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Warren Shea

Archive for the ‘Site Updates’ Category

Radical Web Ideas

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011 at 9:03 pm

I have begun a revamp of my entire site (warrenshea.com). I started yesterday but I was finding warrenshea.com/megaman too hard to fix while maintaining the other themes.

I can change the stylesheet but I can’t change the name of divs in the HTML without changing global code, which means I would have to change the other styles. Anyways, big pain.

What I decided to do, temporarily, is make worldofwarren.com my warrenshea.com dev site, at least while I do these major updates. You could check it out but it might be down…I figure this will take some time to do. I’m excited though.

So anyways: Radical Web Ideas

  1. Combining Stylesheets
    Turning
    -reset.css
    -stylesheet.css
    -stylesheet_blog.css (the wordpress css)
    -print.css
    -prettyPhoto.css (the image viewer)
    into one css.

    But the thing is, there are actually 4 stylesheet.css and 4 stylesheet_blog.css files, one for each theme. So instead of combining 5 stylesheets together, it’s actually combining 11 stylesheets together. That’s actually quite difficult.

    So what I’m doing go to is load a .PHP with a CSS header (instead of a .CSS). I’ll put all my stylesheets for every theme in there, but only output the necessary CSS needed, keeping to stylesheet small, all in one place, and have it only do one call to the server.

  2. Combining Javascripts
    Same deal as above. Rather than call Google and the jsapi (making numerous calls – jquery, jquery-ui, swfobject), I will house all the scripts locally, in one file as well. Also, I call a bunch of scripts too…custom one. I’ll centralize that as well
  3. Get Twitter feed via PHP and Twitter API and output via PHP, w/o JavaScript
    Rather than need Twitter’s JavaScript to load to make the rest of my site load, it will all be PHP, reducing a JavaScript call.
  4. Re-write HTML for many of the pages. A year ago, when I built the site in Apr, I thought my skills were great. Now, I feel my skills are just as good but I can see how bad I used to be. “You don’t know what you don’t know”.. Anyways, I plan to fix some terribly badly named divs, switch some ids to classes, etc.
  5. Re-evaluate my wordpress changes and code/css for those items
  6. Re-do the RSS feeds…currently they’re outputted with wordpress widgets…I want to change it to standalone code written by myself.

Overall, the point is optimization. Yes, my site loads slow (especially lately… :S) and it’s probably me.

Right now:
1 – HTML Request
5 – CSS Request
9 – JS Request

Ideally I want to make it
1 – HTML Request
1 – CSS Request
3 – JS Request (maybe less if I can…)

Anyways…yeah, working on worldofwarren.com as my dev site.

Site Updates – no. freaking. wai.

Monday, February 21st, 2011 at 8:59 pm

Last time I did any site updates was Oct 28 apparently. It’s been 4 months (1/3 of a year) -_-;

Let me first explain why there were site updates:

I’m supposed on-call for work today. What this means is that if I get a call to do work, I have to be available to do it. Now, generally on a day like today, where I’m on call, I would wake up at 9am. Check my work email. If all’s good, go back to sleep for 30m or 45m (wake up via alarm) and check my work email again. After waking up at 9am, and then again at 9:30am, I woke up and checked my email and then…

*cold sweat* my home computer freezes (rare for my Windows 7 nowadays). I restart but the thing fails to bypass the boot screen upon restart. I can see the boot screen fine so my graphics card is okay (not like last time :/). Hard Drive failure? CPU overheat? I assume the latter, despite having 6 fans. I open the case and the inside is a dust ball. Usually I clean it before it gets to this state, I must have been lazy lately. Anyways, I turn off the computer, give it a good compressed air + vacuum + cool down rest….restart it and it’s okay. Whew! :D
It’s 10am now….but due to my *cold sweat*, I’m wide awake. Losing a computer is bad enough but since I’m on call, and today’s a holiday, if I couldn’t get my computer working, I might have to go in to work! And my comp would be broken for at least a day or two…anyways, luckily that didn’t happen :)

It’s 10 and I’m awake but still mentally sleepy…I was bored, going through my recently organized bookmarks, and I decided on a whim to update my site (too sleepy to study, must stay quiet as Z’s still asleep, my options for stuff to do were low).

*11 hours pass, more computer cleaning was done, naps, eatings, watching Edward Scissorhands, image resizing and stuff….leads us to now*

So, site updates:

  1. Unsecured my Resume section. Partly because I couldn’t remember my own username/password and had to check my inline code every time I wanted to see it. Partly because I was originally worried that people were stealing the format but now I’m not worried so much about that…
  2. Finally updated my Links section! It’s not perfect, I still want to write blurbs for every site…but…well, I accomplished a lot so far. Go check it out! :D

Site Updates – Re-categorization: Complete

Thursday, October 28th, 2010 at 12:20 am

It only took forever….

Anyways, it’s more usable now…

and much uglier.

…but i’m looking more at the usability and functionality of it than the design

Site Updates…sorta

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010 at 5:44 pm

Is this a legit comment?

It looks legit, it’s well written…and a possible valid concern. To be honest, I never even tested Opera ever….

**time passes**

Okay, installed Opera. My site works fine! >_< Actually...I'm surprised, Opera scrolls more smoothly than Chrome. Also, it loads faster...but too fast. When I go to my site, I see the page sans stylesheets....but those items get loaded a second later. I don't really like that...but again, everything seems to work as expected in Opera. +10 points for crossbrowser developing w/o testing!



Categories

I’m in the process of re-categorizing everything…but it’s quite the daunting task to re-categorize ~250 posts. Especially when the posts are like….all random :S
But I guess you have to spend money to make money mess things up to clean them up? I better think of categories and sub-categories first before I start…

**Unfinalized Categories**
My Life:
-Accomplishments/To Do (Monthly)
-Dwarf Hamsters
-Friends
-Introspection
-LOLs
-Daily Randomness
-Insightful Reads

Reviews:
-Anime & Manga
-TV Shows & Movies
-Restaurants

Shopping:
-Products I Own
-Products I Want To Buy
-New Stuff (Monthly)

Warrenshea.com:
-Site Updates
-Blogging about Blogging (Monthly)

Art & Design
-Web
-Photography

Development:
-New Technologies
-Web
-.NET
-PHP
-XHTML
-CSS

Developers start counting at 0

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010 at 4:45 pm

So I spent a good hour or so trying to get subcategories to show up on the right panel….
It wasn’t showing up, despite putting in parameter for it (below)…so I thought maybe it was the wordpress code I’d modified. That wasn’t it either.

To show categories, you have to put:
<?php wp_list_categories(‘depth=1‘); ?>

By default, wordpress shows subcategories…so you just have to specify the depth.

So here I’m thinking all categories belong in depth 0
Subcategories belong in depth 1
Subsubcategories belong in depth 2, and so on.

And after of trying to debug this, (and I probably should have done this at the start), I modified depth to 2 and it worked.

So basically,
Categories belong in depth 1
Subcategories belong in depth 2…
and so on.

Man, I feel stupid…but…it’s an honest mistake no? I guess I’m just so used to counting at 0, especially when I see all this code….”who starts counting at 1?” I asked myself…but…the answer is non-developers. But still, this *is* still PHP code…so…man, i dunno.

Anyways. Time wasted….

I need to re-categorize everything. I hate my categories. Can’t find/do anything.