Web Design

So last week, there was a hardware problem on the Amazon EC2 server that my websites were hosted on, and because I was using ephemeral storage for my home directories as opposed to EBS which I'm using for the root partition, I lost the images and style sheets for my sites as well as my friend's site ZestBakery.com. I was able to pull their style sheets out of my browser cache, but since I've not been visiting my own site for a while I did not have this information available for this site.

I've been spending the last several evenings working on a new simple template for my website based on the Zen template. I finally got it looking the mostly the same in all web browsers. Including Internet explorer versions 8 and 9. Since even Microsoft doesn't support Internet Explorer 6, I'm going to stop trying to get it to work in that version even though I know several corporations that still use version 6.

I'm definitely interested in feedback on the template which is now live. But please use an web browser other than IE6.

Things are really starting to pick up on the Cornerstones of Trust web development front. The conference is on Wednesday, June 6th in Foster City. 

I think it's getting to be about time for another layout change on this website.

I've been doing a fair amount of design work on the Cornerstones of Trust website and will be meeting with the San Juaqine Sheriffs Association next month to do some volunteer work on their website.

For my own website, I kind of want to have a media/news style where you get headers and story previews on the main page along with media without having to scroll.

As another friend put it, I want to get more information "Above the fold".

It seems that after a few module updates, I am no longer receiving the Share to Facebook function when updating stories and blog postings is no longer available. I see that the code is in the modules contributed examples, but not fully integrated. Also the examples enable too many features that I actually don't want or have found a different/better looking way to provide them.

Yesterday I decided to see what it would take to get my twitter robot @HackThisOrg up and running again. I found the Net::Twitter perl module when looking for simple OAuth functions. The follow portion of the robot lives again.

When I first wrote the robot, I didn't want to use modules other than the LWP module because I wanted to see if I could get the functions I was looking for in a more simple fashion without having to download and compile a ton of code. I wasn't exactly following the "Be Lazy" mantra of Perl modules.

Today, I just finished installing a brand new content management system. I converted the template from my old content management system to this new one and have ported all the old content over.

I like this engine because I can create permalinks to content, and change things around without losing those links. 

I'm also hoping that Google will auto-generate the "site links" this time as I have things laid out in a more uniform fashion where links are under they categories for which they belong.

I recently received some light critisism with regards to my website. Basically they found that the information was good, but the colors made it hard to read. So I decided to write a new CSS based template from scratch.

I am not completely done yet, but I liked the direction it was looking so much,

I decided now is the time to cut it over. This new theme incorporates what is called a "fluid" design where the information floats in the middle of the page and resizes based on the size of the brower, while maintain certain aspects.

I am still playing with this.

This weekend, I finished the first portion of my bookmarklet for the Inn.ocuo.us website. Currently, there are really only two users. Myself and @LauraVezer.

I thought I would create a bookmarklet so that I can more quickly post links to twitter using my own shortener. And now it works.

So, most people have heard of URL shortening sights like Bit.ly TinyURL, Tr.im, etc.

I decided to see if I could write my own. So I did.

Its available at http://inn.ocuo.us/ <- I got some fancy domain hacking there too