Codemonkey

Let’s Get Naked

Put you clothes back on, no one needs to see that. I’m not talking about humans, I’m talking about their websites. The event is called CSS Naked Day and is the brainchild of Javascript guru Dustin Diaz. For one whole day, people around the world remove the CSS code from their website. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. It’s used to have better control over the look and feel of one’s website. The event is geared towards promoting better (x)HTML practices. You should be able to use a website without the help of CSS. The event simply helps raise awareness about it. This is the third year the even has been held. The day of the event is changed each year. This year it’s being held on the 9th of April.

Want to join in? Head over to CSS Naked Day on Dustin Diaz’s website. There you can find out more about the project, and you can sign up your website on a list of participating websites. Have fun.

I almost forgot. If you’re a Wordpress user, there is a great little extension that will do this for you. It’s simply called The CSS Naked Day plugin. It’s great if you don’t want to mess with your blog’s design.

Posted in Code, Design, PHP | No Comments »

Youtube Un-XHTML

Why doesn’t Google force Youtube to output XHTML? I’m not talking about the website either. I’m talking about the embed code to embed video in blogs, myspace, etc. I shouldn’t have to use tools like the Valid XHTML Youtube Embed Code Generator from Tools4Noobs. This should be built into the Youtube functionality. It’s great they have a working API, but they should fix little things like this first. And does anyone know why Youtube was down for maintenance?

Sorry about the plethora of Youtube posts, but I’m working on a vlog and this is something that was irritating me. It also made my website XHTML invalid.

Posted in Code, Rant | No Comments »

Youtube API Released/Updated

Okay, I’ve been slacking on the Google APIs lately. However, the new/updated Youtube API looks promising. It includes chrome-less video window option (video window without the controls). It also has complete Javascript interface for the videos. Javascript controls include play/pause/seek. It will also inform you of the time the video is at and whether it’s buffering or not. That was a pretty dis-organized explanation. Just watch the video, and it will explain everything. I have some great ideas for this API.

Posted in Code, Javascript | No Comments »

Slowed

Is Time Warner capping bandwidth? This is making it impossible to listen to any kind of audio, like podcasts and the like. Does anyone know about this? It took two hours to download a 50 minute podcast. It went from cable to dial-up speed. Most pages where loading fine.

It’s fixed now, but that was annoying. I couldn’t do much.
I hope this doesn’t happen again

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Twitter Showing Its Stress Marks

If you’ve been living under a rock, or you’re out of the “Tech” loop. I’m here to inform you that #1 South by Southwest, the annual geek festival in Austin has arrived. South by Southwest is a festival to show off and discuss Music, Movies, and Websites. But most of the Web Proffesionals, all of whom I envy, go specifically for the web and interactive section of the show.

One major way to follow the drama is through a service called Twitter.com. Unfortunately for it’s users, the site is not very dependable during periods of high stress, like when all of the geeks just got out of a great SxSW talk and have to twitter about it, for example. This whole week (11 days to be precise), twitter is going to be worse than watching paint dry. It will be up for two seconds than down for five. It also has a habit of losing posts when many people are posting at the same time.


Large conferences and conventions like SxSW, will be completely covered by at least 3 dedicated tech fan who scours over everything and looks for something interesting and keeps his ear out for something interesting at the conference. Then 50 people will see that and it gets “re-twittered”. And then everyone ends up hearing about it, like Crack the Whip or Telephone. And when people over excitedly post about something, things begin to break, which in Twitter’s case is almost everyday. The Twitter guys are amazing. and We should be thankful that they opened their service up to the public.

Stress Marks or no Stress Marks, We will always love twitter. There’s just something about it.

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One Night Redesign

Yesterday, I saw that Matt McInerney had recently updated his site, Pixelspread. I looked at the grunge-ish background and thought, “I can do something with that”. So I fired up Paint.NET (don’t make fun, I have $2 in my bank account and no room for Photoshop or Fireworks). So I took my free little .NET program and added the Sepia tone to it, which is often used to make photographs look old. It was a really interesting effect.


So I took some art I stole off of iStockPhoto (I’m poor, like I already told you). A couple of filters later, I ended up with this great dark brown tone. So I adapted what I had designed on top of Pop Blue, a Wordpress theme by Bob. Since it was licensed under the Creative Commons, I was safe to do whatever I wanted to it (so long I don’t make money off my creation).

After I thought I was finally done, I stumbled upon a little lonely air freshener that caught my eye. It was a free vector that a guy was giving away (I lost the link to his site). The file was in .eps (photoshop file), so I couldn’t open it. Well, I ended up saving the low quality preview of it. Then I took my magic photo skill and managed to get it by itself. And then threw it onto my profile to see if it would stick (bad pun). The original name for the theme was Grunge Code. But once I put the air freshener (pine scent) up, it took on a woodsy profile. So I named it ‘The Great Outdoors’. I’m going to put it up for download when I have time. Meanwhile, Enjoy the fresh pine-scented site. Leave a comment if you like the design (even if you don’t leave a comment why ).

Posted in Design | 1 Comment »

Googlebot

Has anyone ever noticed how fast Google finds changes in your site? I just set up this Wordpress install and got my design working. Then I searched Google, and they already had the updated version of my site! They even had the little test lorem ipsum test page I did while checking my design. I guess Google is #1 for a reason. But how could it tell my site was going to be updated. How is Google that effective at spidering websites? This just blew my mind.

Well, this wasn’t much of a first post. But I’m sure many others have had similar experiences like this. Leave a comment if you have.

P.S. I love the spellchecker in Firefox. It has saved me from many spelling nightmares.

Posted in Code | 1 Comment »