IE sucks

I didn’t think it could ever happen, I thought my heart had hardened even to the THOUGHT of it

and then I googled “ie sucks”

and voila! - true love at first sight.

And for all of you retards challenged people STILL using IE - would you download Firefox already and make a whole lotta geeks lives so much happier.

kthxbai.

I am not an idiot.

That being said, I realize that wordpress is a superior product to other blogging platforms such as blogger.  But boys and girls, I have to say that in no way, shape or form is this more user friendly than the blogger platform.  And I also know that “user friendly” is a bad word to a lot of you geeks out there… but no matter what we are designing, programing or creating, isn’t USABILITY the most key of factors?

It took me the better part of TEN hours to get this page looking like it should and it still does not have all the functionality that I would prefer it to have.  I’m a WEB DESIGNER PEOPLE!  I’m not a good web designer, but this is BLOGGING SOFTWARE.

I realize that the functionality is there, waiting for me to find it… but why is it so hard to find?  I feel that the unlimited customization that you get through wordpress - is actually limiting.

Not all themes work on your version of wordpress

Not all themes can use widgets

Not all plug-ins can be used in themes

You have to find the perfect combination of themes, widgets and plug-ins that all work harmoniously to create a blog that you can actually read and use.

And you call that a Dashboard?  At least google (the owners of blogger) have a DESIGN team and does not expect a programmer to DESIGN a user interface.

So, I guess this is when I close my eyes and hope that all the geeks are right for once - that this software is going to change my life, make me happy, bring world peace once and for all and vibrate.

It damn well better.

I had promised details about my awesome job and never delivered. What can I say, I just liked the suspense.

I really love the job. For my career I see myself doing something much more creative than what I am required to do here. Everything we do has to conform to “standards”, but since I’ve never done anything like this, the structure is a perfect environment for learning the basics.

What I do like is the attention to detail and good web practices our department has insisted the company adopt as part of their standards. A LOT of the work I do is converting old sites into more current, clean and web friendly code.

For those of you who have NO idea what I’m talking about, I’ll give you a little example, I took this code

<.table align="center" width="100%" class="tableBorderLIGHT".>

<_tr>

<.td align="center" style="padding-left:10px;"><_a href="ME_CaseLaw.htm" target="mainFrame" class="pages">Case Law<_/a>

<_/td>

<_td align="center"><_a href="ME_statutes.htm" target="mainFrame" class="pages">Statutes<_/a>

<_td align="center"><_a href="ME_courtrules.htm" target="mainFrame" class="pages">Court Rules<_/a>

<_/td>

<_td align="center"><_a href="ME_Admin.htm" target="mainFrame" class="pages">Admin. Materials<_/a>

<_/td>

<_/tr>

<_/table>

Which is the code for the RED navigation in this picture:

And I changed that code to this:

<_table class="top_tablewidth">

<_tr>

<_td class="toplink"><_a href="ME_CaseLaw.htm" target="mainFrame" class="pages">Case Law<_/a><_/td>

<_td class="toplink"><_a href="ME_statutes.htm" target="mainFrame" class="pages">Statutes<_/a><_/td>

<_td class="toplink"><_a href="ME_courtrules.htm" target="mainFrame" class="pages">Court Rules<_/a><_/td>

<_td class="toplink"><_a href="ME_Admin.htm" target="mainFrame" class="pages">Admin. Materials<_/a><_/td>

<_/tr>

<_/table>

Which made it look like this visually

Not a lot of changes, but it looks better and fits into our web standards. This particular site had 25 pages I had to make changes to. I also made it all uniform, so the spaces between the forms were even on every page and lined up, and also made a welcome page (that you see here on the right) that logs the users by last name.

And that’s it! That is what I do all day, and I love it… for now.

I sit in a little cubical that is about 10×10 and grey.

<_offtopic>

SOMEONE JUST BROUGHT ME A PEANUT BUTTER RICE CRISPY TREAT THE SIZE OF TEXAS ON A BIG MAP.

<_/offtopic>

I have a dry erase board that I haven’t written on yet, two CSS books I checked out from the library we have on the first floor, and a little drawer I keep some files in. OOOOH and I have pushy pins, to hang random things up with. I <3 href="http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/berlinvideo/">watch this now. Mega stud’s that attract 200,000 Germans, here’s to hoping he doesn’t sell out to the man.

PS: 12 more wake ups till I leave for Atlantic City… watch out Jersey.

… of the emergency ‘whether or not I can blog from work’ broadcast system…

THIS IS ONLY A TEST. (aka: my boss is at lunch)

Since I’m here, let me share with you the latest things that have made me laugh. You can find them here and here.

Enjoy.

Other things of note:

• CSS kinda makes me wanna cry occasionally, but they are tears of joy. If only I could borrow Hrbek’s brain from 8-5 M-F. WHAT SAY YOU, HRBEK??***
• It is hard to unpack when you have no where to put things.
• Sheila is going to help me with the above this weekend, (shhh, it’s a surprise).
• I thought I was over it, but NOPE, I still heart men over 40. Wait a minute, I heart men under 40 too… hmmmm…
• Right now, my left tricep is twitching.
• Friday, poker, my place… is it in?
• I am never going to blog in complete sentences again, unordered lists are OBV the way to go.

***So, since you’re here already… I’m currently trying to clean up some sloppy HTML in tables with CSS, but I kinda suck at CSS and know very little about it. I’ve actually managed to get thru this whole site and replace almost all the crap with smaller crap (holler!). But here’s one I can’t seem to figure out -
<_table width="188px" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
Is it even possible to create cellpadding and spacing in CSS? If so, tell me how O WISE ONE!

Tables suck btw.

And, not the streaking kind…

I didn’t design this or anything, it was just a homework assignment. I couldn’t get the logo quite right (well I guess I could’ve, but I didn’t), the L part is a lil skewed, and the shadow of the orb is a too dense, which causes my highlight to be too white.

Anyhow, a certain someone was asking me about flash (no not lynx) so I thought I’d throw this up there. So far, I’m liking it much better than Dreamweaver. We will see how I feel when I start tweening and linking etc.