May 2009 Archives

Two paying gigs have been occupying my time lately, so I have not finished the dropdown menus or anything else on this site.

Coincidentally, I had just run across this tutorial on how to create an online slide show using jQuery and CSS when a friend/client asked if I could help put her portfolio online. I estimated it would take 5-10 hours to get a functional slide show up and running, but it actually took far less. Once again, free stuff on the inter-web saves the day!

The other project is a Typepad website for a nonprofit. I'll add both to my Web Projects page once completed.

Still working on dropdown menus. They are a mess right now. I can easily switch back to my original navigation thanks to Movable Type's template modules, but I figure if I leave the broken menus up I'll more inclined to get them working soon. I spent a good deal of time hunting a bug that turned out to be nothing more than the usual missing "}" in the CSS.

You can see the beginnings of dropdown menus if you're viewing this in Firefox. In IE you get nothing because I haven't uploaded the necessary javascript workaround for IE. In all browsers, they look like crap! Yay!

I often wish I had time to really learn CSS or PHP/MySql or AJAX or fill-in-the-blank. Like, spend a month on a desert island doing nothing but online tutorials. The truth is, I don't have time for that, and it doesn't matter. I'm much more interested in what these tools can do for me than how they work. It's helpful to know the rudiments; beyond that, there will always be thousands of people who know more than I do and often give their work away for free.

When I was a kid I once asked my brother why Kirk was captain of the Enterprise. After all, I said, Spock was stronger and smarter. I forget his exact words, but basically, Spock knows all the PHP/MySql—while Kirk runs the damn ship. I'd like to think I'm more like Kirk than Spock. Or hell, Pike.

Update from John:

well, it's an important question!

I would think about it in GURPS rules.

Spock had a higher Health, Strength, Intelligence, and a mess of science Skills, but Kirk had useful Advantages such as Charisma and Appearance, which aided his various social Skills like Leadership, Savior-Fair, Fast-talk, Diplomacy, Administration.

Only in caveman societies do the Strongest lead.

Testing Suckerfish CSS dropdown navigation. Things will look wonky for an indeterminate period of time. 

Commenting is enabled now. 

In trying to enable comments, I discovered that I'm missing the captcha plug-in (Image.Majick?) or maybe that's it's improperly set. So for all the hordes of people waiting to comment, I'm sorry. I'm working on it.

I also replaced Anil Dash's rooster photo—the default image in this MT theme—with a picture of me playing freeze tag with my daughter. (Credit: Eric Johnson. Here's the original.) Not that you can tell this from the photo, my daughter being cropped out and all. I'm sure I will replace this image numerous times in the coming weeks. I feared the rooster and something had to be done.

Update: I added this line to my mt-config.cgi file and now comments work:

CaptchaSourceImageBase http://www.noahmasterson.com/mt-static/images/captcha-source/

If you are one of the four daily visitors to noahmasterson.com, you've noticed some changes. I just installed a Movable Type blog. My goal is not to pollute the blogosphere with the minutia of my existence. Rather, I want to learn as much about Movable Type--and its potential as a full-blown CMS--as possible.

Here are two other blogs I have created, both of them for my wife, Sarah:

• Austin Kid
• DC BABY

NoahMasterson.com was the fastest install I've done, but I still had problems. For starters, it's never a good idea to begin an installation at 9 p.m. on a work night, especially if you are sleep-deprived, as most parents are. (I've got two kids, one of which is teething and hates his bed.) By 10 p.m., all my files had been uploaded, and permissions set, but the tables were not writing to the database correctly. I logged into the control panel at my web host, dropped an old database, created a new one, and went to bed, figuring I would need to start from scratch the next day.

It's always good to sleep on a problem. This morning I knew exactly what to do: I manually edited the mt-config.cgi file to point to the correct database and the installation went smoothly from there.

So here we are. My overall plan is to set up different sections of this website for my resume, music, writing, etc., chronicling the changes on the blog.

Post Script: This entry did not initially publish. (This was the helpful error message: "{P is world writable.") I checked all my chmod permissions and all seemed correctly set to 755. Finally, after much toiling, I went into MT's preferences and changed all my file extensions from .php to .html and that solved it. But why can't I use .php? It would make me look so much cooler!