My wife and I have wanted to work together on a project for a long time. It took as a while to figure out just what that project might be. Well after many evenings of conversations over some great Cabernet's we came up with the idea of publishing some of her short stories she was working on as a hobby.
We thought the idea of publishing it in serial fashion in weekly installments was a rather "novel" idea. (Pun intended) A lot of the web based fiction or weblit seemed to be very scifi/fantasy/horror based. My wife writes in closer to a chicklit or literature based style so we are trying to build a readership of people who may not be aware they can read fiction online. This will likely be the biggest problem for the website, attracting the kind of audience that would enjoy her fiction. Therein lies my challenge, and so far it's one I've been enjoying.
So please if you enjoy fiction or simply want to peek at what where up to. Please check out The Secret Loft.
I will be hopefully updating later on some of the marekting techniques, programming tricks another bits of information I glean from this project.
I'm not going to tell you what to buy, and I'm not going to tell you how to buy it. But I am going to tell you where most people make some very bad decisions about computer purchases.
Recently I was in the Market for a laptop. My son is now 5 years old and he tends to be on the computer a fair bit. My wife who had little experience with computers before I met her really enjoys her time on the computer now. It was starting to become a bit of a conflict between them. So I decided a laptop would probably be the best solution to the problem. Read the rest of this entry »
Now when I say cool, I don't mean it in that Hip-Hop Rapper of the day way. No. I mean in the only way I know. The iPhone toting Geek Chic way.
In the last year cbc.ca has launched a number of programs aimed squarely at the tech crowd. This set in general tends to be a younger audience than the Vinyl Cafe listening set that the CBC is normally attributed to.
I'm talking about some very timely and poignant programs such as Spark and Search Engine, and the online radio station that is CBC Radio 3. But beyond the new tech related programming they have also introduced Digg style article voting and a iPhone version of the site as well as podcasts on pretty much every program they have.
This all leads me to wonder, where did this come from. Now I'm sure our conservative government didn't put them up to it. And I can't seem to find any information on just what spurred this on but I have to say I'm impressed.
I think the only way for Old Media to survive is to embrace the new media spectrum with open arms. Radio 3 is a great example of putting new media to the test. They have full on demand song streaming for most independent Canadian musicians and maintain a full schedule of original programing every week. This is something that the more conservative laws of the US would most certainly want to shut down (and have).
I congratulate you CBC keep up the good work, I'll be sure to keep listening (online).
I admit it, sometimes I'm just plain lazy when I write my code. I know better but sometimes that time you just tested something in code manages to stick around a lot longer than you expected.
It happens to you too, even if you don't want to admit it.
This happened to me the other day actually, I mistakenly named a variable in my Javascript code "status". This as it turns out was a big mistake. The code I wrote ran fine in Firefox but when I flipped over to Internet Explorer to test nothing was working. After an embarrassingly long time trying to find the error there it was, and to fix it all I had to do was change the variable name.
So in my function I had something like:
status=objectRef.innerHTML;
The problem is for some unknown and seemingly unfixed reason Internet Explorer references the variable status over to the window.status object. Window.status is the text that displays in the status area at the bottom of your browser. So if you set the variable status to a value in side your function the status area in your browser changes as well.
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It's true I love transparencies, unfortunately the great minds at Microsoft did not feel the way I did until they released IE7. You see IE6 lacks the inherit ability to cope with the transparency layer in PNG files. There are of course a lot of hacks to get around this which I will not go in depth into today.
If you want to read more about PNG's and IE6 read this post.
Instead I would like to show a technique that I have used recently to create dynamic interfaces using a minimal set of graphic files.
Here is the problem I'm trying to solve. I have a site that has a wonderful gradient Menu bar/ Nav Panel/ Box/ whatever that needs to change color or have multiple colors. Now what you could do is make a bunch of different back grounds for each color you want or (my technique) have a transparent PNG cover the solid CSS based background color and simply change the color in CSS to match.
Here is an example of what a typical transparent nav bar will look like...
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