Midnight Lights will be undergoing a re-design soon. I’m not quite sure what direction I’m going in yet - but let’s just say Illustrator and Photoshop are running wildly on my computer. This is making the room very warm with the heat of my computer and also forcing MJ to sing Beat It louder and louder over top of the cooling fans and their buzz.

Rest-assured that the new design will NOT be a template and I’m super stoked for that. Yay for my own design!

Until later.
Peace.

Love Me:

The latest Wordpress upgrade was released last weekend -all the waiting… and it’s here. From what I’ve seen so far it’s pretty slick. The new design is nice and everything still seems to work great, and Wordpress has also redesigned their entire website to mirror the new back-end of the 2.5 upgrade. There are only a couple problems I’ve encountered so far - 24hrs into my upgrade.

I have a plug-in I’m using for my forms called cforms and everything seems to still be working fine except the button to insert your forms into pages is no longer in the editor. This is not a 2.5 problem more likely an upgrade problem for cforms - but a problem still nonetheless.

The second problem I’ve encountered is that of adding images to posts and pages. When adding media it gives you an option to either type in the url or browse your computer and add it to your uploads. Whenever I try uploading this way it says there is an error and although it says there is one image in my gallery, only the error shows up - no images. However if you upload the image through your ftp client into your uploads folder and give the url it works fine that way. I’ve also found with the images that I cannot go to Manage Uploads and ‘manage’ anything because I cannot view any images and I get another error.

I think the error I’ve been getting is slightly different than others I have found people talking about in the Wordpress forums however if you are having a similar problem I suggest checking out Lisa Sabin-Wilson’s blog as she seems to have found a solution to the problem she was having with the media uploader.

On a side note tomorrow I’ll be attending the Massive Technology Show in Vancouver for a few hours. It should be interesting and an excellent opportunity to meet some new people. I’ll be posting about it later in the week. Stay tuned.

Peace.

Love Me:

Today I was directed from a page on Wordpress.org to the Webware 100 Awards. I’m surprised I hadn’t heard of these yet, it’s pretty cool. It’s a place you can vote for your favourite Web 2.0 apps of 2008 and there are eight different categories in which to vote. What’s cool is if you use more than one than you don’t have to sit there making a hard decision - you get three votes per category. Web 2.0 is the direction the internet is going - and it looks amazingly optimistic. So check it out - and vote!

Peace.

Love Me:

I am proud to say that this website and blog are powered by the Wordpress content management system, and it RULES. It is my first experience with a content management system and it’s totally awesome. It’s so much faster and its more efficient and organized as well. There are many content management systems floating around the web these days - countless numbers of them. From Wordpress to Drupal to Typo3 - they’re all great and everyone has their personal preference. Drupal has some amazing background and has multiple people behind it - it seems to be the number one choice of late. I’d love to learn a few CMS’ however I think it best to tackle one at a time. So Wordpress is my current tackle position. After that, look out Drupal, here I come! It’s already installed on my computer. I just need to master Wordpress first before I take on another challenge lest I only confuse myself.

My ultimate goal to become a killer web developer is definitely rolling I think. I’m only 19 and I have so many years ahead of me, especially in the New Media/Web industry. Now that I’ve started to get a handle of CMS’ and PHP the next step is to trackback a little and get the Javascript learnin’ that I both needed and deserved months ago. I have a feeling I’ll be self-teaching myself Javascript in the coming months after graduation from BCIT. Which, in fact, is in just over 4 short weeks. I can’t believe I’m finally graduating from this program at BCIT - and I still have so much to learn too. It’s definitely been an experience. And so has my internship. I’m pretty much almost as good as done my 100 hours at Fjord Interactive Marketing + Technology and I really don’t want to leave. It’s been such a great experience with awesome work and great people.

The next few weeks are going to be a whirlwind adventure. I look forward to it, sort of. Wish me luck in this final stretch! See you all again soon!

Peace.

Love Me:

I’ve heard from sources which shall remain nameless that tables are coming back. I hope not. I hate coding them and quite frankly - I suck at it because I started learning HTML after CSS had made its debut. In my opinion, CSS has much more power and its easier to code. Some of you may remember a few months ago I mentioned I wrote a paper about the fall of tables for a class at BCIT. Well, I still haven’t received any feedback on this paper but I still wanted to put it out there for people to read and either tear me apart or praise me for.

You can read this paper by downloading this small PDF or viewing the Articles page.

I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it here before but all of my classmates/colleagues know that I’m not a huge fan of Dreamweaver. I’ll use it, but I much more prefer to open up good ol’ TextMate and hand code everything myself. I find that many times Dreamweaver’s preview view is quite off from the actual browsers (preview is NOT a substitute for real testing people!) and that if you use Dreamweaver’s layout templates the code can get very messy and hard to read. I also don’t like the way Dreamweaver handles it’s CSS or the way in which it manages it while working on a project. I personally find it much easier to open TextMate, start a new project, and drag all my files into the flyout. This way it makes all the files easily accessible with tabs at the top and your CSS is just another tab that is easily viewable in its entirety.

That is my rant today. Hope to see you all again soon and I accept ANY criticism (constructive or otherwise) on the Fall of Tables article.

Peace.

Love Me: