Category: Burningbird

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Burningbird

It is all about me

I’ve added an ‘about me’ link to the sidebar. I’ve been meaning to do this for some time, though my About page is probably not as professional as many of the ones I’ve read elsewhere. Oh well — life is full of wonderous variety, as they say in the movies.

Seriously, when I get the ‘professional pages’ in my site up (not this weblog, no worries there– it will always remain as funky as I can make it), I’ll replace the About Page; but I figured it’s fun for now.

A succinct version of this page could be that I’m a Moron on the Pilgrim Specification Adherance Scale. I hope that I’m a fairly successful Moron, and that I keep my forays into being an Asshole to a minimum. I do try, though, for the Expert Moron ranking in the technologies I work with frequently–except for syndication feeds I hasten to add, where I’m happy just to remain a simple Moron.

When it comes to RDF, I even wavered for a time as Angelic (though some thought I tended more to Asshole than Angel); but then the W3C came out with changes in the released specifications, and my work was pushed back into being Moronic again.

Ain’t that just the way it goes?

In the About page, I also mention my Port-a-Bloggy business, and the camera fund. I have a new port-a-bloggy customer waiting in the wings for WordPress 1.3 to release and then *poof* I’ll have him off Movable Type and into WordPress, quicker than a cat can clean its whiskers with a spit soaked paw. Just think–I can do the same for you.

I’ll have you know, that WordPress is very sexy. Just ask any WP site owner, they’ll say that their sex appeal has increased by a factor of 2 since they moved to WordPress. And you’ve never been moved until you’ve been moved by someone like me.

I did want to say thanks to those who have helped so far with the camera fund, or have trusted me enough to manage the move of their weblogs. I also wanted to thank those who have come out with tips on what to do with my current quirky camera. Because of them, I can continue to take the photos just like the ones posted this week until I do get my new camera.

Those with a modem, tremble with fear.

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Burningbird

Some tinkering

Depending on which stylesheet you favor at this site, you most likely noticed that I’ve been tweaking the site design, doing some cleanup, a little polishing here, and little polishing there.

I eliminated the emotive stylesheet, primarily because I kept forgetting to attach an ‘emotion’ to each writing. Besides – aren’t we women always supposed to keep people guessing?

Some of the styles don’t work that well with Internet Explorer, especially if I embed photos in the page. I am about ready to bag IE, as I was ready to bag Netscape 4.x long ago. Still, I know that it’s still being used by poor souls everywhere. Walker Evans should always work with IE, and Fire & Ice most of the time. I put WE as the default stylesheet now, and we’ll leave it at that.

I changed the background color for Lemon Shake-Ups to a nice buttercup yellow. That and some of the sidebar image changes make it a most cheerful stylesheet. Not a soft pastel or hip 2004 color in the page.

I now use it as my default.

I’m in the process of creating an about page, and doing a major re-design on my front burningbird.net page. I hope to increase my web development business, and to do that, I need a more traditional, professional looking front page. No ‘floating clouds’. No buttercup yellow, with bright red accents.

However, note that I will refrain from using this year’s Big Color, pseudo-avocado green.

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Critters Just Shelley

Last Firefly

The weather has been unseasonably cool and dry this week, which has helped to keep the bug life down; every last biting, stinging, sucking, buzzing, feeding, crawling, creeping, icking, disease carrying bit of it.

However, last night while out walking I was surprised to spot what must be this year’s last firefly hovering in the trail ahead of me. As I drew near, it flashed once, briefly, but with no real enthusiasm. I stopped for a moment to appreciate the little creature, feeling a strange sense of kinship with it: it being the last firefly of the season; me being a 49 year old, non-Christian, liberal single woman living in Missouri.

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Just Shelley

Summer break

In addition to our political views, Mark Morford from the Chronicle and I have something else in common this morning: we’re both suffering from injured wrists. More than that, we’re both taking a break from our writing: Morford because of his wrist; me because damn, but I’m tired.

My writing has been uninspired, my camera busted, and even my code sits there going, “Can you give me one good reason why I should run?” Uppity code is a sure sign that you’re overdue for time away from the keyboard.

I have some writing to do for American Street and then I’m going to see what kind of mischief I can get into that doesn’t involve the computer.

Be good. Be well. Kick butt.

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Burningbird Weblogging

Source updates

I am regenerating the documentation of the PHP for my site and should have replacement pages up tonight. The pages will include my Talkback feature and comment editing. They won’t include the counter post technology, which I’ve removed.

I want to congratulate Jay Allan for winning the Six Apart contest. He deserves recognition for his hard work and I’m glad to see he got it.

This reminded me, though, that those who contribute plugins for other products, such as WordPress, also deserve recognition for the hard work they do. So I wanted to take a moment to say thank you to those who have provided documentation, plug-ins, or even inspiration for my own tweaks, including the WordPress development and documentation team, Chris Davis, Mark from Weblog Tools Collection, Craig, and Carthik.

I gather that August 1st is WP Patch Day where plugin authors pick a bug to fix in the core. Though I’m working on converting the Redland Unix libraries to Windows in order to create a PHP extension (and having a bitch of a time with it–nothing to do with the Redland code; it’s my own rusty Visual Studio/C skills), I’m going to see if there’s a bug left to claim. And then that will be it for me.