Warren Shea - World of Warren

Other worldofwarren.com updates!

Wednesday, February 20th, 2013 at 1:27 am

Just realized that I should also blog about my other changes to worldofwarren.com. After all, it’s awfully rare to do updates to this site…
Also..I wanted to bring up my Feb blog post count up >_<

Removed div tags with id “header”, “footer”, “navigation” and replaced it with real HTML5 tags.
Also cut down quite a bit on the CSS naming/names. Removed unnecessary code that I thought was required for specificity…but now find better ways to find elements (CSS 101…taken again cuz apparently I failed the first time). Swapped some ids out and put classes in. Made names shorter which meant I had to change CSS and JavaScript references to those items
Updated the JavaScript to use jQuery a bit more for retrieving and modifying DOM elements
Removed some “clear:both” div tags and replaced it by adding the “cf” class to divs, which is a clear-fix…um…fix. Got that from responsify.it
Was planning to include Modernizer into this…but decided not to. Don’t really see a need to cater to older browsers, not worth the bloat. Should include it on my warrenshea.com

Tomorrow: Responsive layout for kotobishoujo.com OR PHP MVC admin tool

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

Responsive Layout + worldofwarren.com

Wednesday, February 20th, 2013 at 1:04 am

About 5 minutes after my last post, I realize…I can’t really do a fully responsive layout with all my themes. Some of the themes will work with a responsive layout (gmail, google+); some (megaman, naruto) will not. So I’ve decided not to support multiple themes on mobile devices, much to my girlfriend’s dismay (she likes the megaman theme).

As such, I’ve been able to create a responsive layout that will occur upon using the Google+ Theme (which is the default theme).

Going to my site on a variety of resolutions will now show different results. Breakpoints are:
1000px, 768px, 480px.

It looks like:

Click the picture for a bigger one.

It was pretty easy. While it’s not the proper 16-grid responsive layout that I originally wanted to do, this custom responsive layout serves its purpose. If not for my multiple themes, I’d definitely want to properly do this. Not sure if I should be doing it for my warrenshea.com site. Its current layout is so much a part of the site…I don’t know if I can/want to mobilize it.

Anyways, feel free to check out this site on your iPhone or Android! I’m very happy with the results. Having the navigation in a dropdown; having the search at the top will really make going to my site on those drunken nights at the bar when I bring up something from my life easier. That’s the main purpose for this responsive layout, to make my site more usable when i’m drunktarded.

Also – two resources I found useful to do a responsive layout:

Responsify.it – a good place for a responsive template. Rather than use some person’s template, I found (and asked around) that it was better to create your own to understand and eliminate bloat.
Viewport Resizer – The best thing ever! Saves a bookmark to your bookmarks which, when clicked, adds a small viewport toolbar to change the viewports of your webpage but stay on the same page. You have to see it/use it to believe/understand it. But this thing is AWESOME.

Posted in All Posts, Development, Google+, HTML5, New Technologies, Site Updates, Web Design, Web Development, worldofwarren.com | No Comments »

Another domain! Sorta…

Tuesday, February 19th, 2013 at 6:10 pm

Okay. I finally have a DEV/QA environment. Sorta.

Originally, I was going to put WAMP on my local machine…but then I would have to export the database (which is huge) and load it onto my machine. Didn’t really wanna do that, since I’m not touching the database, just the code (at least for this project). Also – I don’t like local development when my computer has a much higher chance to crash than the server where my information is being stored. And they do backups.

So my new dev environment is dev.worldofwarren.com
Note: It looks exactly the same (from a Google+ theme) but its code is different

No longer will I have that line of code at the top of my site indicating it’s being worked on. No more working on the production environment on the fly. I generally don’t mind as my changes are quick but this time, they’ll take a while.

I’m working on a responsive layout for worldofwarren.com (and some of it’s themes). It’s not very hard but has some fundamental structure changes to the code including a 16 column grid system.

I’ve also taken the structure of the code and improved it based on my current skills. I understand CSS a lot more than when I did this site, 2-3 years ago and my changes reflect that. I’ve been able to cut part of the structure by 10%. I did find that with my understanding of CSS, my CSS code has actually become bloated, following this structure. So as I’ve acquired more skill, my code for specificity has become too specific – and it needs to be minimized. So I’m trying to do the same with CSS with less code. Tricky for one such as I, who fundamentally opposes the principles of “less is more”.

In the process of building a simple CRUD + Login tool in PHP at work. Going to use an MVC Framework with it…maybe eventually build my own PHP Framework like some people I know.

