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Warren Shea

Archive for the ‘GMail’ 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: GMail themes within the GMail theme o_O

Saturday, September 25th, 2010 at 1:02 am

A very recursive title…Does that make sense? It would be nice to have sounded intelligent rather than to have sounded like I don’t understand recursion…which, despite writing a few recursive functions, might be true :/ <insert server-side infinite loop>

ANYWAYS…small Site Update, something I wanted to do a couple weeks ago but forgot. I added some GMail themes within my GMail theme:

GMail themes within themes

I think it’s pretty self explanatory.

I’d add more themes but it would clutter the top bar and on different resolutions, might not look great. Four is good for now…

Bad: GMail is supposed to be a minimalist theme but already, I’ve added a lot to the JavaScript code to implement this. While I’m sure I could clean it up if I gave it more time and thought…I doubt I will
http://www.warrenshea.com/common/gmail/scripts.js

.
.
.

I just realized, the way the GMail themes are changed is totally client side, there’s no page refresh or loading of specific css files. Meaning…theoretically, I could make a huge JavaScript that could modify my page for all themes (Megaman, Naruto, etc.)…reducing any reload.

Ahhhhhh….I wish I hadn’t thought of that, it’s so much work. Probably too much, like re-writing CSS files…in JavaScript. I should probably not do it……………………right?

Now choose the following:
<insert @$$hole comment: you should do it…that would be awesome! >

or

<insert rational comment: that is a waste of time, do something more productive>

or

<insert spam comment: hi guys! i am enjoying this phase of my life to the fullest as i am being showered with cashback cashback n cashback. i did online shopping at ….>

or most likely,

<insert no comment:>

EDIT: 5:15 AM – I’ve been working on the themes and session variables the last 2 hours…trying to move them from server-side PHP session variables to JavaScript cookies. I was looking at my CGI Timeout issue, I thought it could be possible that my site was trying to contact the session server and my CGI Timeout issues were affected there…

I thought I noticed significant improvement speed but…it slowed down again. I don’t wanna stay awake and test, I’m so tired… :'(

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.

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