Monthly Archives: November 2006

Through Tinted Glass – version 3

★ Posted on at 04:21 am ★

Heh, spent the weekend redesigning the photography section and it started out with a random design on my part. I had the basic design elements on it but felt it wasn’t quite right until Vyanne suggested I change the colour scheme a bit. From a drab gray to an earthy clay colour, the same design suddenly seemed to come to life.

For me, the hardest bit with redesigning is settling with a design I like. Once the idea is set, it’s just a matter of converting the visualised image into programmed code. When I first started designing this website 2 years ago, I struggled with the concepts of marrying CSS with HTML. After coming back to the same issues a few times, you get the experience and an intuition on how to work around issues, even if you don’t know the exact code itself (this is where Google comes in and makes up for the lack of knowledge).

For the redesign, I upgraded the WordPress system for the photography section from the ‘ancient’ version 1.5 to the latest 2.0.5. This time around I spent a little more time tweaking the interface, cleaning up a bit to make it less cluttered. I have a slightly better understanding of how WordPress works and starte from an empty slate, putting in only the code I needed instead of having all the if/else statements in the templates that ship with it. This is also the first web design with Web 2.0 elements in it. I have been playing around with AJAX (only yesterday I found out it meant for Asynchronous Javascript and XML) that adds a layer between your browser and the server so content seems a little more dynamic and intuitive to work with (which is the intended objective of this web technology). Heh, I didn’t write much of any code but am pretty good at modifying it to fit my needs.

So what’s new other than the design? A new info/comments part that hides itself away neatly at the bottom of each photo. The info bit now contains the camera settings I was using at the time to reflect how the shot was taken. Even with the wizardry of sprucing up images with Photoshop, you can still learn a lot of how an image was created with the EXIF data. With the extra data entry, posting pictures is slower than before (also getting used to WordPress 2.0′s interface) but am working on that. The best looking bit of the redesign so far is the archives section. It was hacked from a WordPress plugin written by someone else and I modified it to show only the excerpts (which contains the thumbnail data) for each post and the collapsing structure of the monthly links makes the archives page a little easier to navigate.

Like always, most productive prior to an exam. Sadly I need to start studying soon (today!) and will add extra tweaks down the road. This design includes learning experiences from the last one and feels slightly less clunky, so hopefully it will last a year before I start uncovering more useability issues. Heh.

Posted in Design | Comments Off

Dawdling

★ Posted on at 04:43 am ★

Contrast to the prior post, nothing much has happened since then. A good week has lapsed and it seems like I haven’t been doing too much out of the norm for me.

* * *

Just mailed a form out yesterday. A form that I was supposed to have sent out about 8 months back. Heh.

I find that people have this knack for putting of doing stuff if they can. There is a mental block on things you dislike or the other plethora of excuses coming as “it’s not that important, I’ll do it later”, “I need such and such before I can do it, I’ll do it when I have all those items handy” etc. I have been guilty of these excuses far too many times. The item I was supposed to mail out wasn’t urgent, but it was a necessary thing to do, and putting it off for nearly a year is bad. You wonder how I can let something nag at the back of my mind for a year before finally doing it. It wasn’t that hard to begin with. The bad thing was when I originally needed to do said item, all the pieces of information required were sitting together in a stack. Being lazy (for there is nothing more apt to describe it), I piled it in a corner with other things and it got lost. The items would resurface every now and then but one piece would be missing and I’d always put it off. I had this item on my to do list for a few months before I finally wiped it off as an outstanding item.

Heh, down the road when I had cleared out my room a little more, the form reappeared and I finally managed to fill it out and mailed it off. That whole process took little more than 5 minutes, and I waited an entire year to do it. Ouch. In my mind it seemed that I had to spend more time on it than I was willing to give, but in the end, it only took 5 minutes. You just had to sit down, read through the requirements and plan out how you were going to tackle the problem.

It was a small problem with no due date, and unlike assignments and work, there is no due date hence there is no priority in dealing with it. That is our problem at times, not knowing what to prioritise. We are like water, always finding the easiest route through the soil, and missing the intended route we could have gone down. It is a bad habit that one should kick, and there are plenty of examples of people doing it on more serious matters, especially when they require significant time and effort from you later on to fix up. Heh, and I need to constantly remind myself of this so I don’t fall into the lapse of dawdling.

Little Things

★ Posted on at 09:30 pm ★

Lots has happened since last week but never got a chance to really talk about much. Not that it’s really important, but feeling terribly chatty since the long weekend.

Last Thursday went to watch another Melbourne Victory match. Been following most of the home matches and this last match was $20 well spent. Heh, in the opening 10 minutes, there was 5 minutes of minutes where Melbourne would score and the Central Coast Mariners would equalise a minute later. A third goal came from a penalty when a Melbourne defender handled the ball with his hand and was duly sent off. Matters were compounded when Melbourne’s skipper was sent off for a second bookable offense. With 9 men and one goal down, Melbourne still managed to hold the full squad of the opposition and score an equaliser in the last 4 minutes. You could see how dejected the visiting team was.

* * *

Had a long weekend, the longest I’ve had in a while to just chill. Tuesday was the Melbourne Cup, hence a public holiday. Took Monday off as a studying holiday (did manage to study a wee bit) and hence a four day break. Been spending too much time on World of Warcraft. Heh, the expansion is to be released in January and I don’t know what that is going to do to my mental health. I like gaming, but would like to diversify onto other games, especially with the Nintendo Wii coming out in December. I’d like that for a Christmas present. :P

* * *

Learning about personal wealth management these days. So much I don’t know about the tax system, portfolio diversification, how financial instruments work (all a vague memory from university life). I know these things but not in enough detail to do proper planning. It’s a whopping statistic, to know that 11.4% (I think) of income in Australia is spent on debt repayment due to the wonders of that piece of plastic known as the credit card. Was also reading that the best 16% return on investment you can get is to pay off your credit card debt once and for all. That is roughly the interest charged on most credit cards these days.

* * *

Heh, only two more days to the weekend again. Sweet.