CCCU Con Day 1

Unfortunately I can't give you a glowing report so far from this conference.  Currently I have sat through two sales pitches, not even very good ones either, and a keynote where all of the speakers points were supported by gross generalizations.

One of the things that I have been confronted with is the fact that web 2.0 itself has become a buzzword.  I just sat through a presentation where the speaker spewed some nonsense about everything being on the net, and that is web 2.0.  Sheesh.

I am hopeful that things will look up for the next two days... I hope.

Out of touch, after a fashion

I am leaving today to attend the CCCU Tech Conference where for once, I will be attending and not speaking. Hopefully I can learn me something.

I will have sporadic access to email, and the net so if you don't hear from me right away, it isn't because I am ignoring you, or more often the case, don't have time to respond.

Have a good week everyone.

Someones having a birthday

And that somebody is me.  Today is my 29th birthday... the last of my twenties going by.

I have already received some very cool presents (lego's from my wife who rocks!), but I find myself lusting after this Skype phone from Netgear.  This is some seriously cool tech, and with Skype currently running a deal where all domestic skypeout calls are free, this could be very handy indeed.

If someone is feeling generous, you can buy it for me off my wishlist...

More AJAX hotness

If you haven't yet noticed, there is a new version of the Flickr website.

There are some things that I think are a step down visually, like removing the box around individual images, but for the most part I am impressed with the changes that have been made.

My favorite change so far has been the new 'Organizer' which is now completely powered by AJAXy goodness.   No more flash... feels good.

An irritating problem

I am having an odd problem, and I have run out of patience trying to solve it.

For some reason, in the last 2 - 3 days my js-foo has been breaking in Firefox.  And not all the time mind you, sometimes you will load the site and it will work fine.  I have it working in Safari, the only other browser I care about.

So since my javascript-foo is not strong at all, I thought I would make a call out to my friends in the blogosphere: "Help a brotha out!"

You can see all of my code by viewing the source of my site and checking out the contents of cjd-boot.js and comms-js.js; that is all there is to it really.

Any help would be appreciated.

Custom Excerpts for WordPress

So I have already been asked a couple of questions about the new deisgn; namely how do I make WordPress give me the entire commenting history for an individual commenter, and how am I doing my excerpts in the recent entries column.

I thought I would cover the second question first, since it is the easier of the two.  I toyed with using the function the_excerpt(); built into WordPress, but after much deliberation I decided to roll my own so that I could have more control over the output.

Basically my excerpt function takes two variables, the ID of the post, and how many characters to display from that post.  Not too complicated.  I decided to create two seperate functions so that I could maximize flexibility.

Read the rest »

When redesigns == torture

You know it is time to just launch the thing, and take a breather.

I started out this particular design full of hope and energy; after about 3 days the energy was gone and hope was on a south bound train out of Chicago.  I think I am honestly losing my ability to design for the web.

I am planning on writing up an analysis of this design and the thoughts behind it once it is in a better state, but until then go look at some really good design, courtesy of Veloso the wonderboy and Matt the rough, smudgy... scratchy guy.

Anyway go, look at good design, and hope Mike gets his act together and launches a site sometime today.

Oh and for those of you out there not blessed with large screens and high res fear not; I am prepping an alternate version of the site that will be much kinder to your constrained proportions.

Rebooted, almost

Well comments are now working again, but they are kinda ugly still.  I should have them 'not fugly' in the next hour or so, bear with me.  Oh and let the commenting begin!

I am in the middle of things with the reboot; alas a child and eleventy-billion projects means less time for this site as I would like.

I hope to have the complete rebooted Sillyness ready by the end of the day, but for right now, I need to be off to bed.  And yeah, the first thing I will be updating tomorrow is the comments form, so for right now, no commenting.

It's so lonely looking now, isn't it?