upr00ted

I was visiting my grandmother the other day on a day off from work. She wanted me to do some updates to her site, and to show her a few of the sites I had done. I went to my site and much to my surprize found that there was nothing here! It turns out that I haven’t updated my blog in a few months, and that when you don’t update mt it tends to move everything to the archives. Too bad my homepage depends on having some quality information to make the layout function correctly.

Being out of touch from computers has been great, though keeping my skills sharp has been challenging. Luckily I’m equiped with a functioning homemade iPod charger and plenty of people to talk to. Well, I’ve bumped the number of days mt will display up to 200, so hopefully with all the moving I’m doing and looking for jobs and such, I’ll be able to keep something here for others to look at and read.

On top of my battery issues I’ve been having intermittent firewire connectivity issues. Sometimes I’ll plug in my iPod and my computer will launch iTunes immediately, other times I have to jiggle the firewire cable to get it to recognize. No longer.

I looked into the iPod repair programs available online, but the best available was $55. So I decided to take matters into my own hands. I’d seen galleries of iPod disassembly over at ipodlounge so I knew it must be possible, but there are very few step by step tutorials on getting the device apart beyond taking out the battery.

After sweating a few bullets I jumped on in and took apart my little machine. I found exactly what I expected: a broken connection on the firewire port.

Not wanting to shell out $55 or risk melting the iPod with my newfound soldering ability, I went to the local electronics shop where they mostly work on CB radios and have never heard of an iPod. They fixed the connections for $5 and I brought it home, put it all back together and have a fully functioning iPod once again.

I’ve been afflicted with the dying ipod battery for some time now, and recently I decided to do something about it. Two things really.

For those of you who don’t know me, my dilema is that during the summer I spend 8 weeks out in the country working at a farm camp that I absolutely love but that has minimal access to electricity. So, with mid-June just over a month away I thought I should do something about my situation.

I still get a couple of hours of normal use on the internal battery so my first thought was to purchase an external battery that I could take with me and use to re-charge my ipod overnight. This would all be well and good if I had a dockable ipod. My original 5GB model just doesn’t seem to fit the bill.

After looking around for a solution I found Drew Perry’s site that has a great little “hack” for building your own battery. I’m not much for electronics and soldering, but I thought I’d take a trip down to Fry’s and see what I could bum up.

I also found a very similar external battery on ebay that worked off of 8 AA batteries. This seemed like a better plan to me since 9V batteries can be pricey at times. Roughtly $22 later I had a new soldering iron, batteries, battery holders, wire, solder, and most importantly a female 6-pin firewire plug which are hard to come by (Outpost part # 2534171, made by Pactech #PG-FWC6P.) I figured the actual parts cost under $10 (not bad compared to the Belkin version which also requires an outlet to recharge it.)

After an hour or so of shaky hand soldering I had a working prototype. At first I was a bit afraid of plugging it in and swore at my self for not buying a fuse and fuse holder, but I went ahead and plugged it in. I couldn’t believe my eyes, the ipod turned on and began charging. Still afraid, but now strengthened I got back online and bought parts for version 2. The parts arrived today so I’ll let you know how it goes.

The second problem was solved much more easily. I finally broke down and bought a new internal battery, which I am still waiting for, but which I got a good deal on.

I think XHTML might be the death of me. If anyone can tell me how to insert code elements as text see: <$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d">/<$MTEntryTitle dirify="1">.html or some CSS wrapped in a code tag and still have it validate I’d love to hear about it. \ doesn’t seem to work nor does wrapping it in quotes and I really don’t want to write things like (less than)$MTArchiveDate format=”%Y/%m/%d”(greater than).
For now this site is not valid XHTML.

I’m in the process of bringing one of the sites I develop up to XHTML compliance, and decided it would be fun to try some CSS tricks as well. Going from a heavily table based layout, with code that is sometimes 6 years old or created by Word to CSS has had its little glitches and SNAFUs but, now that it is basically done I decided to add drop-shadows to the many images displayed on the site.
The interesting thing with this site is that it only has a handful (maybe 5) images that shouldn’t have a shadow applied so I didn’t want to go through and wrap all 300 or so other image tags in a div because I didn’t see any reason to.
After a few tries here is what I came up with:
img {
background: url(/parts/images/shadow.gif) no-repeat bottom right;
padding: 0px 5px 5px 0px;
}
This adds the drop shadows using a simple gif that is clear except the last 5 pixles on the bottom and right where it fades from black to the background color of the site. Here is a Photoshop version of that gif so that you can change the background color to fit your needs.
The real trick was taking the shadow off of the other images without having to add much code, luckily they were mostly already wrapped in divs so I just told those to have no padding and gave them an empty image to display as a backround. (It didn’t work to specify background-image: none which is what I would have liked to do. Any thoughts?)
Then for those couple of other images that were just floating out in never never land, I made a class noshadow:
img.noshadow {
padding: 0px;
background-image: url(/parts/images/empty.gif);
}
I suppose the padding:0px is overkill, but for my purposes it didn’t matter.

My good friend David is in the process of setting up his own Movable Type blog and had some questions about setting up archiving schemes. As I had not set any up I figured I’d give it a try. Here are my findings based on the “Hint 1″ at NSLog().
Here is perhaps a slightly more correct version of ‘Hint 1′ for archiving.

