Except I’m not a little red-haired girl, and there’s more swearing. Christ, allergies? Really? It’s still snowing, for fuck’s sake.

Ah, March in Colorado.

Anyway.

So, although I’ve technically been laid off, I’ve got a couple projects going on that make it seem a whole lot like I’m gainfully employed.

My assignment is simple.

The first and foremost is a deal where I’m creating a bunch of online courses for my old job. I’m churning out about one interactive course every four days or so, which looks impossibly fast until you know that the material has already been tidily assembled, and all I need to do is write the script, voice it, assemble imagery to go with it, and code all the quizzes and final tests.

Then it just looks almost-impossibly fast.

It does provide a nice pattern, though, which has helped me with my aforementioned “when do I know I’m done for the day?” problem. On day one, I write the script. On day two, I voice it. On day three, layout, animation, and whatnot. One day four, quizzes. When I’m done with the stuff needed for that day, I stop. Voila.

That gives me time to work on the other project, which… well, it takes me back.

Mini-storytime
The first website I ever made was (it should surprise no one) for a game I was playing at the time. Like most things on the internet, even back then (this would have been around… 1992), I wasn’t the person who built it — I was just the guy who was asked to go in and fix it.

I’d never touched html before. I had to figure it all out as I went, and of course I didn’t have a manual or anything. Hell, I didn’t even have Google. I’d just poke around at stuff and figure out what I wanted to do, then horribly break something, figure out how to fix it, learn, and move on.

That website (and that game) disappeared into the mist of internet death a long long time ago; my first forays into web coding are mercifully lost in time, but that marked the beginning of my presence on the internet, and the start of my ongoing relationship with building websites. 18 years and counting. bears-cave. average-bear. random-average. Raw html in notepad. Frontpage. Blogger. Movable type. Wordpress. mysql. Wikis. Forum installs, apache, php, bbcode, and god knows what else.

For me, it’s like math: I don’t know very much of it — I don’t carry the knowledge around, close at hand, the way I do knowledge of other things — but give me a few hours to refresh my memory and I can figure out a surprising amount.

Poke around random-average.com or this site or fireflywiki.org, and you might be under the impression I know what I’m doing. Or ktliterary.com, which marked something of a high point in both web design and wordpress kung-fu for me.

Until now.

One of Kate’s clients, who also happens to be a dear friend who spoke at great and hilarious length at our wedding, has this website. It’s beautifully and professionally designed, and the one time I ever looked at the code (while I was helping her set up a Ning site for her fans — Nings: did I forget to mention nings? Nings are cool), it scared the shit out of me. The layout was accomplished entirely through tables — tables nested four and five levels deep in some cases — positively labyrinthine. A sort of massive, intricate structure composed of nothing but pixie-stix filled with nitroglycerin: do so much as sneeze and the whole damned thing would explode in your face. Intimidating, is the word.

Turns out, Maureen felt pretty much the same way. As a result, with the exception of the (blogger hosted) blog, nothing really got updated on the site because it was too damned easy to break something. Badly.

So a little while ago, Maureen guest-blogged on someone else’s site and got a taste of Wordpress.

You can see where this is going.

It didn’t take long before she decided she wanted some of that wordpress goodness on her own site, and she asked me if I could take the blogger template, make a wordpress equivalent, port the whole thing over to be hosted on her actual website – where all those delicate, explodey static pages were – and… you know… make it all work.

I said sure, because… well, Maureen’s a little crazy, and sometimes crazy rubs off.

This little story is getting long, so let me sum up: I didn’t port over the blogger site.

Well, I didn’t just port it over. In order to make use of the the nice widget sidebars, modular headers and footers, and really everything else that embodies Wordpress Cool, I had to take apart that scary nitro-pixie-code and rebuild it in neat little parcels.

… and when I was done with that, well… it really wasn’t THAT much more work to port in all those static pages as wordpress pages, make them less explodey, and put them where they could be, you know, updated.

… and get the flash-laden front page working as part of all that…

And… you know… just port the whole damned site into wordpress, where MJ could actually have a site she could touch without losing a finger.

So I did that. It’s over here. Yeah, I know it’s pink. I know it’s not “me”. (It is Maureen, though, which is rather the point.)

It’s not my design – I’m honestly not much of a designer – but if Mordin Solis has taught me only one thing, it’s this: it’s just as hard to modify an existing Deadly Thing without fucking it up as it is to create the thing from scratch in the first place.

So I’m pretty proud of it. You should see the “Edit Pages” display; it’s tidy. I learned a LOT of cool Wordpress stuff.

Best of all, MJ seems happy with it.

And I don’t know if I’d have found the time to do this much work on it if I hadn’t been in my current weird employment situation.

So, there you go: bright spot.

Now then: back to work.

Mostly notably, if you’re interested in a fun, VERY challenging board game, may I direct you to this post on my gaming blog: We got our butts kicked by Shadows over Camelot, and it was excellent.

