shameless plug no doubt, but i’m allowed to plug my own work!  launch 10 has launched its first interactive multi-player facebook game today.

pirate ships is a game that allows you to battle against friends or with strangers on the high seas as pirates!  place, plot and fire to see who can sink who first.  you can play multiple games simultaneously and choose your pace.

join our pirate ships facebook group to help us spread the word and discuss any topics related to pirate ships the game.

so aside from all the self promoting, the game is quick and fun and we would love your support!

at some point in 2004 i decided to actually make myself a website.  created a template and embraced CSS and used a not so friendly template version of wordpress.  once i got everything working and wordpress all settled.. i never finished.

the other night i made my kitten her very own blog. decided to go ahead and give AdSense a holler, i had never bothered before because about 3 of you actually come to my website (hi guys..). however part of AdSense policy is they don’t give accounts to unfinished websites. I’m going to be putting AdSense on sachi’s website, and figured might as well put one on mine, i figure after 3-4 years of you guys reading my blog i might make enough to finally make a $100.00 check and cash in!

i have now completely updated all the content on my website. updated my theme and made some fixes (but i did this a week or two ago), added a contact form, links (while that’s still unfinished at least i started it), a brief gallery(ill link my crappy gallery some other way), my resume, and a simple home page.

holy shit guys, i finished my website. finally.  now its time to redesign it!! haha.

jason complained my blogs are too nerdy. dont worry jason im sure ill start blogging more casual stuff as i slowly become consumed with WoW and have finished building out my entire site.

so after a phone conversation today with a client, we discussed all the problems we were facing with the website and she just finally agreed, fuck os9 users and their browser problems, lets move forward using technology that doesnt suck!

for those of you who arent so fortunate, i pity you, but i guess all lessons are good lessons. i got to revisit how shitty ie5 is and moreover, the problems with mac ie5.

things to consider when developing a website and you need compliance with mac ie5 in os9, and things to consider if you have a mac and for some godforsaken reason, you dont want to upgrade to osx. things to consider when you have to develop for windows ie 5.1 and windows ie 5.5.

• mac ie 5.0, 5.2.3 does not support flash transparency
• mac ie 5.0, 5.2.3, win ie 5.5 does not support background layer transparency
• os9 browser options are limited, there is an old mozilla build, 1.2.1, however due to lack of developer interest and resources it never got beyond that
• mac ie 5.0, 5.2.3 does not support many forms of javascript and breaks commonly used javascripts, including dreamweavers rollover (specifically the body onload pre cacheing of images)
• all forms of ie 5.* break the crap out of css2

there was a time when i created many websites to function appropriately in ie5, considering it was the browser of choice in 1999, but since then browsers have come a long way… a long long way, even ie6 itself has vastly improved, regardless of how much you hate it.

in the end, i urge mac users to upgrade to osx and use safari or firefox and avoid using ie5.*. I urge the entire world to upgrade..

-jamie

this is not an actual dig at mac users, more for my lack of access to a non osx mac with ie5. i have been playing ping-pong for over a month with a client about discrepancies in mac ie5.

my frustration level is at an all time high. while it is probably my fault for not qualifying her appropriately when we discussed all the style elements she wanted, but i figured since she was a web master she would have been aware of the countless cross platform conflicts and issues and had made it clear to me that it was a requirement for her site to be working in mac ie5. unfortunately, this information only came to me after the entire site was like.. done. had i known this i would have taken a different approach or had probably changed the elements of the site completely and let her know what was and wasnt viable for an ie5 solution.

i want to pull my fucking hair out. i am going to have to rebuild the entire site because the problem isnt going away and at this point i dont know what is breaking anymore. this project is so far overdue, it is pissing me off to no end.

oh my god, jesus christ kill me. i’m tired so i will rebuild her fucking site in the morning.

on a side note, after finishing the navigation for my site, nian messaged me and ridiculed me for having used javascript instead of css for the image rollovers.

[21:20] PluckYewToo: come on … there’s such a thing as CSS rollovers

i changed the image rollovers to css.. cept it has this annoying delay/flash bullshit mother fucking anomaly on the rollover in IE, it fucking irritates me, but it looks nice in firefox.

i cant fucking win tonite. i am irritated and miserable. i need ice cream and a fucking hug.

-j

well here it is, the new facelift! its been quite a long time i suppose since i actually had my own “webpage”. i forced myself to do it all in css, except for the mouseovers. there were a handful of times i just felt like throwing in the towel and resorting to html because it would have just been so much faster. but alas, im glad i finished what i had set out to do.

i may or may not be changing some aspects, i am not completely married to all parts of it but i did sign off on the design, to force myself to just finish the site.

i guess now i get to spend time forcing gallery to conform to my look and feel.. blech :S ! I get to also spend a lot of time finishing the other links. i had planned to do everything else first and the blog portion last, but it turned out quite the opposite.

thx to joel, sean, mike, erik, and greg for the css brainstorms and guidance when i got stuck.

ive also attached an image that my friend mike showed me earlier, i think the picture sums up nicely how i feel about resolving CSS cross-platform issues.

