, etc.

With the advent of Quick Look however, we are faced with a little bit of a conundrum.  

Read the rest of this entry »

1. Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word: I’m looking in your direction.[↩]

High nerdery; join us.

Mentioned in passing the other day, Simile Timeline is a neat little API for building rich timeline visualizations with annotations.

Though the documentation is a bit thin at the moment, the core code is not too difficult to figure out¹ and if you start with a straightforward example (like this one) then you can get a quick-and-dirty one going in about as much time as it takes you to write out the XML.

Considering that the community garden shut down for the season yesterday, I decided to experiment with the Simile Timeline API by building out one for our 2007 garden foray. Again, getting the initial events into the XML data file is super-easy (if a bit tedious); tweaking the JavaScript to get your timeline looking the way you want? That takes a bit longer… Most of the main variables (e.g., the height/width of the timeline) are well-enough exposed that a novice would be able to get it right with a few guesses. Customizing the theme and “zooming in” on sensitive “hot zones” however, that takes a bit more experimentation. That said, considering what I was able to accomplish in an afternoon (between loads of laundry), I must admit to being impressed with its relative simplicity — Simile Timeline is certainly an elegant solution for these kind of visualizations. Poking around on their site a bit, it seems I’ve just barely scratched the surface of its sophistication.

1. Translation: “Don’t look for comments but be grateful that the variables have Plain English names.”[↩]

WordPress 2.3 upgrade here at F_D is … well, it’s more-or-less complete.  The Extended Live Archive plug-in had some compatibility issues so it was discarded for the simple and effective “Compact Monthly Archive” plug-in.  At least for now.  At least until I can roll-my-own archives plug-in¹.  On the flip of that, switching to the native tagging system was a snap.  The main thing that I’ll miss from Ultimate Tag Warrior however is how it automatically appended the assigned categories as tags.  Oh well..  My other plug-ins worked: SparkStats, FootNotes, the FeedBurner plug-in, and (of course) Akismet.

So here we are … up and running on 2.3.  w00t!

1. They’re all so chronological … where’s the categorical? the taxonomical? the tag-based folksonomy?[↩]

F_D in transit to WordPress 2.3…

Plugging in the new native tagging API was a snap (10 minutes max). There’s a built-in migrator for existing Ultimate Tag Warrior tags (bonus) so getting this rolled out to the live environment should will go nice and smooth.

The bummer part is with the “conflict” reported on the Extended Live Archives plug-in that we’re using for the archives here. What’s weird (at least to me) is that the reported issue talks about “problems when editing or creating new posts due to the database changes” whereas I couldn’t even get the plug-in to work at all in my sandbox environment (wouldn’t load Taxonomy or Folksonomy clusters). So now we must decide whether to strip it out, wait for the fix (or try to fix it my own self), or re-invent my archives all together. I’m leaning toward the latter because of some other UI tweaks that I’m considering (may as well do it all at once, eh?)

• jQuery makes JavaScript webdev so easy it’s almost stupid; 5 minutes of experimenting with the jCarousel extension followed by 10 minutes of wiring it up and then 10 minutes of CSS followed by 5 minutes of jamming it all through SVN¹ and a home-rolled Twitter marquee is born.
• Been on a good consistent writing run the past week or so.  30 minutes here, 90 there…  Same ol’ project but a re-write has been in the cards for a while.  So the time spent outlining and brainstorming is definitely time well spent.  It’s funny though, where I keep getting “stuck”…
• Garden is winding down.  Packed 4 qts. of tomatoes tonight, so that’s good.  It’s doubtful that we’ll actually get a fall crop of peas; the beets and carrots I’m still hopeful for (but just barely).
• Plowing through Stross’ Accelerando; I recall trying to read the CC-licensed PDF last year and didn’t get too far but holding the book in my hands and flipping pages?  Man, it’s good stuff!  Also: Bruce Sterling has a new collection coming out².

currently playing: Junior Boys “Like A Child”

1. What can I say?  It’s been since May…[↩]
2. Anyone know where we can pre-order a signed copy?  A. keeps asking me to give her ideas for birthday present(s) and I’m pretty deficient in that department.[↩]

While A. committed herself to more work this evening, so did I…

I decided to follow up on this morning’s post and put forth a good faith effort at solving as many of the IE-specific issues in my CSS as I could re: Ortho…

The good news? It’s legible and more/less looking good (at least w/r/t/ the main content regions) in Internet Explorer 6¹, which is to say that the parts you (my dear reader) actually read look almost exactly like I’ve intended them². In a way, I feel like asking myself Well what did you accomplish? But that much should be easy. Ortho went from looking like a gothic kid’s worst regurgitation³ to looking like the (I hope) classy bit that I intended it to be. But there’s still a ways to go:

• ul.menu is missing border-bottom in IE6 (despite “standards compliance mode”)
• the last img in the Flickr badge sometimes drops down a full 75+ pixels despite (what appears to be) adequate clearance (width and height-wise) and proper overflow rules (and “standards compliance mode”)
• the paragraphs seem squashed together in IE (not sure yet if this is an issue with line-height or margin-bottom…)
• and of course there are the many issues with the #footer that don’t even need describing…

At any rate…  We’re a far-cry from where we were this morning.

1. At the moment, our Windows PC resources are quite limited. I’m reticent to put IE7 on the final remaining machine because I hear it (IE7) plays nice with min-width and max-height (etc.) and generally follows the rules. Well, most of the rules. And since I still have about 20% of my readership on IE (shame on y’all) and 87% of that on IE6… Alas, I need to do a little bending here.[↩]
2. It turned out to be the min-width and max-width bits of CSS. They really confuse the living shit out of the IE.[↩]
3. Black on black on black and wide as hell…[↩]

After last weekend’s (perceived?) success getting Ortho up and running here, I was feeling pretty good.  Got it loaded into Subversion and was off and running.

Until I got my first look at it in IE6 today.  Yuck.  Even after switching to a strict doctype it is almost totally and completely illegible.  Working on that.  Fortunately, most of our readership is on Firefox (or an otherwise standards-compliant browser).  It seems there are ways around this.  It’s apparently all about not using width and padding.  Or some such thing.

We’ll see how that goes…

We deployed our “Pemulis” version of K2 here on found_drama back in October; it has served us well but truth be told it carries a bit more bloat that we need. There’s the main style.css which carries hooks for plug-ins I don’t use (among other things) and then there’s Prototype and then there are all of those ancillary images. It was just a bit much.

Plus there was a snow storm this weekend and it was an excuse to brush up on my webdev skills instead of shovelling.

Benefits? A slimmed down, minimalist design with few graphics and few external files (CSS, JavaScript, etc.) makes for fast load times. Should be more accessible now, too — w/r/t/ plussed-up browser font sizes, screen readers and so on… Wrapped up most of the testing tonight, too. So far, everything holds together. Some minor differences (mostly behavioral) between Camino/Firefox and Safari. Haven’t checked it in any version of IE yet (chime in if you see something). That said, I’m sure there will be tweaks throughout the coming weeks. Especially when it comes to any of the items on my existing “to-do/follow-up” list. (i.e., fixing the Flickr badge’s behavior in Safari, IE layout “adjustments”, etc.)

But so far, so good…

currently listening: Pete’s “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow“