Exposed To Want » Website Building

More Random Things…

cliff538 — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 20:44:32 +0000

HTML 5 Demos and Examples great place to play with new features from HTML5 put together by Remy Sharp. Well worth spending some time playing with the new features and planning how to implement into your projects.

When Can I Use compatibility tables for features in HTML5, CSS3, SVG and other upcoming web technologies. Another great spot to see when new features are implemented.

Have you ever needed to show somebody 800 miles away how to do something on their computer? Screen sharing is a great way to do that. I have been using the screen sharing feature in Skype but I have found the new darling in the screen sharing world… hands down the best way (for free). Much better speed and resolution than Skype. Check it out here at Adobe Acrobat.

I’ve been using WordPress with the Thesis Theme for a few months now and to do advanced custom stuff it really helps to have a foundation in PHP, I have found a great course over at lynda.com that really goes over PHP well and then jumps into MySQL so you can make a full featured web application. I think it’s worth signing up for if you want to learn PHP/MySQL from a good instructor. The course if called PHP with MySQL Essential Training by Kevin Skoglund.

After you spend some time coding you’ll start to acquire pieces or chunks of code that you frequently use or want to save for later. I have been using Snipplr and it seems to fit well. You can save and organize all your code snippets. Well worth the look if you don’t have a system yet for saving your snippets. If you have found something better or really like what your using, let me know what it is

Thats it for now, Never Stop Learning!

Just Some Random Things

cliff538 — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 00:21:56 +0000

For a very good video on using firebug to extract information from your css watch kristarella explain it here.

Another great web site for videos on science, math, and computer science is Peteris Krumin’s “Free Science and Video Lectures Online!”

I have found new FTP software that I am just crazy about! Hands down my new favorite, tons of options and a very clean easy to use layout, and I swear it’s faster. Transmit 3 by Panic.

I have never used a dedicated RSS reader before and to be honest I have been missing out. It’s kind of like twitter in a way, you get this great stream of customized information that you can digest/move through very quickly. After a small learning curve I have moved all of my feeds to NetNewsWire and it absolutely rocks! Everything is now organized and keeps in sync with Google Reader. You can very quickly move down your feeds scanning/pausing for the ones you want to read and just by-passing the rest with just using your space-bar. When all of my feeds were in Safari I had to click on each individual one, wait for the page to load and then scroll through. With NNW all your feeds are in one list, broken down into folders if you want, and this allows you to scan down and read everything very quickly, pausing on the stuff you want to read word for word. There are tons of options for sorting, viewing, filing, and syncing. It even has it’s own built in browser that will open up in a new tab for when you want to have a look at the web site without leaving NNW. If you have never used a RSS reader before take the time to check this one out, it’s free and it will change the way you look at feeds.

The new and improved “Exposed To Want” blog is still powered by WordPress but I am now using the Thesis theme. I will write up a blog post later after I have had time to play with it more, but for now Chris Pearson has really hit on something. It is a very well done and easy to use theme up to a point. Advanced stuff is a different story and you have to really dive into the forums and search the web for people who have written tutorials on how to do things that you think should be easy. I have played with 20+ themes and thesis is the best so far. With that said, I’m still very frustrated with WordPress as a whole due to my lack of PHP skills and not having a really good solid understanding of how WordPress is all hooked together. It takes hours of study to figure out how to do basic things that I could do on a “normal” web site in 10 minutes. Don’t take that as a slam or complaint because it’s not! WordPress is an incredible and powerful backend to your blog or web site and that power brings with it complexity… you just have to take the time to learn some PHP, and how WP is structured. You can do an awful lot by just cutting and pasting other peoples code into your site, the whole WP and Thesis community is great, I have found nothing but great people who usually are more than willing to help out and share what they have learned. I can also say nothing but great things about Thesis support, there forums are teeming with help!
Alright enough said about that for now, look forward to a full write up about Thesis.

If your using WordPress and you want to know more about it, I highly recommend the new book “Digging Into WordPress” by Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr. You can buy a .pdf version that will be updated or get a very nicely bound spiral lay flat hardcover. I bought both because I want these really smart guys to keep imparting there wisdom and knowledge on us!

Wrapping this thing up. The (I think) very cool header above spelling out ExposedToWant.com in pictures of letters from flickr is a fine project from Erik F. Kastner called Spell with Flickr. You can refresh this page and get different pictures. It’s very cool, go check it out. Yes, I’ll say it yet again: Never Stop Learning!

WP Plug-in for Mobile Phone Viewing

cliff538 — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 01:06:50 +0000

Had to show you this very cool WordPress plug-in for viewing your blog or Web site on a mobile device. I can not do it justice by describing all the features, so just check it out here, WPtouch: Mobile Plugin

I have been seeing this on many blogs that I visit on my iphone and have been wondering how they do it, with a little bit of research I found this. Here it is with my blog:

If you don’t like viewing the site this way you can shut it off with a slider switch at the bottom, very nice touch:

There are drop down menus to access your other pages:

It’s very easy to install and set-up. You can use default icons or upload custom ones. They ask for donations on there page and this one is well worth donating a few dollars, a lot of time and effort has gone into this plug-in. Download it and check it out with your blog. Never Stop Learning!

Great Articles Covering JQuery

cliff538 — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 01:00:52 +0000

Wanted to drop off these great JQuery articles written by Michael Abernethy to you, I have been going through my Head First JavaScript book and keep dabbling over into JQuery…. hard to keep focused on just one thing you know! Well, here are a series of articles that cover JQuery very well, they are really worth the read. Alright it’s back to the lessons in my JavaScript book… Cheers! and remember Never Stop Learning.

Working with jQuery, Part 1: Bringing desktop applications to the browser

Working with jQuery, Part 2: Building tomorrow’s Web applications today

Working with jQuery, Part 3: Rich Internet applications with jQuery and Ajax : JQuery: Building tomorrow’s Web apps today

Watch These Great JQuery Screencasts

cliff538 — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:44:40 +0000

Just found these yesterday, there is nothing like watching things being done. Go to iTunes and get all of these they are great. Click the iTunes link to go straight there.

Here is the link to the web site “JQuery For Designers” so you can roam around, be sure to look at the written tutorials as well, there are some good ones.

If I knew it was that easy… finally rounded corners

cliff538 — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 00:22:10 +0000

If I knew it was that easy my corners would of been rounded when I made the site! I was just poking around the web a week or so back and found an article on “moz border” and “webkit”, turns out you just add this to your CSS and boom you have rounded corners, at least in Safari, FireFox and Chrome. Since I do not do web sites for a living and don’t have customers, I can for now…. forget IE and most importantly IE6 for now. I have too much other stuff on my plate right now to worry about IE work-arounds. (then today, I find out thru twitter that IE6 still has 25% of the browser market locked up!……. why don’t these people upgrade?)

So, here is how my CSS looks to get my rounded corners:

#sidebar ul li a:hover { background-color: #046380; color: #fff; -moz-border-radius: 5px; -webkit-border-radius: 5px; border-radius: 5px; -khtml-border-radius: 5px; }


#sidebar ul li a#active {

	background-color: #369;

	color: #fff;

	-moz-border-radius: 5px;

	-webkit-border-radius: 5px;

	border-radius: 5px;

	-khtml-border-radius: 5px; }

#sidebar h3.sidebar { background-color: #a7a37e; color: white; margin: 4px 4px 4px 4px; padding: 4px 2px 2px 2px; letter-spacing: 2px; font-size: 1em; -moz-border-radius: 5px; -webkit-border-radius: 5px; border-radius: 5px; /* future proofing */ -khtml-border-radius: 5px; /* for old Konqueror browsers */}

So overall it’s incredibly easy to get rounded corners at least in three browsers. I was initially thrown because the information I first saw about rounded corners was all about placing four small pictures into your css with the background tag. Seemed to much at the time. Now you can just download a CSS Snippet over at css-tricks.com and paste it right into your css. Chris has now got a great selection of snippets that you can download right into Coda or TextMate, really saves a lot of time typing and having to remember the syntax. In my last state of learning update I talked about switching over to my new Text Editor that I’m in love with Coda. If you’ve never checked it out, download it, you won’t be sorry. Great Product.
Here is the exact snippet of what gets pasted into your CSS, just fill in your radius Xpx number, 10 is set by default in the snippet:
-moz-border-radius: 10px; -webkit-border-radius: 10px; border-radius: 10px; /* future proofing */ -khtml-border-radius: 10px; /* for old Konqueror browsers */

Now, go round some corners before they go out of style! ; )

Rounded Corners-A Starting Place

cliff538 — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:43:25 +0000

Have not played with this yet, but researched it a little bit and wanted to drop a quick note about a good starting place. Basically it sounds like you can use JavaScript to round your corners and it works in all the major browsers. In your CSS you can use -moz-border-radius: Xpx, Xpx, Xpx, Xpx; to round your corners but it only works in in Firefox. You can use -webkit-border-radius: Xpx, Xpx, Xpx, Xpx; and this works in Safari. So the choice is yours, use JavaScript once and it works for all browsers or use both -moz and -webkit and forget about IE.

Good short video to watch this all in action here.
Scroll down to bottom video, it’s called how to make rounded corners with CSS and JavaScript.

Complete run-down from Mozilla Development Center here.

Better get learning how to round corners!

MAMP and WordPress Up and Running

cliff538 — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 19:43:20 +0000

Good to be back on the blog today! I actually had to work this week, I hate it when work gets in the way of my technology habit.

Last week I got MAMP on my MacBookPro up and running with WordPress Installed. It is the only way to go! I have to admit I have been doing lots of “live” editing of the CSS on my theme and playing with completely different themes. Now I have my exact WordPress setup installed and running on my MBP and can experiment and tweak without making the actual changes to the live blog. This is a much better system for dealing with WordPress and when you move onto making webpages that use AJAX and PHP you can test right on your computer without having to wait for uploads to your live server. Now lets get into the meat of how this went, what I learned.

I thought about doing a complete step-by-step tutorial on how to do this with screenshots and such but I would just be repeating what others have already done. I am brand new at all of this, so I figure if I just show you the “tools” that I used and share any problems that I had with you it should be helpful. Please feel free to ask questions if you run into something I said that you don’t understand, I will try and help.

First Step: So, the first thing to do is watch this video by Andrew Gormley. Andrew does a great job and explains the limitations of the mac built-in Apache Server and steps you through installations of MAMP on your computer and then lightly touches on each feature within MAMP.
Notes: for right now do not worry about MAMP Pro, I will touch on this at the end. Follow Andrews directions and just stick with the free version of MAMP it is the only version most users will need. MAMP and MAMP Pro will install together, you get to use the Pro version for a trial test period then will have to pay. For now just use MAMP it’s what Andrew uses in his video.

Second Step: Now that you have MAMP installed and running you need to install WordPress or other CMS, there are other videos here at the MAMP Vimeo Channel on installing other CMS like Joomla. The next video is by Andrew also and is the start of step 2 watch it here. This video takes you through downloading WordPress and installing it into the proper MAMP directory and creating your first MySQL database. This was great learning for me, I did not understand the relationships between all the components like I should and doing these steps really made things clear.
Notes: If you follow everything through you should not have any problems at all, this is a very easy set-up. If you have to ever set-up WordPress manually on a real server this is exactly how you would do it also. I went back into my “real” server and played with everything to make sure things would of worked the same way. CAUTION! Be very careful experimenting with the back-end of your live server, you can screw things up in a hurry. I say this out of experience! yes, I screwed up my blog and took it off-line because in the process of getting into my SQL database to copy things I changed the password and then my WordPress PHP could not access the database. This was a simple fix of exactly what Andrew does in the video of going into your WordPress files (wp-config.php) via FTP and changing your database name and password. By the way, I had lousy support from my hosting provider, they do not help at all with your screw ups of your system files. I hope that your hosting company has better help than mine, I probably need to change.

Third Step: This one is optional but really helps in your theme and design process. You now have WordPress up and running on your MAMP server but now it helps to have your exact theme and blog content. Just go into your WordPress admin page like normal and everything works the same, download your current theme or if you have a customized theme copy it from your live server and paste it into your MAMP server. You will find all your theme files in your main WordPress folder under wp-content/themes. Once you have your theme downloaded it’s nice to have all of your content so you can truly see how changes to your theme look with all of your list’s, pictures, paragraphs, etc. you do this right in your WordPress admin, under the Tools Tab on your current blog go to tools and then export, save the file then on your MAMP WordPress admin page go to Tools and Import, here you can import the file you just exported and poof, you have all of your content. Now you can experiment away without having to make real changes to your live blog.

Final Notes: This is pretty painless if you follow the videos, I did have one problem that I could not solve and that was using MAMP Pro. I always tend to gravitate to the “upgraded” version of everything for the advanced tools and I like to support the folks that spend a ton of time making these wonderful pieces of software. I bought MAMP Pro and tried to set things up using it and would always get a permission denied message when trying to access my database. I believe it’s a small setting but hours of messing with it brought no fix for me. I ended up re-installing MAMP which comes with MAMP Pro but just using MAMP to setup my server not MAMP Pro. You always use the MAMP directory for installing databases and web pages but you have the option of using the MAMP Pro Interface for your settings and using advances features. Once you start using MAMP Pro you have to stick with it, if you set up your WordPress under the pro version and then try to access it with the regular free MAMP things will not work well, there is a caution against this on the MAMP FAQ, and a warning box on your computer if you start MAMP and not MAMP Pro. So, maybe you will have better luck with the Pro version than I had but for now I’m just using the free version and will play with the Pro version when I have time trying to get it to work. I will let you know when I solve the problem. I really want the Pro version to work, it has some very good advanced features.
I hope this helps you get things up and running, Never Stop Learning!

Links you will need all in one place:

Pixelmator Rocks

cliff538 — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:27:30 +0000

Pixelmator Image Editing and More!

Pixelmator will blow your doors off! It was built exclusively for Mac OS X and it’s called the image editor for the rest of us. Lets face it Photoshop is expensive. I have Photoshop and I think you should too, but if you can’t afford it right now buy Pixelmator heck even if you own Photoshop I still think you should buy it. It’s a beautiful, well laid out piece of software with incredible usability. It’s 59 bucks and you can find 10 percent off coupons online. It’s fun, and getting better and better, they just released version 1.5. Here is a great page of tutorials to get you started Abduzeedo Pixelmator Tuts.

MAMP on Vimeo

cliff538 — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:51:36 +0000

If you have started messing around with MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP)(It’s a Web-Server right on your computer) or WAMP (Windows) You’ll want to know about the new Video channel over at Vimeo. Watching the videos to learn more is on my short list.

MAMP on Vimeo.