-j

so my friend erik messages me today about my css dilemma. at first he offered a solution but it was not a solution to my particular problem. after we further discussed what i was trying to accomplish he got the gist of my predicament and offered to ask his friend greg who is a big time css fanatic.

e2dot718: my friend says if she doesn’t float the inside layers
e2dot718: that it then works
e2dot718: e.g. exactly positions the interior layers
samofool: that would be why
e2dot718: hahah
e2dot718: why!
samofool: floating takes them out of the containing box, so the border snaps down to the smallest non-floated box.
samofool: you could put an empty div at the bottom, under the floated things, with a clear: both, and it should work.
samofool: or use this: http://www.positioniseverything.net/easyclearing.html

so there you have it kids. heres the official dilemma:

Internet Explorer: Wrongly clears the outer container
Firefox: Correctly doesnt clear the outer container but must be “tricked” into it.

They also discuss and address the html bloat problem and offer a solution which i liked. the ability to use :after in css to, i guess, “append” a css tag to follow without having to go in and manually creating a clear div.

thx for the help erik and greg

-j

ive always been a fan of CSS. HTML is so riddled with embedded tables by the thousands that you have to master the art of tables before you can make any type of comprehensive website. as long as you want stylistic elements that are beyond basic html capabilities that look good but are possibly too simple, tables were the only way.

wordpress has themes built on css with no or very few modification to the parent html/php files. this makes for switching between themes seamless and easy. also makes backing up and upgrading really simple. however, i keep running into more and more complications as i prep my blog to fit within the new confines of a website im attempting to finish.

current problem: floating div’s. after reading through the wordpress forum’s and trying to do some searches i couldnt find much documentation on my problem at hand, and to be honest after about 2 hours of searching i just plain gave up. perhaps i will take this challenge up another day.

so the situation is as such, i have 3 divs, lets name them main, left and right. attempting to use all css for this, i have my main div and both my left and right divs within it. i am trying to create a border on my main div that will encompass both left and right divs within the main div. left div is a floating div while right div is not. the reason why the left div floats is because i want them to be side by side. i have tried floating the right div but it will not align and places itself under the left div. now the real problem is, the main div’s border *ONLY* reaches the length of the non floating div. unfortunately the floating div is much longer.

of course it looks fine in IE, however in firefox its another issue. ive tried several methods to force the main div’s border to wrap itself around the floating left divs length but it just refuses to. it makes no logical sense to me why a main div wouldnt encompass the length of a div within it, even if its floating. if youve had this problem and know the fix, let me know.

so back to tables and regular HTML i go, where I know i can force it to look exactly the way i want in both browsers.

-j

when i started this blog hunt, i asked fellow friendly bloggers about what applications they were using, both server and client side. eric told me about zempt, the client side tool he used. zempt was built to work with MoveableType but luckily works with WordPress as well. Unfortunately I ran into a few snags.

First the current stable build for WordPress is 1.2.1 “Mingus”, unfortunately it was packaged without “xmlrpc.php”. You need this file to get zempt working. So after searching around, there isn’t much useful documentation on this, i found some “fixes” that worked for other client tools that broke without its presence, unfortunately it didn’t fix my zempt problems.

I went from not being able to connect at all, to connecting and getting a runtime error and completely crashing my application. yay. so after consulting with yb we decided it would do no good to just grab the xmlrpc.php file or even the current xmlrpc.php in the WordPress beta nightly builds. I would just have to upgrade altogether.

so I’m an idiot. I’m here ranting to will that they need an upgrade.php to make my life easier, oh wait THEY DO! ha ha ha. after upgrading, zempt works and I’m *NOT* getting runtime errors and crashing the application!

WordPress is definitely impressing me as far as usability goes. Its such a seamlessly easy install (as long as you are not completely stupid and can read basic english, and have basic unix/shell navigational knowledge). I am quite impressed at how easy it has been to setup a blog utility. Not so much as a year ago, and this would have been so much more painful.

thx everyone for helping

-j
(more…)

its like this long windy hill of new css i have to figure out. let me tell you, the hill that was once near a 90 degree slant has finally decreased. I’m chugging along at a annoying slow pace on a 40 degree incline. but progress is progress at least.

i think i like wordpress so far. unlike moveable type its all php, but i think its far less customizeable than moveable type but i dont realy know for sure cuz i dont use it. the interface for wordpress isnt the most spectacular but its pretty simple and to the point. i’m sure with time they will spiff it up.

and wtf??? whats with the fucking spam comments? how fucking annoying is that. my blog has been up 2 days and not even really up, mostly just me constantly refreshing with paragraphs of post containing “blah” and “doobie doo” just so i can get it working. and yet, im getting TONS of comment from spamming advertisements for texas holdem poker and online casinos. you fucking cunts… goddamn the internet sometimes.

okay so back to more uphill driving, i need to get the rest of my website online.. wow to think, im actually going to finish one for the first time in possibly 5 years?

-j