Under Weblog Config:
keep your “Local Archive Path” pointing to the absolute path to the archive directory: /home/html/mt/archives
and keep your “Archive URL” pointing to the archive directory on your server such that it would come up in a browser: http://www.example.com/mt/archives/

In the upper right hand part of the Weblog Config page there is a link to “Archiving” Click it.
On this page you should have two things checked, “Individual” and “Monthly”
In the text box for “Individual” Archive File Template place the following text:
<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d">/<$MTEntryTitle dirify="1">.html

This tells MT to store your files in sub-directories under “Archives” as defined on the main Weblog Config page. These sub directories are of the format Year/Month/Day/ and then your file is named by its title. So %Y/%m/%d turns into 2004/04/01 and then a slash is appended.

Next change the “Monthly” Archive File Template text box to:
<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/"$>index.html

This tells MT to build a page for each month of entries that is placed in the archives directory in sub directories of Year/Month/ and called index.html.
This means that if someone wants to see your entries for the month of March 2004 they would be directed to
http://www.example.com/mt/archives/2004/03/index.html

This is useful if you don’t want all of your blog entries stored in the same folder, or if you plan to have so many blog entries that it will be hard to navigate them in the future.

Keep in mind this only applies to the backend of the blog and your users won’t be the wiser, unless you are converting from having all your blogs in one folder. Then you run into the problem that this re-writes all of your permanent archives to a new folder structure.

I’ve been tinkering today and have my very first tutorial for CSS ready to publish. This is a modification of “The Thrash Box” as described at Vertexwerks combined with the Glish ALA Style (which is based on the sliding doors model found at ALA)along with my own little modifications.
Here is the basic shape of the layout:

The general benefits of this layout model are that you can use a graphic (read pattern or color) background for you box, but you don’t have to make the files huge to slide behind the text.
It consists of 4 corners, and one pattern for the background.
Check out the CSS here:
/* Based on the ThrashBox at http://www.vertexwerks.com/tests/sidebox/ */
/* And, ALA style from Glish http://glish.com/css/9.asp */

.links a {
color: red;
text-decoration: none;
}
.links a:hover {
color: white;
background-color: red;
}
If you just want to see it in action here are the links:
html file
CSS file

The major difference between this and the Thrash box is that I included a footer that holds the two bottom corners, this frees me up to put a background on the area that contains my text as well as on the entire box. In the Thrash box model you have to use the background for the main box part to put in the lower-right corner which means you have to make the file big enough to stretch if the box is dynamic. Mine also gives you a footer at the bottom or padding if left blank.
Let me know what you think of this option, I checked it in Safari, Camino, FireFox, Mozilla, IE 5 Mac, and IE 6 Win, but don’t have IE 5 Win. So far so good.

Been working on the site again, seems like once I finally have it working the way I want, looking good, and pretty much bomber, I find something that needs changing or updating. This time it was my portfolio page. Basically every page on my site except the homepage doesn’t have my blog links that show up on the left on the homepage. This looked odd because it left a 200px gap on the left side of all the pages. My temporary solution is just to give the content area of the page a -200px margin. This works, but I don’t like the necessity of an inline style. What are your solutions for content on pages that don’t have all the navigation? Should I just break the style sheet down into parts and give the pages that don’t have the extra navigation their own style sheet? Or does it make more sense to find a different layout?

If you have visited here over the past few hours you probably noticed a few odd things popping up and moving around. I’ve been updating. I have changed over to Movable type. I like the interface and features much more than phpoxom, though the setup was actually much harder since I was just using php to curl the blog section in the previous method. In the longrun the features and flexibility afforded by movable type will be quite useful I think, and now people can leave feedback right on the page. Expect at least one more style soon as I continue to dink around with some CSS. I realize that none of these designs so far are extraordinary, but they will come.

I’ve made a couple of new styles for the site, nothing spectacular but I do like the blue motif. Links for the styles are now listed at the bottom of the menu. I’m thinking I might have to go the way of the Zen Garden and add in some extra html hooks if I want to explore the possibilities of css. I also looked into refer 2.1 (see below) and have come to the conclusion that I can’t really use it since I don’t have a MySQL database on this site. So sad. If anyone has a different way of managing referrers (posting them automatically) I’d be interested in hearing about it.
I’m also looking for a good blogger that allows replies, but has great filtering too since I’m not really in the market to enlarge my member.

Domain name has been set to www.UpR00ted.com, note zeros not o’s.
Simple explaination: I love root vegetables, I move quite often, there are obvious conotations of roots and trees and the like in what I do in my free time, mainly program and dink around on the web.
This site will eventually become a repository for all things CSS, Mac, etc. that I find/figure out.

Thanks to Ethan over at sidesh0w.com for solving my little “CSS” bug, actually pilot error, using padding to keep the main text flow from overlapping my menu instead of margins. It seems I effectively placed my menus under a nice glass ceiling that they just couldn’t get through. Now we can all enjoy the intended look.
I think I should also pay tribute to Dean Allen and put up a copy of his Refer 2.1 as that was how Ethan found me. I am truly amazed each day at the community that exists in cyberspace. Thanks Ethan. Now maybe I should invest some time finding a good blogger as it seems I might have something to say.

Don’t expect it any time soon, but I plan to add a style switcher ala ALA via some basic PHP. In the meantime, check out my last PHP project of a redesign of my Picture Album, now called Gallery.

After battling CSS bugs for almost a week as you can see I finally have a site re-design. I’m pretty happy with the end result, but as you can see here it isn’t quite what I wanted. It seems there is an odd bug (or perhaps pilot error) in some part of CSS or HTML that stops the links in my right side menu from being usable in any browser besides IE Win. I only have 6 installed so I don’t know if it also works in older versions, but every Mac browser seems to render it nicely, but uselessly.
If anyone has an idea on how to fix this problem, I would appreciate hearing about it.