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Apr 3, 2006
By Timothy R. Butler | Posted at 23:37:16
I received word last night that my kind blogging neighbors Christopher, Craig, Michael voted me into their Cranium Leakage blog-thingie (a.k.a. “network”). I'll be adding my new Cranium Leakage seal to the side of my blog in the next day or two.
Thanks, guys! I'm quite honored!
Y'all can listen to the podcast featuring the business meeting that voted me in over at CL. It's a funny listen. 
It sounds like I'm going to end up being a call-in guest on the “show” someday — I wonder what they'll do to me? Yikes!
In case you're fretting: don't worry. Asisaid will still keep the same quality (or lack thereof) that you've come to expect. Although, in honor of this event, I think I am going to drop the medieval spellings I announced the other day.
Jan 20, 2006
By Timothy R. Butler | Posted at 1:16:35
I've never been entirely happy with the new asisaid design I switched to early last year. The background color was a bit too minty and light, and the header was too plain. I've been wanting to try a photo-based theme for awhile, so I decided to go through my newly cleaned up iPhoto and pick out some photos. Virtually everything you see (including every photo up in the main header and in the sidebar headers) has been taken within the last few months. The first, third, fourth and fifth photos in the header were actually taken just in the last week, for example.
Note for the archive: I plan on changing the header more frequently in the future, so if you are reading this weeks or months after I posted this entry, go here to see the header I am actually referring to (in case I've changed it).
I've also replaced the drawing of a hill side that was at the bottom of each page with a real hill side of a similar shape. The drawing was a cropped portion of the old asisaid's header, which changed with the seasons. It never really fit in with the new site design, but the bottom of the page needed some color. I think this looks better.
Well, this is a work in progress, but I'd like to hear any thoughts y'all have on whether I'm headed in a good direction. Post your critiques below.
May 30, 2005
By | Posted at 20:25:5
Asisaid should now render properly on standards non-compliant browsers ( cough Internet Explorer cough) as well as those which obey standards, now. I tested the site against IE 6 on Windows 98, and, as always, continue to test it against Mozilla Firefox 1.x and Apple Safari 2.0. With Firefox now grabbing nearly 10% of the browser market, less than one year after release, I'm a bit more optimistic that Microsoft may soon have to learn to play nice with W3C specifications, but I'm not overly optimistic.
As a side note, I love the new features of Safari 2.0, especially the RSS reader integration. Now, I can keep up with all of my regularly read blogs without having to go to each one just to see if something new has been posted. I added all of the RSS feeds to one bookmark folder on my bookmark bar, and now I can just click that and see all of the feeds aggregated conveniently. I am also appreciating that Apple finally supported embedded PDF's; it is beyond me why Apple opted not to do this with the original Safari, but I am happy to have it finally acting the way it does in other browsers.
May 16, 2005
By | Posted at 18:30:45
I forgot to give credit to Kevin for finding the quiz I took yesterday.
Apr 28, 2005
By | Posted at 23:3:8
…for the lack of posting. Things have been hectic this week, but I'll try to get back to posting something a bit more substantial tomorrow or Saturday (at the latest).
Apr 1, 2005
By | Posted at 12:28:8
After much consideration, I've decided that blogging is taking way too much of my time. I could be doing far more constructive things with my time than sitting here on a soapbox every few hours and uttering some incoherent statement on something that most of the world doesn't care about. Does that sound bitter? Well, it is. When I started blogging, I never hoped to become like InstaPundit or Andrew Sullivan, but I admit that I was hoping to at least get enough traffic to support Google AdWords on here. Instead, I've just wasted hours for nothing… absolutely nothing.
Farewell. It's been fun (not really). Hopefully the rest of you will wake up and see that you could be doing far more useful things too — like organizing your socks or picking lint off your sofa.
Update (2005.01.02 01:15 CST): Since this post will remain forever in the asisaid archive, I would note to anyone wondering to take a very close look at the date of the post if it doesn't make sense.
Feb 28, 2005
By | Posted at 18:10:31
I've been playing around today a bit to finish up text processing, and after much hassling, was able to get a module known as “SmartyPants” to work. It adds support for “smart” characters such as “Smart Quotes” (notice that I'm using lots of quotes to show this off) to text. SmartyPants takes the straight quotes that I can type in a standard web browser and converts them to nice smart quotes like you would see in a word processor. It also takes care of Ellipses… Dashes — and so on. Combined with Textile (well, to be clear, I'm using Brad Choate's Text::Textile Perl module that was written for his MT-Textile plugin), I should now have an uber-text-processing™ blogware program.
If you noticed the blog was unavailable for awhile… well, that was because I was lazy. Rather than using my “sandbox site,” I used the main asisaid code base for testing. Sorry about that. I'm going to try to implement BB Code support soon, but I'll try to be good about keeping up the site during that process.
Since the site has been down a lot, let me remind y'all that the latest installment of the CYOA Dakmoore saga has been posted here.
Feb 27, 2005
By | Posted at 23:2:2
Well, trying to post my CYOA entry tonight I spent two hours instead of five minutes. I spent more time trying to get the stupid thing posted than I did writing it. For some reason, Safari (the web browser) is messing up the way it posts data, so that Unicode stuff was getting completely garbled. It took me a long time to figure out where the problem was originating from and along the way, I ran into numerous bugs impacting Firefox as well. Ack! On the bright side, SAFARI (the CMS) now uses Textile to format the text. Textile seems to be pretty popular for blogware formatting, and since it is licensed under the MIT license and available as a standard issue Perl module, I decided to integrate it into the system. This means you can use Textile commands in the comments too. If it causes anything to look weird, let me know.
CSS Blues
Ok, so I thought it would be smart to use CSS on my site and catch up with the times. But now I have a problem. If you look at the CYOA entry, you'll notice that the CYOA graphic is down at almost the bottom of the part of the post visible on the front page, level with the last right hand side div area (obviously, this will correct itself as the CYOA post gets pushed down further on the page). I suspect this is because I used clear: right to make the boxes on the right side stop stacking on top of each other. That seemed well and good, but I'm not very happy about being unable to use align=right or left or any div tags within posts without having them pushed way down on the page.
Anyone out there know how to fix this problem? Perhaps the way to make the content div tag isolate everything inside itself so that those things are “unaware” of the right side bar? I'd be very grateful for suggestions. Tables were so simple…
Feb 24, 2005
By | Posted at 23:24:46
Well, it dawned on me - stupid me - that I have IE:mac at my disposal. Sure, it isn't the same as IE for Windows, but maybe it wouldn't hurt to try out the site in it… Ouch! It looked horrible. So, I tinkered until I realized that my position: relative settings made IE go crazy in some cases (not all). So, I removed as many as I could without disrupting the design and IE:mac now shows the front page pretty well, save for the missing logo on top (I can't figure out why that doesn't show up). The site continues to load fine for me on my browsers, but if y'all would let me know if I messed up or fixed anything from your perspectives, that'd help. Thanks for being guinea pigs.
As I mentioned to Kevin in the comments of the last post, the boxes on the right side are suppose to be sticking off a bit for visual interest. Of course, if it just looks bad, let me know.
Feb 23, 2005
Finally Moving Ahead for My Blog's Third Year
By | Posted at 23:23:16
Welcome to my new design. Hopefully I didn't build your expectations too high after the delay. It is nothing fancy, but I do think it is a nice, clean design. I don't have access to Internet Explorer at the moment though, so if anyone would be willing to give it a spin on a Windows/IE system, I'd be appreciative of the feedback.
In honor of this new site design, and my blog's birthday (which I missed — it was the 21st), I have a short “history” of the iterations of this site posted below.
Read more...
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