Warren Shea - World of Warren

Finding a good partner for a website…

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010 at 6:39 pm

Note: This is an old draft but with a recent development, so I’m going to post my old draft and add to it.

There are several factors that I look for in a web partner:
1. He/she must be interested in developing in the same language as you.
2. He/she must be of relatively equal skill so that you both learn from each other. You may not be equal in terms of development skill but I believe your skills have to compliment your partner’s so that you both have relatively equal value in the relationship.
3. He/she must be have relatively equal passion regarding the topic the website being developed is for.
4. He/she must be have relatively equal motivation to work on the site, otherwise you have a person doing too much and a person doing too little.

What I believe is that, much like a give and take relationship, things must be fair. It does not mean that every task must be fairly or equally shared but as a whole, both people should compliment each others strengths and weaknesses.

Throughout my entire web career, since the middle/end of high school and still ongoing, I’ve been looking for that partner. Given the requirements above, I imagine it might be harder to find a good web partner than finding a significant other! Or maybe I’m not looking in the right places…

In high school, my friend and I wanted to work on a website together. He was sort of into web, much like me. We talked frequently about it but nothing ever happened. I stopped waiting and eventually did my own stuff.
In university and the same thing happened (with another friend). This time, the guy actually had his own web stuff, he migrated his content over to my already existing hosting…and then, never touched the stuff again O_O
Note that both of these are my good friends whom I’m still close with. The first one moved in to something unrelated to web, the second one is currently doing Microsoft SharePoint stuff.

I guess the first guy didn’t have 1, 2, and 4. The second guy didn’t have 3 and 4.

I gotta say, it’s tough. I’m still looking…there have been a few potential candidates recently but nothing seemed to work out. Maybe I didn’t sell that I was looking well enough…

Anyways, I’m posting this because the first guy, from high school, wants a website built. And as of today, I’m going to work with him on it. He’s not interested in the design or development, he will be the relationship between the business and I. I just found it kind of interesting that about a decade after we originally wanted to work together, we finally are. The stakes are higher this time though, it’s not just children playing, we’re both doing this professionally. But I’m honestly really looking forward to working with my friend professionally on something like this. It’s like doing a high school project together…and I know he’s lacking in 1 but he’s got 2, 3 and 4 and in this dynamic, that’s all I want/need. And because he’s a close friend, I’m eager to really do my best and not let him down and I’m sure is opposite is true.

So I officially have a side project now.

I hope things go smoothly…I might ask this guy for a ride but will asking him for requirements work out? He might ask to borrow a game but will his asking when something will be done sour the friendship? While I agree that mixing professional and unprofessional relationships is a bad idea, we’re both aware of our respective working skills (from high school) and I think we both have that working trust in each other. What really sucks is mixing professional and unprofessional relationships when the unprofessional aspect doesn’t measure up to the professional. Going out for drinks with someone and working with someone are always two completely different things.

/4 (LFM): Sheaman: LF1M WEB DESIGNER/DEVELOPER
/4 (LFM): Sheaman: Must develop in PHP/ASP.NET. Know XHTML/CSS2. jQuery/HTML5/CSS3 a plus. Good Group. U Fail = Boot. /roll for loot. Mainspec > Offspec

(that’s my World of Warcraft version of Looking For 1 More)

Posted in All Posts, Development, Friends, My Life, Work | No Comments »

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

Posted in All Posts, Site Updates, worldofwarren.com | No Comments »

My Saturday is average.

Saturday, September 18th, 2010 at 8:53 pm

I slept last night at around 11pm….It was weird, I came home from a bar and left, my skin very warm and with a headache. Except this time I didn’t drink. -_-; It’s unexplainable! Maybe it’s the bar atmosphere O_O

So last night, I thought it’d be funny if I took some mutual funds papers to bed and fall asleep while reading them. So that when Z found me, she’d think it were funny that I couldn’t stay awake reading it. For some reason, I thought this would be funny…I don’t know why. I was drunk (actually, no I wasn’t…). Anyways, I fell asleep, as planned…and then kept sleeping…until 2pm today. Let me tell you, it was an awesome sleep :D I had at least 4 separate dreams…one was a Futurama episode o_o.

Went out to some dim sum restaurant that Z wanted to go to…had some very good eats. Then walked around Eaton Centre a bit. I got a $30 tripod at Best Buy for a camera that I’m currently borrowing. The lack of a steady hand and a good camera & macro lens go together pretty poorly.

EDIT: Here’s a pic of my new “studio”. Looks good with a tripod…also, taking pictures on the couch didn’t seem to work….too low…my back couldn’t take it.

EDIT: I also got some Mario mints at Best Buy:

I went to the Disney Store and pre-ordered a Blu Ray Beauty and the Beast. Got this pretty lithograph for pre-ordering.

note: this is a picture of MY lithograph, not a picture off the internet…

We also got 2 stuffed animals, a Hamm and a Doug. Zena and I really liked the Hamm (he was very soft!) and the Doug might prove useful later.

