Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Blogger. Template. Fixed.

Sunday, August 6th, 2006

Blog­ger tem­plate ques­tions? Please search and/or post to the offi­cial Blog­ger Help Google Group—you are much more likely to get a response there than by email­ing me.

A lit­tle over 2 years ago, Blog­ger relaunched, and fea­tured all-new tem­plates designed by some of your favorite design­ers. I was lucky enough to be included in that list, and my tem­plate set, Thi­s­away, was well received and has enjoyed some pop­u­lar­ity over the last few years. That is, unless you’re an IE user who hap­pened to put ital­ics in a cer­tain parts of your posts.

Woe is IE

IE/Win suf­fers from a curi­ous bug (gasp!) related to the use of ital­ics in cer­tain sit­u­a­tions. The won­der­ful folks at Posi­tion is Every­thing have doc­u­mented this as much as pos­si­ble (or as one would want to), and, as luck would have it, their fix works on Thisaway.

Why now?

I’ve been email­ing the fix to peo­ple for quite a while now, on a case-by-case basis, and it’s also been posted to the Blog­ger Google Group, but I finally coor­di­nated with the nice folks at Blog­ger a few months ago to start incor­po­rat­ing the fix into the live tem­plates, so new users of the tem­plate would get the fixed ver­sion. Hap­pily, I can now say that as of a few weeks ago, the fix is now live, and seems to test out just as it should.

Fix­ing exist­ing blogs

What if you’ve been using one of my Thi­s­away tem­plates for a while? If you want to update your blog to incor­po­rate the fix, you have two options.

Option 1: Start from scratch

If you haven’t made any cus­tomiza­tions to the blog tem­plate (e.g. adding ele­ments to the side­bar, chang­ing the CSS, adding a cus­tom header image, etc.), you can sim­ply log into your Blog­ger admin area, select the “Tem­plate” tab, then click “Pick new” in the tem­plate sub-nav, and select the same Thi­s­away color scheme you are cur­rently using. Then just repub­lish to update your blog with the fixed version.

Option 2: Apply the fix manually

This isn’t as scary as you might think, though it takes a few more steps than Option 1. After log­ging into your Blog­ger admin area, click the “Tem­plate” tab, and then focus your atten­tion on the text edit­ing area on that page.

You’re look­ing for the fol­low­ing CSS in the upper por­tion of the tem­plate code:

.post-body div {
font-size: 13px;
line-height: 18px;
margin: 10px, 0px;
}

Change that to match the following:

.post-body div {
font-size:13px;
line-height:18px;
margin:0;
height:1%;
overflow:visible;
}

The last line of the orig­i­nal is changed, and two addi­tional lines have been added.

Click “Save Tem­plate Changes” and then repub­lish to update your blog.

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MySpace: Now not quite as ugly

Sunday, July 30th, 2006

Update: I was a lit­tle too quick hit­ting the “Pub­lish” but­ton, and for­got to include a link to my pro­file (duh). The text has now been updated, or you can go directly there »

If you’ve ever had a con­ver­sa­tion with me about MySpace, you know how I despise it with a pas­sion unequaled by pos­si­bly any­one else on the planet. OK, maybe not any­one else, but cer­tainly any­one who has a MySpace account. Except Mike D., he hates it more than I do (but for the same reasons).

Most of that hatred comes from its piss-poor (tech­ni­cal term) user inter­face design, which doesn’t seem to be (and never has been) a pri­or­ity for Tom and pals. It’s been described as “ghetto design” by some, and that’s just the crap you can see on the sur­face (web stan­dards junkies, like me, cringe when look­ing at the source code, but enough about my level of über-geekness…).

I was really plan­ning to dig into the bow­els of the pro­file code myself, to see what could be done, but after wast­ing half a day on it ear­lier in the year, I put the project on the back burner. This week, I decided I’d had enough, and with the help of Mike D’s “Extreme Makeover: MySpace Edi­tion” kit (my name), and a few min­utes in Pho­to­shop, my pro­file page is now sport­ing a new, exfo­li­ated skin (mmm, smells like oranges…).

And if any of you know Rupert Mur­doch, put him in touch with me, I have a plan to help him “fix” MySpace, and save some money, with­out alien­at­ing his pre­cious users…

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WebVisions 2006

Sunday, July 23rd, 2006

Well, it appears as though there’s noth­ing bet­ter than immers­ing myself in a web con­fer­ence to get me in the mood to write. Per­haps this is a sign that I’m spend­ing too much time work­ing in iso­la­tion. Or maybe I’m just more of a social ani­mal than I once believed. Either way, I’m com­pelled to write while sur­rounded by like-minded indi­vid­u­als of high intel­li­gence and com­pli­men­tary personalities.

