Pixel Surfers » News

Site5 founder dead at young age of 28

Elaine — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 23:51:15 +0000

Very sad to hear the news about the passing of Matt Lightner, the quite brilliant founder of Site5, my favorite hosting company. I joined Site5 when Matt still owned the company and I’ve always been impressed with the service of Site5, from the technical aspects to the customer service. I felt like he built it for me. At only 10 years older than my eldest son, he clearly left the world too soon.

Dominus vobiscom, Matt. Requiescat in pace.

Another Moodle Competitor?

Elaine — Mon, 24 May 2010 23:53:43 +0000

Google has just launched an open-source course/learning software solution called Cloudcourse that may rival Moodle. The more I use Moodle, the more I don’t want to use it, so I guess any alternative is welcome, but…

Oh man, at first glance this looks really sweet. I live my life on Google already and the idea of having a tool that fully integrates with Calendar is very appealing. The only problem is that I don’t have a clue how to use Google’s app engine much less Python, so it’s out of reach for me for the time being. I sure would like to try it, though.

Here is the Google blog article on the subject: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/05/cloudcourse-enterprise-application-in.html

Update: It seems that all it really consists of is a calendar/scheduler. While useful, especially if you are already using Google Apps for your enterprise, it’s not anything that you can’t do with Drupal with a little configuration…except the automatic integration with Google Calendar of course. You can try it here.

Woo Hoo! I’m back up again.

Elaine — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:27:39 +0000

I haven’t been paying much attention to my own sites over the last year or so. Which is why it just so happened that all of my sites on one server were hacked! I think I had an insecure password, and they made a mess of everything by inserting Javascript trojans in every .php and .html index file in first and second level directories. I’ve lost a couple of posted in the database mix-up, but I think I can continue on from here. Ugh.

Seven figures for a domain name?? – IPhone.com has been acquired by Apple

Elaine — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 16:23:33 +0000

All I can say is…wow. Trully incredible. Why didn’t they secure this when the iphone went into development? Here is the original blog post from domain tools on digg:

I can confirm Apple has bought IPhone.com from Michael Kovatch. Michael would not disclose the sale prices but he said it was well worth it to sell. I know this was at…

Sandbox theme competition

Elaine — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 10:18:05 +0000

I haven’t been paying much attention to WordPress lately, (or really much of anything online, it’s all been about “Wow! A new vacuum cleaner!” and “Why won’t that cat stop peeing on the carpet?”) but this just caught my eye and it looks like a really cool competition.

The Sandbox theme is a semantic, xhtml based theme that generates classes based on content. The folks that designed it have sponsored a competition for designers to create their own themes based on Sandbox using only CSS and images. This is a bit like what Zen Theme is attempting to do for Drupal (make themeing possible using CSS only) but it still needs the bugs worked out (which I might help do except I’m cleaning up cat pee).

I really don’t think that I will have time to participate, but as much as I love the current theme for Pixel Surfers, I have been wanting to create my own theme for some time. I will definitely be using Sandbox when I do so!

Take the survey!

Elaine — Wed, 02 May 2007 10:35:21 +0000

I will be interested in seeing the results of this survey, indeed. If you do web design, you should take it too.

My latest project goes live

Elaine — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 23:55:51 +0000

I am happy to announce that Highdesert Photography is now online with its new design. It sports a simple, semantic, all CSS layout and validated XHTML. It designed to be very easy to update with new photographs. I am also working on a design for this photographer’s Coppermine Gallery, which will be done in the next month or so (no rush).

Some new projects

Elaine — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 00:57:26 +0000

I hit a major wall with the redesign of this little blog o’ mine. I had WordPress up to my ears and I just couldn’t stand it anymore. It got to the point where I just could not even post; not a jot, not a tittle. That happens when I go overboard on things. Moderation should be my middle name. Actually it’s almost my middle name. Doesn’t Moderation sound a little like Margaret?

In any case, I have been able to work on some things recently. I set up a website for my local garden club. It is still in need of content but we are working on that for each member page. I also am going to design a site for my son’s Montessori teacher, and a local photographer has expressed some interest in having his site redesigned. In light of the possibility of having actual clients, I wanted to have a way to communicate with them in a way that was kinda like, well, a blog… Where we could upload stuff and have communication over time that was archived and trackable. I decided to try the easy to install and use phpBB bulletin board software as I have had luck with it before.

