Month: April 2007

The triumph of the php include.

I use this cms called doop to build my web designs around because I like the way it makes html pages dynamically that can be called into the one index.php file and styled with your own css file.So basically you can style countless html pages with just one css file.Very neat and tidy.And then those pages can be opened and edited by whomever. Me and doop were doing really well until I hit the speedbump of needing to use a more complex form inside one of these pages instead of the simple(but wholly functional) one that doop provides in it’s addons folder.The doop default editor’s textarea basically ate the closing tags of the form and this pretty much ate my project.I wasn’t able to fix it until I used filemanager and filezilla to delete this one page and start over.
It fixxed the broken pages problem but didn’t solve how to get my form into one of these pages.I couldn’t use HTML so that was out.So I turned to this open source php form generator to build my form with.It was still an html form but renaming the file extension to .htm and using a php include to call the form worked like a charm.
awesome!
I used to have a link to an example but that is long gone.You’ll just have to imagne how awesome it was to behold.

Website How-to pages with tons of errors

It’s a slow day and none of my clients want to return my emails.Until I hear something,anything from any of them I can’t go any further on the projects…So I’m taking this time to try to learn a bit more about few programming language implementation techniques that I’m still a bit fuzzy on.Like XML or even just plain old javascript.As a designer I haven’t had to do much with either beside link the external files properly in order to get this or that to work.The Mozilla developer center listed this PAGE as a good source of information.I guess it might be if almost every link didn’t return some scary looking error page.
Result: I learned nada and wasted a little time.
Some more searches led me to the Yahoo answer page.
Who else finds the Yahoo answer pages to be really annoying with all those cartoony avatars looking at you? I really dislike the whole avatar thing.Almost every forum or social community site asks you to upload one or worse,like Yahoo, use their cheesy selection to build from.
I had to do it for Flickr(Yahoo again) but mine is of a cartoon sofa.

I have a big mouth

My boyfriend and I were relaxing after spending the afternoon with his mom who is in town for a few days.

I was at the computer desk he was watching the basketball game and we were chatting about random things when out of the blue he said “I’m going to live in Colorado one day”.
I asked him why and he said for skiing. I immediately thought of Unmentionable, an old boyfriend who I hadn’t seen or heard from since 1997. Unmentionable used to take off from Long Island to Colorado to work at some ski resort and drive a bus in trade for free ski slope privileges. He’d be gone for the whole winter and never call me.

Needless to say it wasn’t a great relationship, very much in the unrequited category with me doing all the requiting. And it ended very badly. After one of his Colorado trips,he’d been back for a week or two before I even found out he had returned. Not only that but he’d finally gotten Ms.Thing to be his girlfriend and hadn’t bothered to let me in on it. Our mutual friend The Other Ms.Thing was the one who let me know. It was really devastating. Real Lifetime Movie Materiel.

So when Awesome Boyfriend said skiing and I thought of Unmentionable, I said so. And without thinking I began to describe some of the bad associations I had with men and skiing and Colorado and I happened to mention that Unmentionable and I were “together” for about 6 years.

Awesome Boyfriend took this hard. I think it was the 6 years part that got to him. Rather than the fact that I’d had a boyfriend before the boyfriend before I met him…if that makes any sense. I might have had a few boyfriends but I never had a good boyfriend until Awesome Boyfriend.

Most of my relationships prior to Awesome Boyfriend looked very bad on paper and this one I’m talking about was the worst and why would I want to talk about that with Awesome Boyfriend? I’d already told him the other guys I’d been involved with had failed me in the commitment department.

The 6 years spent being tortured by Unmentionable was just a hap-hazard grouping of painful events that yes, spanned 6 years of my life but no one could ever describe what went on as me and Unmentionable “being together”. And if Unmentionable and I had not had The Other Ms. Thing as a mutual friend it wouldn’t have lasted more than 1 day.

I tried to explain this to Awesome Boyfriend but I was feeling horribly guilty because of his reaction and I couldn’t verbalize that well. He just got angrier, like I’d been hiding something all this time we’d been together.

I do not feel I had been hiding Unmentionable or the length of time I knew Unmentionable. I just didn’t think it was an important aspect of my life previous to Awesome Boyfriend that he needed to know; such as if I’d ever been married or had had a child ( No, No ) before I met him.