Having not done any web development in a while I think I’d forgotten why I hate IE so damn much. Stupid rendering issues of a WC3 compliant page, just so damn annoying. All I can say is, praise jebus for the <!–[if IE]> workaround

Wordpress is now my CMS of choice for any freelance work I do. Once you get the hang of developing themes for Wordpress, it’s incredibly easy, and you can pretty much lay it out however you want, my first theme was simply the one you’re looking at now, basic, but functional. I finished developing a theme for a school website I’m doing at the moment and I got it together as smooth as if I was building a static page. Usually when I’m designing a layout for a web page, I just mock the thing up in Fireworks first, get it looking how I want, that probably takes the longest, I have trouble getting a layout I feel good about. Once I’m happy I slice up the images I need and then go write the code (don’t worry I don’t export the Fireworks HTML, yuck!). I think the main thing I like about Wordpress is the pure simpleness of the administration section, it’s basic as you like, and should be easy to show not so savvy people how to use it. A lot of people I’ve shown the Joomla admin section to have looked at it a bit wide eyed, but Wordpress is a lot more straight forward. Until recently I thought it was just a blog application, but if you wanted to, you could ignore that altogether and just setup a site with editable static pages. I’m almost done with the current freelance Wordpress site I’m doing at the moment and I’ll plug it when I’m done.

If you want to learn how to develop your own Wordpress theme, I recommend the Cyberhackz tutorial, it’s straight forward and to the point, and honestly, once you’ve done one, you’re ready to go. One suggestion I’d have is to follow the tutorial with an XHTML layout already developed, and cut and past the segments you need from that into the segmented theme files, works quite well. After that, keep yourself a blank basic theme for reference.

Launched my browser this morning and whammo, digg has significantly updated their iGoogle widget, it’s quite fancy.

I was wondering if they would add images to this thing. Happy Days

Facebook has fast become the pretty looking Myspace. The whole site now is covered with other websites, companies or people exploiting the not so computer literate for their own gain or pure pointlessness. Here’s just a few things that everyone should know before having this horrible thing minimised in your taskbar at work.

1)

Applications are 99% crap, and they fill up your profile with needless shit, and eventually your profile takes forever to load, the ignore button is your friend.

2)

Clicking forward on the fucking husky will not do anything, ever, not to mention that stupid AAA BBB CCC DDD thing along with all those other crappy messages, the wall, superwall and funwall are simply public messaging services, they cannot do anything else, nothing will ever happen I promise you, you’re not missing anything.

3)

If you think you’ve found a decent application, you probably haven’t, if it says you must invite 20 people, for the benifit of the people in your friends list, press cancel. It’s simply another form of spam.

4)

Don’t poke, just don’t.

5)

I’m not sure if anyone has ever done it, I bet someone has, but don’t buy those gifts….. why would anyone do that?

6)

Piss off with your vampires, your slayers, your fucking frankensteins or whatever else you want to virtually bite me with

7)

Seriously, the only good thing about Facebook is the photo tagging, events and sometimes the status can provide a little fun, that’s it.

I know there’s more out there, share the hate.

So I’ve hit my first major snag with my Mythbox. The signal is… less than acceptable. It’s like watching a DVD that’s been skimmed along sand paper. On top of that it doesn’t pick up channel 10 at all when scanning for channels. There’s an option on my Nova T 500 to turn on amplification, LNA Activation is what it’s called. This is turned on, but it doesn’t seem to effect much. I’m half hoping it’s the aerial port that I’m using, there’s a chance it’s not the quality it should be. I’ll have to grab a set top box and sort that one out. Other than that the only real thing I need to set up is the remote, and the VFD. I also need to get a wireless card for it, and I want to eventually install a bit torrent client to it, but other than that, she’s apples. If I can’t fix the signal issues I think I’ll have to plonk the tuner on to eBay and find myself another one. Which is annoying, the functionality and quality of it when it works is great, it’s HD for a start, and it’s a dual tuner with one aerial port, which aren’t real easy to find. I’ve got some googling to do.