I’ll have some more stuff soon, but right now I’m wrestling with some technical glitches within Wordpress itself, and it’s hard for me to write something when I know the machine I’m writing on is broken.

Must. Fix.

“Find your obsession. Every day, explain it to one person you respect [...] and try not to be a dick.” — Merlin Mann, 43 Folders

While bowling this week (which I do with Kate, two of my gamer friends, and one gamer’s better half) I was talking with Tim about various ways one could cook up a blog in wordpress, and he expressed a small frustration with wanting to have a blog about everything he was into, but at the same time wanting to split things out into seperate tabs or something of that nature.

My response to this was a garbled version of some advice I couldn’t quite remember verbatim (the quote at the top of this post, actually); I said that in my opinion the thing to do was put all one’s interests “out there” without apology and trust that over time, adherance to that honesty (and, you know, interesting stuff to say) would ensure that the site would find people who’d find the whole mess interesting (or vice versa).

I then mentioned (as I sometimes do) that if I had it to do over, I’d have put all my gaming stuff and my ‘main blog’ stuff in one big kettle and let it simmer, no apologies.  Highsight. C’est la vie.

Unfortunately, I think Random Average had grown for too long on its own to allow it to be successfully grafted on here anymore, but that doesn’t mean I won’t still try to weave the two together when I can.  To that purpose, I’ve set up an interesting plugin on both sites that allows both blogs to pick up and crosspost specially-flagged entries from their sibling.  We’ll see how that works.

In the meantime I’ll continue my current blogging practice for this site: dumping my daily obsessions into a big pile and poking at the strange unions and bastard offspring that crawl out.

I will be trotting him out after days like this, during which I wrestle for several hours with things that shouldn’t really be broken in the first place, only to finally ‘fix’ it by putting it back the way it originally was.

Wha? I was confused, because in my head Firefox is always performing a brilliant cover of “Anything you can Do…” as it dances around IE. And I knew I had seen pop-up descriptions of links and images in Firefox in the past, and I could imagine why it worked some of the time and not the rest of the time.

So, after the meeting, I poked around and found out that the whole problem boils down to the different between the “Alt” tag and the “Title” tags, with can both be added to either images or links on web pages.

Basically, the “ALT” tag is really only relevant for images – it provides a text alternative to display on browsers that are set up to repress image display; that’s its only purpose. A text-alternative to a text-based link is kind of pointless, so really there’s no reason to have an ALT tag on a text link; just images.

The “TITLE” tag is, as one might expect, the Title of the link and/or image. With Links, it’s often used as a description of the link you’re about to click on.

The basic problem arises from that fact that Firefox will pop up any TITLE tag when you mouse over an image or link, but does not do the same for ALT tags; IE will pop up either-or. Why does Firefox do this? Well, because it’s not supposed to: the ALT tag for images is NOT supposed to produce a tooltip when you mouseover an image or link, according to the HTML specifications for web design and browsers. This is supposed to be the job of the TITLE tag. Firefox has never done this for ALT tags, correctly obeying the spec. IE has always done it for both, ignoring the spec.

Which I really don’t have a problem with… except that:

• It makes people think Firefox is broken, which it isn’t.
• It confuses my brain, which means I frequently mistag links with an ALT instead of a TITLE, and miss out on providing helpful pop up descriptions (which is something I really like to do, especially in links on my sidebar).

So… there you go. Nothing profound; just me remembering how the internet works, again.

Changed

• My ‘main’ blog, which was at www.doycetesterman.com/journal.html, is now right at doycetesterman.com. It also has a new design, which is apparently different enough that people thought it was a mistake.  The newsfeed for this blog has also changed — the new feed can be had simply by clicking on the big orange button in the top right corner of the page.
• Random Average is no longer just a blog, but a blog, a forum, a scheduling calendar, and a PONY!  You can get to it via the same ol’ http://random-average.com, but the newsfeed has changed: there’s one for the forums and a different one for the blog.  They’re all linked off the front page of THAT site, top left.
• Adrift didn’t move, but the news feed is different than it was, and the look is different.  Easiest thing to do in that case is to just go to http://doycetesterman.com/adrift/ and get new links.
• With all this done, I’m completely ‘off’ of Movable Type — the only thing left up are the eight years of archived posts from both Average-bear (which didn’t make the jump to doycetesterman.com in the first place) and eight years of Random-Average gaming stuff.  The Random Average archives are linked off the new Ning-based R-A site (top left),  and the Average-bear archives are… exactly where they are… which is where you’ll find them if you know where to look.  Ahem.

Not changed:

• FireflyWiki, RandomWiki, Storyball, doyceandkate — all safe as houses and very unlikely to change. (All those sites are built with PmWiki which, unlike Movable Type, has actually made updating and maintaining them easier, rather than harder.)

Also? The blog seems convinced that I’m on GMT -0. Which is annoying.