Month: September 2007

Bring the pain, the plugin pain.

I have a sweetie pie of a client who is very nice and everything but every little design change they ask for (and they ask for very many) and which I then implement has to be tweaked about 30,000 times before they are happy.

Completely understandable. It is their site. I just keep chanting this mantra in my head, keeps me from shooting myself in a vital organ.

Most of the time. Today the requested color was too bright.
I went in and began to do stuff. Ok we all know changing the color of the background of a div is not supposed to make a plugin disappear. I checked for missing ; or } nothing. No unclosed div no unclosed anything. Further messing led me to sidebar.php and back to the plugin page for help. I repeated installation steps 1 2 3. Still not there. I deactivated. I reactivated. Still not there. I cleared my cache. Still not there. I deleted the plugin and reuploaded it. I followed the steps all over again. Still not there.
This is the kind of thing that makes me unhappy.
Because whatdidIdo?! Back up your themes before you mess with them,sob.
And while I was re-validating the code I got a message saying that it had no less then 42 errors!
Continue reading Bring the pain, the plugin pain.

Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif ? Thanks Microsoft.

I used to include helvetica in my font string by rote. I never really looked at it in action. I admit I never thought much about it. Until I wanted to use some new fonts and wondered why the next font down in my font string showed. Well, helvetica is a universal font that everyone has installed by default in their computers,which explains why it would be displayed by my browser but Volute wouldn’t. I had helvetica but I didn’t have Volute.
Here is a list of default fonts .
The idea is compromise. List first the font you really want to use and that you have installed and hope someone or many others have it,too. Then list a few other fonts separated by commas ending with a sure-fire sans-serif or serif. Use Weiss Lapidar for a heading and your body font will show, hence the need to specify some “fallback” font-families in your font string.
I recently downloaded this font along with Volute and about 20 others. But only my machine can see them.
There are a few universal font families: Arial,Trebuchet MS,Tahoma,Palantino Linotype, and etc.they fall into serif or sans serif. I’ve seen sans and sun-sans,too.
Use these and no matter what browser anyone viewing your page with will see these fonts.
Continue reading Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif ? Thanks Microsoft.

Theme Designing,Theme Destroying

Today I got a call from my nicest client whose site I have been tweaking since the spring. She wanted to tell me a few problems she was still having with the site(mostly typography issues,spacing,etc).

I felt a little guilty because I began to get these problems in line last week then dropped the ball and started working on 2 other projects. I’d also begun the migration of her site from a very simple CMS to WP. She writes a monthly column and was excited about the promise of more interaction via a blog.

The thought of absolutely iron cladding her current site’s design only to have to dive in and make her a theme for her new site kind of galled me.But she had done a recent mailing and wanted the site to look good when folks came calling… So no way to avoid the extra work. If her project was the only one on my list I think I could have done all of the improvements that same week. But I am just one little slave.

So I did the improvements and began to work on making a theme for her blog. I worked for 3 hours had dinner and worked for 3 more hours.

One tiny little thing didn’t work and I deleted the whole thing! Over 6 hours of work down the drain. I am seriously disturbed. I knew that deleting the files was rash even as I decided to do it. And I still did it. (Of course I have a similar template lying around but) I was getting close with the one I was working on, then I just wiped out.

Six hours of work.Sheesh.

My Head is exploding!

I wanted more work.
I got more work.
Then I got too much work with offers of more work on top of that!

It’s all repeat clients, too. Not one ad I answered paid off.To know me is to love me, I guess.

My boyfriend’s youngest brother came to stay with us right as this wave of work hit me. Since then I have barely left the desk in the living room and he probably thinks I am a huge freak. Of course I am a huge freak, so that’s ok.

I had to run out of the house today before I shot someone. I had done the dishes 4 times since I woke up. They just kept coming. I’d hoped a whiff of a clue would dawn on my roommates but it did not, not once.

It’s like they all decided that if it has tits it can do the dishes.
And then it can put the lotion back in the basket.

Even my roommate who isn’t on my team (euphemism) said “oh yeah, I know” as he put his peanut buttered knife into the sink just as I was putting the last dish on the drainboard and bitching to him as I slaved. I’m all alone with a crew of dish users. And I’ve had ridiculous fits of hatred over it.
So I ran to the haven of Macy’s where all the fall clothes live and taunt me with their higher price tags… summer clothes are cheaper, aren’t they, especially when your uniform of choice is a tshirt and jeans and flip flips. I sound snazzy, don’t I?

All of a sudden Calvin Klein has decided to produce a line of clothes I could actually imagine wearing. Almost. I tried on the raincoat/trenchcoat with flared skirt thing and felt too much of a Vivienne Westwood vibe. It’s amazing: since I pledged to try clothes on before I buy them I hardly ever buy clothes any more.

To further put off the rechaining of myself to the computer I watched a movie I’d rented last week and finally cleared time on the tv to watch it. This was only done with much passive aggressive huffing. I’m not proud but I have my ways. The film is Broken English and it was pretty good. Parker Posey stars and it’s directed by Zoe Cassavettes (sp) so her mom (Gena Rowlands) was in it,too. The lead character drinks her way from beginning to end. I was impressed.