Warren Shea - World of Warren

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Life updates

Saturday, July 31st, 2010 at 1:11 am

WordPress 3.0.1 updated!
Okay…that’s not very impressive.

The problem is that with every update, I have to apply my custom code to the WordPress template.
It’s editing 8 files, 100~ lines of code. I’m trying to figure out a better way to do updates…it’d be awesome to parse the files and do auto replaces…kind of like what WordPress does. But to do that, you have to know what changes…and I don’t really…

Life…has been…off
Aimless rant incoming:
Things have been weird lately. I haven’t been blogging, updating twitter, studying, taking/editing photographs, designing, developing, watching anime, watching anything…basically, I haven’t been doing anything. My sleeping schedule has been screwed up…I’m generally sleeping at 3…waking up at 9:15 (which is pretty late…for a work day). I take 2-3-4 hour naps after work. I recently had a night of insomnia…couldn’t sleep until 5am. Pretty rare for me to do that…it’s usually not very difficult for me to fall asleep but that night, my mind just wouldn’t stop racing. I’m just generally tired…even though I’m not doing anything. My life’s been busy…going out, etc. I don’t walk to work anymore because it’s too hot. Last weekend was my first weekend of unwinding but…I’m still tired. This weekend’s kinda different…still busy though.

Tomorrow I have lunch and dinner with the family…Monday or Tuesday, I’m going to the Toronto Zoo.

The weekend after this, August 7, I’m going to see Jersey Boys. And then…there’s Comicon coming up.
I have a deluxe pass (3 days) and I’m taking the day before and after off (so..Thursday-Tuesday – 5 day weekend).

So busy. I don’t have time to do the things I want (below):

I need a…list…of….like…to do…or something….(in no particular order):
(GREEN: to complete this weekend)
-design new layout for warrenshea.com…like…NOW.
-contact me web form (which shouldn’t take too long)
-decide which of my two EPIC SITE ideas to pursue…and then
-start planning/designing EPIC SITE…
-finish reading Scott Pilgrim
-watch Despicable Me, Kick-Ass (again), Once, Shutter Island, Remember Me (…which only got 28~% on RT…)
-secret project (not the epic site…even more secret!)
-update To Buy list…for comic-con
-take more photographs/galleries – Yoshi, Scarlet Witch, Psylocke, Kakashi, Scheris, Cagalli, Lunamaria, Catwoman, Yuna, Full Metal Panic! characters…
-clean Hamster cage (tomorrow)
-study ASP.NET
-catch up on 6 episodes of True Blood, 1 episode of Hell’s Kitchen, 2 episodes of Futurama
-start reading One Piece manga
-start playing Zelda: Ocarina of time again
-laundry
-watch Transformers DVDs I recently purchased
-watch EXTRAs to DVDs – Battlestar Galactica, Seinfeld, Friends, Transformers
-wear retainer…to fix my teeth…cuz they’re not looking so hot

I need to avoid
-taking naps after work
-sleeping after 2am on weekdays
-drinking…well, enough that it ruins my night…i need to moderate it better/train my terrible alcohol genes
-playing DOTA…hours passing by like nothing…it’s just a fun & addicting game! damn, i feel like playing a game right now…….
-….wasting time on things not on the list above

/i feel so scattered lately…my focus is all over the place…need to cross some of these items off…and focus.

Posted in All Posts, Development, My Life, Site Updates | No Comments »

WordPress 3.0

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010 at 3:24 pm

Upgraded to WordPress 3.0!

The changes I made to the WordPress code, that took 2 nights to do, only accumulated to 8 files being modified, maybe a total of 40-50 lines of code changed. Took like, 30 minutes to redo the changes into WordPress 3.0….including using a Code Comparison program comparing default WordPress 2.9.2 and my current code to find the changes I had made.

About 50% of the changes are simply formatting/view source changes…which going forward, I should probably just ignore…not really worth the time. But my OCD has issues with that….

The other 50% of the changes include customizing how widgets are displayed as well as modifying the way WordPress displays content with their stupid tags. I feel I *have* to do those changes…the way they’re coded is crappy. They don’t have <ul>s and </ul>s around their <li>s…definitely not XHTML valid! Anyways, I thought the transition to WordPress 3.0 would be difficult considering the 2 nights of changes I made…turns out, it wasn’t.

I’m kinda disappointed with WordPress 3.0….well, there are tons of cool new features but not for a web developer such as myself who’s already integrated WordPress into his site. They want WordPress to build a site for you…great for people without skill. Wasted on people with skill. I mean, I GET that it’s awesome for almost everyone but not for me…I’d rather make headers, menus, pages from scratch and have total control than be restricted to WordPress themes and constraints. That’s just me of course…

/next upgrade of wordpress will be even easier!

