get out of my brain it is mine

or, design gestalt.. I started making a new design for webanorak a while back.  It had some fun transparent overlay tricks for making javascripty bobbling clouds of content look lovely. It had png24 pattern overlays for that not so THIS IS THE FUTURE, MAN! WEB 2.0 sameness all over the everywhere. I then left it in it’s little box for a while after the initial enthusiasm was side-tracked by puppies or kittens or head trauma or something. Looking at it again, and comparing it to all the lovely I AM THE FUTURE bleeding edge of cool sites out there now my design blends in to the crowd. Feck it. CSS sprite menus are retro cool.

Adobe ebook DRM crazymadness solution

I have to install a special program to view it? It is not compatible with Stanza* (see comments from Neelan Choksi), the best ebook reader ever – although less happy for their prospects since they sold out to Amazon.. Oh Kindle for iPhone. How sad you make me. Not quite as sad as iBooks. But pretty sad. It takes THREE BILLION YEARS to download a POCKET edition of a book? I have to install some random extra product to my iphone (after a non trivial search to find the goddamned thing in the first place) to view it? What. The. Shit.   *Note the dearth of development since the buyout. And it is still better than the Kindle app by…

3D Text Tower with MOAR 3D with MAGIC! (CSS)

If you are in internet explorer this post will look very dull indeed. Get a different browser, you crazy fool!

So, the various lovely things that can be done with the CSS3 property text-shadow, whilst still lost on Internet Explorer users, are definitely still worth playing with.

David Desandro’s 3D Text Tower effect, as popularised by Chris Coyier is pretty darn cute.

It’s not just for 3D effects though..

Upgrading from 2.x to 2.6.1

I admit it, I am a bad person. I am a foolish person. I let my wordpress install lag behind on leekworld. I encountered a bit of a bug all of a sudden with advanced-cache, and decided to upgrade rather than work around it – I was on WordPress 2.2. Utter disaster.  I tried all sorts, but the upgrades just wouldn’t take.  I reconfigured my wp-config file to have all the post 2.5 stuff but it just wasn’t having it. I’ve lost the Qwilm! theme as well. I loved that theme. I had tinkered with it and it made me happy.  I think I may have to make a new one just like it. This one’s just plain vanilla right…

painting websites

I’m really liking the whole mixed media thang at the moment. Created a couple of watercolour headers that display based on GMT sunrise and sunset. Never realised PHP had sunrise/sunset functions, you larn a new thing every day, huh? Still very much WIP, but I’m loving the paint. I’ve gone all painty.  I painted the cats and the landscapes separately, so I can move ’em about. Taking photos of the paintings with a K850i is perhaps less than ideal however – I think I need to get a scanner working..

dojo master regexp your arse, glasshoppa!

Dojo Toolkit and Regexp monster child runs amok. Citizens terrified. Where will it stop?? I want to put ‘>=2 ‘ in a combobox. Dojo master say no. In fact, it seems to be escaping any even vaguely ‘dodgy’ characters. I can’t put < in, fair enough. I can’t put & in. I tried ‘<‘ even. It converts that to & lt; but it won’t resolve anything with an ampersand in either. This bug, and yes I say it IS a bug, is bugging the arse off me. bloody wordpress is at it too! Leave me the hell alone! What is wrong with you people?!?!