I’ve had a serial number for MarsEdit hanging around since early 2006.
MarsEdit just got an upgrade to version 2 and I’ve been slacking on the blogging front lately so maybe using MarsEdit will give me a jumpstart.
Akismet and Spam Karma 2
I’ve been using Akismet to stop comment spam for a while now. It worked fine, but I was never quite sure what it was doing. I went back to using Spam Karma 2 today, since the plugin that lets SK2 and Akismet work together is out of beta. So now I can have the added benefits of Akismet and actually know what my spam filter is doing.
New semester and problems solved
Well, my first class seems like it will be ok. It’s Quantitative Research II, Analysis of Variance. The texts are good, much clearer than last semester’s regression analysis class. The instructor seems good, he actually took time to explain things until everyone understood, and has a very different teaching style than last semester’s professor.
There are no tests or papers to write, just exercises and problems to do every week. Sounds fine to me. I’m also taking this class with a group of people from SISLT, so hopefully things will be easier than last semester when I was a bit lost. One interesting thing about the class is we are using SAS from the Unix command line, no GUIs here.
I figured out the problems with Stephanie’s blog and now WordPress and Gallery are playing together nicely. Unfortunately, I’m having to rebuild Stephanie’s gallery from scratch. In my attempts to make things work I choose to delete instead of reassign pictures to a new user. That was a painful, click-happy error. In an effort to not put all my photo galley eggs in one basket, Lisa now has her own site.
In other news I decided not to go with Bluehost. I couldn’t get any partial refunds on my current hosting contracts and I found out I had some free (with ads) hosting with GoDaddy. So hobbitandmonk.com is living on GoDaddy for a while. I’ll revisit hosting options once my current contracts are closer to expiring.
A new semester begins
Today begins a new semester. Being back in classes will hopefully save me from myself. People spend their free time in lots of different ways. I usually work on web sites. Changes to this site went pretty well, my other projects didn’t turn out as planned. In attempting to integrate Stephanie’s blog and photo gallery I accidentally deleted her photos. And it turns out that the plugin to tie Gallery and WordPress together isn’t working quite right. Maybe I’ll get that figured out at some point. It might be configuration issue with the server and Apache mod_rewrite but the people that Stephanie’s blog is hosted with say everything is normal.
I’ve been looking at BlueHost for a while. Their servers and software are more current than where Stephanie’s site is currently hosted, and they offer a lot more disk space. I signed up today and got a free domain name. Since Stephanie’s site is hobbit81.com and this site is librarymonk.com I got the domain hobbitandmonk.com. Not much there at the moment, I just think it’s a fun name. 🙂
Since Stephanie’s gallery is in disarray, I decided to make a separate site for Lisa. So if you are so inclined, take a look. How many kids have a website before they’re even born. 🙂
So here’s hoping classes give me something else to do.
Success…mostly
The CSS is still a bit convoluted, but thanks to some help from Matt I was able to clean things up a bit. I’ve also made the site readable in Netscape 4.x Amazingly I was able to get Netscape Communicator 4.8 to run on my machine.
As I’ve said before Netscape 4.x is a horrible browser, but I wanted to make sure the content was accessible for that 1% of people that are unfortunate enough to use it. The site is also accessible in Lynx. Further testing at Browser Emulator shows that the site will work in several older browsers, Netscape 1.0 for example. 🙂 Speed tests show that the site is at least bearable on a dialup connection. I also checked against WCAG and Section 508 guidelines and didn’t find any problems.
So I’m calling the major design finished. There are little things here and there and at some point I may totally rewrite the CSS. But for now I’m letting the dust settle.
Comments on the new design
Visually I like the new look, but the CSS behind the site is pretty complex, I’m sure it’s more complex than it needs to be. There are lots of fixes in there for browser bugs/CSS glitches.
http://www.librarymonk.com/wp-content/themes/monastery/style.css
Most of these fixes are for browsers that very few people still use. I’d rather the content be readable across browsers, instead of pixel perfect. CSS this complex has got to be slowing things down, the file is 471 lines long.
So far my attempts to whittle down the CSS has managed to break things. I’d like to have just what I need to preserve the major aspects of look of the site. I don’t really care of the margins differ across browsers etc.
Anybody want to help me out? 🙂
New design
Here is the new 3 column Library Monk design. It’s not done yet, but it’s usable at this point and having it live makes it easier to finish up. So don’t be suprised if some things don’t work. But I should be done soon..
New image
I changed the St. Jerome image to the colorized version. I’m working on a new 3 column design that I may or may not end up using. I also added a header graphic.It’s something to do….
Anybody have strong opinions on a 2 column v/s 3 column design?
Pondering a redesign
My mascot/logo for this site has always been St. Jerome in his Study by Albrecht Dürer. I was looking for other/better images of the woodcut and found a colorized version by Domenicus Rottenhammer done around 1600. I’m thinking about basing a redesign of the site around this image.
Anybody have any ideas for a new Library Monk design?
2006
It’s 2006 and I have started a new blog. Not really, I just started a blog at WordPress.com so I could try out the Akismet anti-spam plugin. You can read all about that on the new blog.