95% done moving

I moved most of the large items this weekend. I still have a few odds and ends (less than one car-full) left at the house. One more trip, and then one trip to wash the carpets, and I should be fully vacated from the old location, and fully “in” the new. Of course, everything remains in boxes, and finding anything is near impossible (and dangerous if you’ve got to walk over things), but I’m workin’ on it.

I’m mostly just interested in getting back into a regular routine.

On the upside (and on a side-note), the Red Sox beat the A’s tonight, the Yankees lost, and Manny played his first game in the last 24 days. Papi hit a home run… hopefully the Sox are using these last few to secure the division, go for best record in the A.L., and win some “meaningful games” before the playoffs start. Get ready…

Thought for the day

My thought for the day is this:

Everyone should keep usability in mind while performing their job. While creating something (especially like a website), some aspects end up being unrelated-graphic design to programmers, implementation details to designers, etc-however usability should be an part of every aspect of the creation process. There are an unending number of uses to design for, the least we can do is succeed for one or two.

welcome to fall

I’ve been keeping an eye on the Red Sox game all night on my computer. When I saw David Ortiz up in the 9th with a man on, and down by 1 run, I went running into the living room and turned on the TV. He fouled off one pitch, and then, just in time for the arrival of fall, Papi hits a walk-off home run into the newly cooled air.

blurry focus

I’ve been working on the same project for about 4 weeks now. 4 weeks straight. It’s the re-design of certain parts of a big site using CSS. Sounds like nothing, but the constraints of the re-design are that it must function almost exactly like the old. Therein lies the difficulty.

It is surprisingly hard to make the new act like the old. I am pretty good with my CSS, but when you have different parts that can expand to huge sizes, both horizontally and vertically, it is quite the challenge. Also, when certain expections have been set by use of tables, it is hard to design around them. There is only one widely supported html tag which can resize a collection of block-level elements similarly, and that would be a table. And yes, I have had to revert to a few tables (with some crazy CSS trickery on top).

I have found myself longing for Microsoft to catch up to other browsers, specifically regarding support of display: table* attributes, but I’m not really sure why I even looked.

Aside from the technical difficulties, my main problem as of late has been focus. I have focused so long and intensely on this one project, it is beginning to blur together. Today I was making mistakes in my code that I would have never normally made. And I had to think…for a rather long time about a conceptual problem concerning whether a certain piece of code should be put in an include, or in the calling source.

I guess I don’t really know how “long” is “long” to be working on a project. Something I will have to figure out gradually, I assume. I am glad to be able to recognize the problem, as I can now see if I can work on de-bluring my vision of the project. Maybe it simply requires a different perspective. That being said, one approach that I will take before anything else is to get a good long night’s sleep tonight.

CSS Shorthand Cheat Sheet

If there is one thing that I’m a sucker for, it’s cheat sheets. I love letting my eyes fall upon a single page and navigate right to what I’m looking for. It takes the whole “open book, locate index, look up word, find page, find where on page” process out and beats it with a big stick.

So the other day I was working on some trivial CSS, and found myself having to look up the shorthand for ’list-style’ for the millionth time. I don’t know what in my childhood prevents me from remembering it, but… it must have been traumatic. Anyway, I looked over at my CSS cheat sheet, and it was absent. So I searched the webbernet for a cheat sheet. I found Dustin Diaz’s guide, but that wasn’t what I was looking for. It was filled with information, however I know the values-I work with them constantly. I just wanted to figure out the order and defaults… and put them on the wall.

So here is my CSS Shorthand Cheat Sheet.

This cheat sheet contains all of the cases (that I can think of) where a CSS property has a shorthand notation. I’ve even added the obscure and rarely implemented outline and outline variations, as well as the Aural pause and cue properties (respecting accessibility). I even threw in the color shortcut (#abc) in for good measure. 🙂

From a design perspective, there is obvious room for improvement. I haven’t really messed with InDesign since it was called Pagemaker, and I was doing my high-school newspaper. So that was interesting. I also wanted the design to look slightly disorganized… anyone who’s ever seen my yellow shoes will know why. There are saturated colors, but no heavy backgrounds. I wanted it to be printed, and I only have a grayscale laserjet printer. While on the subject, it looks somewhat faded when printed. I have to look into adjusting the colors for priting grayscale, but I’d prefer not to darken all of them.

Anyway, I hope that someone will find it helpful. I’m going to use it tomorrow.