Warren Shea - World of Warren

Archive for the ‘Site Updates’ Category

warrenshea.com VS CGI Timeout

Sunday, October 24th, 2010 at 7:08 am

It took a while, but I’ve finally removed that pesky CGI Timeout issue….I think.

I’m pretty sure it’s been caused by having the themes session variable you’ve all been using when you browse my site. I imagine that because the session variables are stored on a session server, if the session server takes too long retrieving the variable, my page can’t load….so it times out.

I’ve rectified the issue by making the theme variable store inside a javascript cookie. Anyways, here’s hoping this fixes it! :D

I’ve been updating my last post, Vacation Time frequently! I may not blog much during my vacation but I plan to keep that schedule updated!

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Some changes for warrenshea(.com)

Sunday, October 17th, 2010 at 9:44 pm

I need to make some changes (in life). But I’m going to post about how I’m going to make some changes to warrenshea.com and my blog instead.

I’ve decided a couple things.

The first day of every month, I will post
1. What I have accomplished in the month before and
2. What I plan to accomplish in the following month.
I will try to be realistic….

The 15th day of every month, I will post a status of where I am.

The second day of every month, I will post
1. What I plan to buy/receive for that month. It will give me something to look forward to during the month.
2. What I received in the previous month that wasn’t planned.

After my vacation….I might try to do the 9-5 for work. I haven’t done that for months now…
The thing with 10-6 is that when I come in late, I feel guilty if I leave before 6…but once I start to stay past 5, I stay for a lot longer because it gets quiet and I get in my groove.

I’m hoping that with that 9-5 schedule, I can get more a standard schedule. With that, I can judge my tasks and timelines accordingly and not overwhelm myself with tasks. I’m getting too comfortable working overtime….it has become something that occurs far too often lately.

I’ve also decided not to make posting goals (ie. this month – posting 1 post/day) ever again. It led to some of my least proud posts…some that I wanted to post (like how people find me from google) but I wanted them to be written better. I do feel I redeemed some of them with my Reliable to succeed. Passionate to excel. I really like that post and the thought that went around it.

I want to re-categorize and reorganize all my (241 -_-;) posts. I don’t like the categories right now….I don’t even know what’s in Awesomesauce, Epic Fail…

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Site updates and annoyances

Thursday, September 23rd, 2010 at 6:18 pm

Site update:
My homepage, the blog aspect, and all my themes on warrenshea.com is now HTML valid! I learned you cannot, validly, put an anchor tag around a div tag….so i had to modify my megaman icons as well as my social media icons to have div around empty anchor. set the anchor to width 100% and height 100% and you’re golden.

Annoyances:
I almost always have my GMail open. My favorite and most used theme is my GMail theme (it’s so easy to read stuff on it!). The fav icon for my theme is done a little TOO well, I get my site and my gmail confused all the time! it’s certainly annoying to build something and, even though you built it, have it bother you…and not be able to change it (because it’s perfect the way it is!)

EDIT:
oh man, i completely forgot. there’s an addition to the gmail theme I wanted to do like, 2 weeks ago but forgot about it. i’ll do that asap, it should be quick. nothing special but kinda interesting.

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Site Updates

Sunday, September 19th, 2010 at 6:47 pm

1. I developed a theme which is virtually inaccessible unless you have/use IE6 or IE7. No longer is there a warning regarding the use of IE6, no longer is there a weird PNG image of the title in IE6. Currently, the IE6 and IE7 users will only see the blogger theme, modified slightly for IE6 and IE7. They will no longer be able to view various themes as the “Choose your theme” div has been display: none’d. IE6 and IE7 issues solved. Finally. GTFO.

2. I modified the way the social media icons and Mega Man icons appear. The social media icons and the inner part of the Mega Man buttons are both 1 image now, with the image components beside each other. Basically, used the idea of sprites rather than individual images.

The social media change reduces http requests from 6 to 1.
The Mega Man theme reduces http requests from 14 to 3.

I also modified the hover aspect so that it’s no longer JavaScript and is purely CSS. These should improve load on all pages with significant improvement to the Mega Man theme. Unfortunately, due to the complexity of the images, I couldn’t/didn’t do anything with the Naruto theme.

3. I updated the About Me section. I wanted to add more images and stuff to make it interesting but that would involve digging up images from my storage unit, looking through pictures, scanning them, resizing…..blah blah i’m just too lazy for that. So the update is just more/modified content >_< 4. My themes (at this point, there are 4: Megaman, Blogger, Naruto, GMail) look pretty much identical on Safari 5.0.2 FireFox 3.6.10 Chrome 6.0 But the Naruto and GMail theme aren't 100% perfect in IE9. W.T.F. It’s always IE giving me the issues. I don’t even know how to CSS hack IE9….

5. Fixed the CSS in my GMail theme for comment section. It’s now properly margin’ed.

To Do:
1. I still plan/want to edit the Code Reference section. Of all my sections, that’s gotten the least love and possibly, long-term, is the most useful.

2. The hobbies section also needs updating.

/going to…read css or html5…or take a nap………or most likely, start to read html5 book and pass out after 15 minutes

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GMAIL theme launched

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010 at 2:52 am

Rushed a theme…didn’t completely test everything….but it’s available

http://www.warrenshea.com/gmail/

idea: today
design: today
development: today
launch: today

I wanted to do a GMAIL theme and yesterday at work, we were looking at this website: http://whichloadsfaster.com/. I tested my site against other sites and, not surprisingly, it got killed.
There’s tons of JavaScript, tons of php logic, tons of images on other themes. That’s the price you pay for coding that can take care of everything….it’s not done cleanly.

So I did this theme…which has a total of 10 images to it, 6 of them being those little icons on the right. The other 4, the title, the icon, and 2 background images of 1 color. It was my intention to create a faster loading theme to counter the slow, image intensive Naruto one released a few days ago. Pretty kool how this whole theme and all the work put into it only took 1 day :) I think I’m most proud of that. And I’m least proud of quality control, having not tested IE8 and Safari, despite being a few clicks away. I’ll leave that for tomorrow…no one’s gonna look at the site in the meantime…except maybe YOU.

EDIT: i wonder how long i can leave this on my screen at work w/o arousing suspicion that it’s my personal site. let me tell you, you can spot that i’m not doing work when it’s on my mega man theme in like, 5 seconds.

…not that gmail is work but at least it’s more acceptable than my favorite 8-bit blue bomber :D

Posted in All Posts, GMail, Site Updates, worldofwarren.com | 1 Comment »