Custom WordPress Theme Design

Okay, so this is an inside joke, but since D2 is no more I decided to post the glossary here to persevere it for posterity…

it’s easy, I saw it on the History Channel

it’s hard to get inspired when dealing with a dick….

That said . . . Charlie who?

yellow that carpet

lucky

fuck up a wet dream

ninja

okay charlie

haiku

I for one welcome our new UAB overlords

redfred

is that flash

is it search engine friendly

aaaah

I’m known for my percentages

Its true. Its even in a 10-21 song.

clickz

fajitas 4 2

kg wrath

kert

minimalouf

maloufikova

panda

stu-bee

distruptive tech

can we copyright-patent-trademark-propietary software that

global redirect

9abca415bc643be9fdfaa8c96bc6dada

gamepan-enormorent

State modifying the access databases

trivial

in a sick twisted way

mobley and thurman - hold the phone

newfangled shareware: perl

can we use spotedit for that

what else

win those ball games

what else

thats all I got

doo-doo-doo

monkeys

caveats

copacetic

anathema

youll like this-youre gonna love this one.

data towers

data streams

I know that

Why is ‘Net porn so poular? It doesnt smell

non sequitur

tabled

I still dont know what I paid her for

fruition

Thats an idea

dig deeper

not html, rich text

I heard you

the difference between Windows and Linux is that Window works out of the box and but always crashes, and Linux never works right away, but once it does it never crashes.

This is a little different visually than our other databases.

Mentor is getting a complimentary license this year based on the way I can structure their costs.

yes, please

one on those headaches that turn you into a serial killer.

cat cock

monkey hole

air-hockeey air-hockeey

sammit

I think Ill play it safe and take the risk

goddam that was uncalled for. whatever.

corporate masturbation

Who’s resposible for those wrap tags ?

Separating marks from there money since 2000

I’m the evil, anti, opposite John Ashcroft

Can I officially beat the crap out of ***** now?

I thought you guys may have built Fanger on Plone or Zope/Python since it is a popular opensource toolset.

That’s My Charlie

So Keith, what do you do? - Well, I take the spec from the client, and deliver it to the engineers. - So you physically take the spec, and give it to the engineers? - Well, no, sometimes my secretary does it; BUT I HAVE PEOPLE SKILLS, DAMNIT!!!

I’m trying to get Charlie Manson to blog as well, but I’m not sure if I can get him; he’s not that reliable.

AMFMP

This podcast that I listen to, Free Talk Live, was talking about globalization the other night and since I was listening to it after the fact so I couldn’t call in, so I sent them this email and I thought I would share it with TDB readers.

Hey Now -

When you guys were talking about manufacturing jobs, globalization, etc. last night - you asked ( maybe rhetorically, maybe provocatively ) “why can’t Americans compete, are Americans lazy?”

I think that as a whole Americans are definitely not lazy, in fact I think that a sizeable percentage of Americans are among the most driven and hardest working people in the world. I think the issue is that we have become addicted to a certain standard of living or lifestyle that is simply not sustainable.

While I agree that all of the rules, taxes, and regulations can make turning a profit almost impossible for some industries in the U.S., possibly a larger issue is that we have to pay our workers a much higher wage then factories in Guatemala do. Even if the minimum wage was repealed I don’t think that industries are going to be able to effectively staff their factories paying workers $1.25 an hours so that they compete with with central American or Chinese factories. Even as wealth spreads and foreign companies are forced to pay their employees more, they are never going to have to pay them wages that American factory workers came to expect in the heyday of American manufacturing.

People in other countries live differently then we do here in the US of A - if you need proof just look at the percentage of resources our country uses. With less then 5% of the words population we consume a quarter of the oil produced each year. We teach our citizens to be consumers, from early childhood, and to be consumers you need disposable income. You are not going to have much disposable income making $1.25 an hour.

Even if we can get rid of the very real fiscal factors that our government burdens us with, we will have to systemically change our culture before we can compete with other countries in a truly free market.

The next night Ian said that he was gonna kill himself if he he had to keep talking about globalization… Oh well nothing is perfect, not even free talk live.

One thing that I have learned in over a decade developing web sites is that the ‘Net is continually changing, and to keep up you need to change with it. One of the more recent developments in web design is the use of CSS and semantic markup. CSS and semantic web design has several benefits: clarity in code, browser and other web-enabled devices compatibility, seperation of content and presentation, smaller burden on bandwith, and better visibility to search engines.

Back in the day, we designed sites with tables and hacked those tables into doing things that they were never meant to do. The table tag was designed to display tabular data, not as a way to render the layout of a website. Unfortunately, a better alternative did not exist, so we used tables. This made for inefficient, slow loading sites with code that was very hard to read and maintain. Wikipedia defines sematic markup like this:

Sematic pages “supply information for Web search engines using web crawlers. This could be machine-readable information about the human-readable content of the document (such as the creator, title, description, etc., of the document) or it could be purely metadata representing a set of facts (such as resources and services elsewhere in the site). (Note that anything that can be identified with a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) can be described, so the semantic web can reason about people, places, ideas, cats etc.)”

These days, hip designers and developers use CSS extensively to create beautiful, fully standards compliant sites. CSS-based layout allows us to develop sites that will degrade effectively–that is that they will be viewable on all types of devices such as PDA’s, cell phones, T.V.’s–and will work correctly on devices that don’t even exist yet as long as they are standards compliant.

Most importantly, developing sites with CSS allows us to effectively separate content and presentation. Have you ever looked at the source code of HTML pages that were created with a table-based layout and wondered “what the heck is going on here?” You see lots of opening and closing of tables and table rows all mixed together with textual content and graphics. With a clean, CSS-based layout you can create pages that are easily understood by looking at the source, making them easier to understand, maintain, and update. Look at the source of my company site http://www.vp3media.com and then look at the source code of this site that uses a tables based layout:
http://webservices.org/. Big difference, huh?

If you have a site with high traffic, you can significantly reduce the amount of bandwdth used by transitioning from a table-based site to a CSS-based layout. If a visitor to your site doesn’t have to load all of the code needed to render those tables and spacer gifs, you are transmiting less data.

CSS also offers search engine optimization benefits over tables. If you have a tables based business site that relys on Internet traffic to turn a profit or aquire new clients you will see real advantages by switching to CSS. When a search engine spiders your tables-based site, they retrieve a large amount of content that has nothing to do with you business. When search engines spiders a clean CSS-based site, the majority of content retrieved will be textual content that describes your business. The ratio of content-to-code is higher with CSS-based layouts.

We’ve all seen search engine descriptions that don’t make any sense; that’s because search engine spiders use a top down method for retrieving information. Whatever is topmost in your document, the search engines are going to think is the most important part of the document, and therefore should be used as the description. Since we seperate content and presentation with CSS, we can put the most important information at the top of a document no matter where it is actually displayed on the page. Try that with tables!

So haven’t updated this damn blog lately, we moved from North Mississippi to South Georgia last week and are still trying to get everything in order.

Additionally I have gone the independent contractor route since leaving D2/USNX and have been inundated with work - but I can always squeeze a few more projects in so if you need some web design and/or development shoot me an e-mail. Check out the portfolio over at vp3media.

In the next week things will be calming down and I will get back to bloggin’ proper. On the upside Online Music Blog has been moved over the the WordPress platform and has been updated regularly.