The plan is to get some Disney Blu Rays, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdins, The Lion King, etc. Toy Story 3 Blu Ray available from pre-order in early Oct FYI. I personally cannot wait for the Toy Story Blu ray box set trilogy. I was in line at the Disney store, running through Toy Story 3 in my head, especially the ending, and finding myself zoning out into the emotional aspect of it. Hard to describe. Toy Story 3 really was one of the best movies I’ve seen all year, if not the best. I can’t wait to rewatch an HQ version of it.

Zena also purchased Starcraft II for herself. I pray that I don’t start it…

After that, I went to Indigo to look for some CSS books. As I started looking at the selection of books, I felt a big overwhelmed at the number of different books and different topics. HTML5 books, ASP.NET C# 4.0 books…jQuery. I felt uneasy and wanted to go home…to do work. But then I started blogging… :S

You know, I just realized that when I opened and removed the tripod from the box, I completely discarded the instructions. When I buy a Transformer, I’d never look at the instructions on how to transform it. “Instructions are for little girls” I would say. Except I don’t use “little girls”, I say something slightly more vulgar. But aren’t simple instructions the basis of learning fundamentals? Maybe I’m not the type that can instinctively learns from fundamentals, I’m the type and dives in head first and then drowns? or more accurately, dives in head first, learns how to swim enough to get by, but probably not make any records.

I leave you with a Flash plushie I got a couple of months ago. He sports a jagged lightning belt meaning he’s Barry Allen, not Wally West (boourns). He’s still cute though.

Posted in All Posts, Daily Randomness, Photography, Shopping, Things I Own | No Comments »

What’s next (for me in web development)?

Thursday, September 16th, 2010 at 5:54 pm

So, the last few days I’ve learned a couple of things
1. My fundamentals suck. I don’t read any books, other than the ASP.NET one that I’m “currently” reading. I never read any html, asp, css, javascript book or anything. Everything I’ve done, everything I’ve learned my entire web career has been self taught or looked up, ie: I look up what I want to do, do it, and learn that “method” and use it elsewhere. For example, if I wanted something to loop, I would look it up.
Learn about for, while, do while. Make my change that needs the loop. And down the road, apply my knowledge to something else.

What this means is
a) I’m strong because I’ve looked a lot of things up.
b) I’m strong because I’m good at thinking outside the box…because I’m able to apply what I know creatively to get something accomplished. And if I can’t think of a solution like that, I look it up and add to my knowledge base.
c) I’m weak at fundamentals. I don’t know the “right way” (by that, I mean, the shortest, most efficient way) to do things because I find creative workarounds to accomplish the same thing. Like when I built a calendar from scratch. A feat in itself but time wasted when I could have used a control or other source code available.
For example: I didn’t know what display: block did. I thought it was just the opposite of display: none. I thought everything was inherently display: block’ed unless you specified display: none, which would hide it. I never learned what display: block was, I just guessed it’s functionality based on some use and the difference between that and display: none.

Conclusion: I will begin my re-education and buy/read some books on: CSS2.
I will learn CSS3 and HTML5 from a book so I get my fundamentals down. From there, I’ll continue learning what/how I currently learn….which brings me to my next point.

2. I’ve often wondered if I should move away from front-end web development and move to back-end. I’m good at both, stronger on front-end (that’s my job). But front-end does get kind boring in the way of “deep” thinking, something I really love. I thought I’d learned enough about front-end to try something more complicated…but because of 1 (above), I realize I’m not as strong as I thought, maybe there’s still room to stay in the front-end side. The thing is, with CSS3 and HTML5, where HTML5 is fundamentally different from HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1, there’s still a lot to learn. I imagine HTML5 will bridge the front-end and back-end development sides…but since I don’t know too much about HTML5, I can’t confirm that statement.

Conclusion: I will continue what I’m doing, both front-end and back-end. I will try to learn CSS3 and HTML5 early and decide whether or not it’s enough to satisfy my “deep” thinking. I will start working on something more complicated to fulfill my back-end need…which brings me to my next point.

3. I’m getting bored with warrenshea.com. Not in terms of blogging, but in terms of updating the site, creating themes, in terms of content/difficulty. I’ve launched 2 themes in the last week, I probably should have staggered myself, but there isn’t/wasn’t any challenge in doing my gmail theme. The idea was fun, the design was okay (like always), but the development was tedious. There are 4 themes I want to do still but currently have no motivation to do any of them. They all include a little “quirk” which would make the development interesting…but not interesting enough.

Conclusion: I think I’ll take a break from warrenshea.com for a bit (again, not the blogging aspect). I’m going to spend more nights re-re-re-re-catching up with ASP.NET….and planning the “EPIC SITE” site I want to build.

I know I write that ever 2 months but THIS TIME I MEAN IT :@

Posted in All Posts, ASP.NET, CSS, Development, JavaScript / Java Frameworks, My Life, New Technologies, Web Developer, XHTML | 2 Comments »

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 »