Well, I’m happy to announce that my board is up; and I actually managed to style it and rewrite some of the template files so that it does what I want it to do. This is a big victory for me, as it seemed I would NEVER figure out styling a PHP based program EVER. Hmmm, guess I was wrong. Here is my new board.

Readin’ and dreamin’

Elaine — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 23:31:32 +0000

This last week I have been trying to get my head around a number of things as well as read through a couple of new books, so my brain is now sufficiently mushi-fied. Hopefully I can get the multiple projects into some semblance of order so that the real work can start soon, but right now there is just a lot of imagining going on…

The books I am perusing are The Real Business of Web Design and Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress.

The Real Business of Web Design is an enourmously simplified title for an extraordinary little book. It isn’t a how-to book under any stretch of the imagination; instead it is a manifesto for taking web design as information architecture to a whole new level in which humankind finds what it is looking for, business gets done, and it reaches its true potential in a global network that reflects both diversity and an individuals uniqueness in one fell swoop. If that sounds utopian, it is, but, as the history of the web reveals so far, it is also true. This should be required reading for anyone seeking to do more with the internet than just code up a site in Dreamweaver for Uncle Hal’s photography biz.

Building Online Communities is a very different book, but a very interesting read for my knowledge-hungry techie side. I had narrowed my own CMS interests to that which I could handle a few weeks ago; which happened to be Drupal, WordPress, and phpBB. When I saw a book that addressed all three; I just had to buy it. The reasoning for those three programs is that, in the opinion of the editor, these represent the best of the Open Source community in blogging, bulletin boards, and website implementation. I couldn’t agree more. Much of the how to install and configure stuff I had already figured out on my own, but I keep coming across these little gems that make me say “aha! I didn’t know I could do that!” or “that’s how that works?” that make the price well worth it.

The sections on theming have got me started on figuring out how to code up a fresh new design for my favorite blog…you guessed it! Pixel Surfers! I have decided, since my PHP skills are rudimentary at best, to take on creating a scheme for the Binary Blue theme; which has all the functionality I could ask for and more. I am in the process of figuring out what blocks are which div and going from there. My biggest issue is that it is a 2 column theme with one column “widgetized”, but I think that I would still like a 3 column layout. So that begins, if only I could get my spongy gray matter to get with the program (sigh).

Also, I will be installing Drupal, for the first time, on my main site this week. Don’t worry, it will be in a test folder, so there will be nothing new to see for weeks and weeks. But I have multiple domains that I host on my site, so the main focus will be configuring multiple domains from single Drupal install. Oh well. If it’s not a challenge than it’s not worth doing, right?

Some progress

Elaine — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 05:24:41 +0000

Well, there has definitely been some progress made in the last week. First, I re-designed an interim splash page for my website. It was a great mini-project; in that although it was only a single page, the layout was complex enough to challenge my CSS skills. With a large image for the background I had only a small area within which to offset the text; an additional challenge was to acheive the same effect within Firefox and IE. Accessibility had to be put aside for a fixed pixel-based font size to make IE behave; and the margin property got the text box where I wanted it. Not too difficult, but “look ma! no tables!”.

Second, I adopted the current template for Pixel Surfers, WP Andreas 09. It is a good template to play with, and I’ve modified a couple of the pages and the CSS, learning a lot in the process. I even considered using the general layout as a basis for creating my own design, which is an absolute neccessity at some point. In the end, however, I have found it to be way too boxy to be a good model, so I’m still on the prowl for a theme that will do the trick. I find I really enjoy attempting to warp WordPress to my desires; hopefully a theme of my own is in the offing.

Finally, Pixel Surfers has gone from Pixel Surfer to surfer with an “s” and it has it’s own web address now: www.pixelsurfers.net. Before it was just kind of glommed on to my website. The reason for this is mostly because I have some good girlfriends who do webdesign and coding that I would love to have contribute to this little space as well. We are always IMing each other with this or that discovery; what I’m hoping is that we will post here as a way of keeping track of what we find. And if this blog ever acheives a wider audience (which I doubt it will, but ya never know) then our discoveries are available to the world at large. As Padre, my son’s Scoutmaster says “the adventure continues…”.