Photography is going well. 10/43 statues done. 25% of the way isn’t bad :) Gonna keep on truckin!

Posted in All Posts, Secret Project KB, Web Development, worldofwarren.com | No Comments »

*Promises to blog more

Saturday, February 16th, 2013 at 2:16 am

11 days since my last post. I think that’s the longest I haven’t blogged…ever in the last 3 years.
Don’t really have a “good” excuse. I generally blog every 3-5 days. Last blog was on the 5th and on Sunday, the 9th, it was probably around when I’d usually blog. BUT I started playing Candy Crush Saga, a Facebook game. And sh!t got real (competitive).

Like Tiny Tower, which I played almost exactly a year ago, I’ve been in a competitive battle with Sophia. I think she was around level…88? I could be wrong. And I was at 1. But I made it my “mission” to beat her. She’s now at 110 and I’m at 115. Averaging 23 levels/day for me. 4 levels/day for her. Seriously, I’m ultra competitive….sometimes. It’s scary and bad – I “ruin the fun” out of the game. Just like I did with FarmVille (created a spreadsheet to optimize and efficiently handle growth). Beat all my friends, and quit.

Same with Tiny Tower – Beat all my friends, and quit.

Same with Candy Crush Saga – Beat all my friends, and quit (though I haven’t quit just yet).

So anyways, in the last 5 full days (120 hours), I’ve probably played about 12 hours a day, every day. That includes time at work (probably 80% of my day), in which I spent most of this week playing this game. It was very bad and I won’t do that next week. I’ll work hard next week, I promise! Have missed deadlines to meet lol…my addictive personality is not a good trait. That’s why I try not to get sucked into these things easily. Once I start, I PWN IT. So it’s best not to start….

.
.
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It’s Friday. Long weekend! Have some errands and get togethers tomorrow but Sunday and Monday is pure Photography/Development time!

Alright, time to sleep! Tomorrow’s a busy day.

Posted in All Posts, Daily Randomness, Games, My Life | No Comments »

What a crazy work week it’s been!

Tuesday, February 5th, 2013 at 12:16 am

It’s technically been an entire week since I blogged as my last post was Monday, after midnight.
The craziness that has ensued this week!
It was all well and good until Wednesday. I’d spent the last few work days casually working without a project – investigating responsive design both for the company, and for myself. Emphasis on the latter.

And this happens:

And then BAM! My boss’ boss basically said (with his actions) “I’m not confident with project X in person A’s hands, I’m going to give project X to you!”

And what a project this project X was. I can’t go into the details, but it involved an ad around the Super Bowl in the US. An ad in the Super Bowl is…probably $X million dollars for 30s. And my project was directly related to that. THE PRESSURE. It’s okay, “no one watches the Super Bowl in the US” said no one ever.

I spent the week both doing development (Wed-Thurs), being on call during stress tests (Thurs-Fri), and being a fill-in system administrator (Fri-Sat) and finally, monitoring everything (Sun).

I was able to move a website from grid hosting (shared services) to dedicated hosting. That meant I:

Migrated code over to a new server
Migrated SSL to a new server (same domain)
Changed the DNS on a domain
Created a new database user, a new database, and new tables from scratch (with the help of phpMyAdmin – so it wasn’t so hard)

I did all of the above in less than 2 hours. It was a tough 2 hours, and I was most fearful of migrating an SSL Certificate to a new server (never done that before) but it turned out to be easy.

Later that night, I

configured PHP settings from scratch
Set up SSH and through it, optimized Apache and mySQL via SSH Commands at the root level

The day after that, I optimized my code a bit

Created an .htaccess file at the root and added Cache control header for images, javascripts, and CSS to deal with load
Enabled GZIP compression with mod_deflate for low page-transfer time
Optimized JavaScript files to point internally

And finally, was left monitoring my Facebook App on Sunday, during the Super Bowl.

So there’s a reason I haven’t blogged – or tbh, done much of anything. I’ve been working. 37 hours overtime from Wednesday to Sunday. That’s an entire work week…compressed within 5 days, and including 3 days of regular work. So..that’s a lotta work! Couldn’t do Photography, or much less RELAX. But it’s all over now. Back to my regularly scheduled program.

I hope to watch some cartoons tonight and do photography.
Tomorrow, catch up on some work items and get back to learning responsive layout.

Posted in All Posts, Daily Randomness, My Life, Work | 2 Comments »