Technical Blog – Page 43

Focus! Focus!

I’m not supposed to be working on my own pages. I’m supposed to be working on my friend’s new art site. I took a bunch of photos of her paintings and cropped them in my photo editor and loaded them to her server but when it comes to actually doing anything with them I let my mind wander.

I admit that I have been at the computer too long.I need a break a shower and a walk outside.If you see me back here tonight yell at me and stage an intervention.I have an excuse-my roommate is here with the baseball-snapping his gum and driving me crazy!

I just made more work for myself

I imported my blogger posts and now all the text formatting is gone. So all the posts look like one big block of text. I know how all you readers love that. I couldn’t find out how to un import so now I am stuck with these wall of text posts. I have to edit them all. Yay.

Legal Ho-Ha

I’ve been very busy lately.I got involved somehow, don’t ask how, in a nasty dispute involving ICANN, an adult film star’s trademarked stage name and her intellectual property (a concept that kind of makes me giggle).

One of my side jobs is being the Web master for a site which content is a niche of a niche in fetish. It is not porn. It doesn’t even involve nudity.And no, it isn’t bondage.And no it doesn’t involve waste materials. UGH. I have nothing against folks expressing themselves in a safe, consensual manner. But I can’t ignore the gleam of sleaze that shines off of the industry itself. I wouldn’t choose to write about this if the niche I was talking about was objectionable to women. I’m sure there would be some people who could find something objectionable towards women on this site.But as a woman, I personally do not. My motivations are practical- working for this site pays my rent which is a big step toward being able to finally save some money.

However,my client has a number of other sites sites he wants to get rid of, sites that no one under 18 can visit.So you know what those must be.

Anyway, moving on – the dispute was settled- and so we can all breathe a sigh of relief that this performer’s intellectual property is one less unauthorized domain name compromised.My client is tired of the legal stuff and so he handed the domain over just like that.He was just keeping it up because she broke their contract and was trying to recover just the costs of the server.Well, that’s his side of the story

How did I get involved? Again, don’t ask. Let me tell you it was sheer naivete on my part.

So how do you feel about taking on jobs like this? Do you judge me? Or do you feel it is ok to work for a site as long as it’s content isn’t distasteful to you? Of course I’d rather it wasn’t related to that industry at all-more like something to do with pottery or crafts.But those niche sites don’t seem to need my help,ha ha.

It’s a fine line

Here I am calling myself a Web designer but using someone else’s theme.
Why? Because of insecurity? Well,maybe.I’m pretty new to WordPress and this is only my 3rd WordPress project.Once I got the idea that I simply had to move on from my other blogging tool I wanted to do it right away.Once again I told myself I didn’t have the time to learn the insides of WordPress, that getting the project done was more important. The funny thing is I ended up learning WP finally with this latest project. Oh, not that I am now an expert, ha ha. But I did pick a theme with out the dynamic sidebar and that wasn’t widget ready. That step was amazingly easy,by the way. But I didn’t know that until I tried it for myself.That’s a lesson right there.
I was already used to the concept of templatizing a site since I’d done it many times when using the CMS, doop. In fact, my site was basically just put together using this flat file CMS and that flat file blog; SimplePHPBlog.

Not that I overlooked the fact that a visitor coming to my site might not like the change in design flow when going from my regular site to my blog. I was never very happy with this change but I found SPB a bit daunting to say the least. And so I just lived with it.

I ended up making my own template right before I made the switch to WordPress,and might’ve gone as far as customizing the blog to look exactly like the rest of my site. But it occurred to me: why not do all that work with one of the best blog tools available? I do sometimes tend to make things harder for myself then they have to be!

I am not in any way knocking doop or SPB. They served me very well for a whole year had great support forums and at least doop kept upgrading and upgrading. I felt obligated to stick with doop since they helped me have a dynamic site back when I didn’t know how to make one for myself. They are great alternatives for anyone who can’t use a mysql connection for whatever reason.But sometimes you find you have gone as far as you can and have to move on.

So back to the theme:Activate-10
by Brian Gardner.It is a 3 column theme I converted to 2 columns. I put in a script to rotate the header/banner images.I didn’t want to use all the background images,so I didn’t.I spiffed up the font css away from px to percentages of ems.
But the layout is still not mine. It is not different enough for me to call mine.This is that fine line I mentioned. I might be tempted to claim this as my work since I did a lot of work on it myself.But it wouldn’t be right.
One should always give credit where credit is due -after all I wouldn’t much like it if in the future I saw someone using one of my themes and not giving me credit for it.