Posted in All Posts, Development, OCD, Site Updates, XHTML | No Comments »

IE6 (Internet Explorer 6)

Monday, June 28th, 2010 at 11:11 am

I know I wasn’t going to code for IE6….but maybe I should. I ask myself “What’s the point?” Right now, people that use IE6 is 7.1%. That’s actually a fairly large percentage.

Now, by the time I complete my site and rework the CSSes (plural) to work for IE6, I imagine it will be a few months later (say, Sept) and the % will have dropped to 5.5% (on average it’s dropping 8%/month).

Also, this site tries to heavily use PNGs, and not JPGs or GIFs. You get the JPG quality plus transparency…it’s win win with PNG. The loss is that IE6…needs special CSS to display any PNG. Like, really?! seems a bit ridiculous…

But…if people are coming to my site…judging it’s cross browser compatibility and such…then I should have it working for IE6. How can I call myself a cross browser compatible web developer if I simply don’t code for that…I know I SHOULD develop for IE6. But is it worth it?

/I’ll think about it for a couple months. I’m sure the problem will resolve itself.

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

EPIC SITE

Sunday, June 27th, 2010 at 1:04 am

I finally have my idea for an EPIC SITE. I’m not going to share details on it…I just wanted to post that I have it. Hopefully after/during this learning vacation, I’ll start some high level development/experimenting…

It will be done in ASP.NET 3.5/4 C# and heavily use AJAX…and LINQ…and (insert buzzword I haven’t learned yet here).

The site will be EPICLY difficult to do.

/I might need help… :S

Posted in All Posts, Epic Site (yet to be named) | No Comments »

Site updates + WordPress

Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at 11:28 pm

I’ve spent the last couple of nights formatting my code so that if you view source (go on, do it!), it’s DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict as well as formatted (space) precisely to my standards. It sounds easy right? if things don’t align up, press spacebar in the code a couple time until it aligns it. But…it’s actually not that easy because the blog portion as well as the RSS is generated by WordPress and doesn’t care about the formatting at all. What does that mean? Going deep into the WordPress code and figuring it out. Well, figuring it out enough to change it. It’s purely cosmetic but in diving into the code, I was able to remove some “additions” that I felt were in question.

1. WordPress, by default, wraps everything in tags…which I hate. Paragraph tags add extra space, unless you change the standard tag’s CSS. But for someone who likes full control (and who doesn’t have it), these tags suck. I’m much more accustomed to using . Controlling exactly how to space content. Anyways, WordPress adds paragraph tags around everything so I had to replace that with the appropriate amount of s.

2. WordPress also strips s. Which sucks because just say I wanted to do something like this
FAKE SPOILER ALERT

Joking!
I couldn’t! It wouldn’t allow those spaces, it would look like this:
FAKE SPOILER ALERT

Joking!
Despite how many s I threw between the text. Ridiculous eh? Anyways…I had to go into the code and fix that.

3. WordPress also, by default, replaces three consecutive periods with … so that … = …
The problem is that someone like me, who chooses a # mod 3 != 0 will result in 4 dots becoming …. or 5 becoming …..
Hideous I say! I don’t quite understand the purpose of replacing the periods…but yeah, that had to go. I was changing my … ‘s so that they would mod 3 == 0. But it was annoying.
I couldn’t write things like “uh……………..” without having to post and go back and edit/remove the dots. Because let’s face it, with OCD, this: …. and ….. was unacceptable!

4. WordPress keeps widgets together. So the RSS Feed that I had…it was all grouped into ONE section before. I had to go into the code…find out how the RSS was being written and throw in some if statements to display other headers. The result is on the right (notice the RSS feeds are now sectioned off into groups rather than in one “RSS” Category) ——->

5. I also changed the standard WordPress UI. In the image below, the left side is the original WordPress UI. If I had say, 10 RSS feeds, the CMS wouldn’t show any descriptive titles. If I wanted to edit a particular RSS, I would have to play the counting game or the “click edit and trial and error” game. Ridiculous! I changed the WordPress UI to show at least some form of descriptive title…So if I wanted to edit a particular RSS feed’s information, say #10, I can click on the one I want and not have to guess or look at the Edit’s link. Also, I was able to throw my particular headers into the WordPress UI as well! The WordPress UI, thanks to my tinkering, now mimics my site exactly.

Posted in All Posts, Development, Site Updates, Web Development | 1 Comment »