A few impor­tant things have changed for me since SxSW in March, the most intrigu­ing being my new­found aware­ness of my “place” within the indus­try, what that means to me as a designer, and how that affects my approach to design as a field and as a lifestyle. I’ve also become busier, tak­ing on more respon­si­bil­i­ties and dead­lines (more to come soon on the writ­ing projects under­way for Apress/Friends of Ed, along with the tech­ni­cal review­ing for Simon Collison’s new book, and of course my duties as Bryan Veloso’s co-host of Live from the 101), and I’ve start­ing think­ing more seri­ously about mov­ing away from Florida, to some­where on the West coast.

The change in my thought process has sur­prised me, and I think that’s what hap­pens when you fall into a “thought-rut” with­out being aware of it. Some­thing (or some­one) slaps you in the face and makes you aware of what you have or haven’t been doing, and if you’re smart, you use that sud­den aware­ness to your advan­tage, and take a fresh look at every­thing you do. In my case, SxSW made me happy to be a designer, and reaf­firmed many of my per­sonal beliefs regard­ing design, and inter­ac­tion with design on a daily basis (not just my own, but users, fam­ily mem­bers, peo­ple walk­ing through Star­bucks — I watch peo­ple in an entirely dif­fer­ent way than I did before).

Real­iz­ing the impor­tance of the face-to-face inter­ac­tion and con­ver­sa­tion (sit­ting down to din­ner with a few smart folks trumps IM, phone or email any day), I decided to con­tinue attend­ing con­fer­ences as often as pos­si­ble, and while I had hoped to make @media a real­ity (sched­ul­ing and bud­get played a part in my absence this year, but not next), Web­Vi­sions 2006 has been my first oppor­tu­nity since March, and the four months could not have passed too quickly. Not only have I enjoyed the com­pany of peo­ple I met in per­son at SxSW, but I have once again made the acquain­tance of peo­ple I’ve known online but never met (Dan Ceder­holm has been my per­sonal high­light), and peo­ple I’ve never inter­acted with before, but hope to again and for some time.

My opin­ions are also becom­ing stronger. I’m begin­ning to have a gen­eral sense of “fuck every­one else’s ideas, this is what I think” — this isn’t to say I dis­agree with any and all exist­ing the­o­ries, con­cepts or best prac­tices, in fact I agree strongly with many peo­ple in the indus­try on many top­ics; it’s more that I find myself form­ing my own opin­ions and thoughts with­out bas­ing them on some­one else’s ideas first (at least not con­sciously — nodes of inspi­ra­tion exist, every­thing has been done or thought of before in some way or another, but there is a big dif­fer­ence between con­scious and uncon­scious inspi­ra­tion, mainly that the lat­ter is com­prised of infor­ma­tion that has been com­pletely assim­i­lated into the auto­matic thought process).

Life has been chang­ing for me on many lev­els over the last few years, and much of my evo­lu­tion in my pro­fes­sional life dur­ing this time has been (and still is to a great extent) clouded by the dif­fi­cul­ties in my per­sonal life. You can­not sep­a­rate cre­ative from emo­tional, and I would be lying if I said it’s been easy to focus and be cre­ative over the last few years, and the last year in par­tic­u­lar. But it’s slowly get­ting eas­ier, and spend­ing time with fel­low designers/developers and free thinkers (Bryan, Jeremy, Gar­rett, Keith, Jonathan, Mike, Erin, Megan, and every­one else I met, talked to, or drank with this week) helps chip away at the emo­tional restric­tions that have been a con­stant distraction.

I’m done mak­ing promises about blog­ging more (it will either hap­pen or it won’t, good inten­tions aren’t worth the time it takes to voice them), and I’m done car­ing so much about what peo­ple think. Risks are ahead, and I’ll either have suc­cess sto­ries to share or fail­ures to learn from.

Either way, I’m already start­ing to have more fun.

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Default Browser:OmniWeb

Thursday, May 18th, 2006

Note: Orig­i­nally posted on the Omni­Web Forums (reg­is­tra­tion required).

I’ve been on the fence as far as my pri­mary browser is con­cerned (call me a “browser agnos­tic” if you will), but find myself using Fire­fox with tons of exten­sions for the last 9 months or so, on all my machines (Mac & PC).Camino? Looks nice, but not enough fea­tures (one good exam­ple of mak­ing some­thing too sim­ple in my opin­ion). (more…)

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Podcasting with Bryan

Saturday, April 22nd, 2006

Hot on the heels of my trip to San Fran­cisco, I had the chance to spend nearly an hour as a guest on Bryan Veloso’s “Live from the 101″ pod­cast Wednes­day night (although, come on Bryan, isn’t it time to change the name? j/k…) We talked about try­ing to record it in per­son while I was in Cal­i­for­nia, but it didn’t work out (this trip), so my apolo­gies to all Bryan’s lis­ten­ers who were miffed at hav­ing to wait a few extra days for this episode :)

Bryan is a tal­ented designer (one who now owns a shiny new Mac­Book Pro), but he knows how to shoot the shit, which is exactly what we did for 55 min­utes. Curi­ous to find out what two design­ers can talk about for that long?

Check out the ‘cast.

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