No, I’m not writing about the Super Bowl…
Web design can be so complicated -- I love it, but at the same time, I hate it when things break for no reason...In the words of the late, great Heather Chandler: "Fuck me gently with a chainsaw."...
**A minor clarification -- please do not take my bitchings about my own inadequacies in overly customizing my website/theme as an admonishment of the WordPress platform. WordPress is probably the best platform for the less savvy user who still wants to be able to tweak/customize because it is easy to use and has tons of support. The fact that I would rather bitch about something not working perfectly than take the time to figure it out myself is on me -- not the system.**
Well, as you can see, I have updated my site's theme to match Chris Murphy's latest version. I can't reiterate enough how thankful I am that he made his theme and files publicly available. Truly, truly outstanding work.
After I screwed up and overwrote my CSS files TWICE (yeah, yeah, I have a habit of doing stupid stuff), I finally sat down to update it all today, and unfortunately (and this is NOT Chris's fault, I want to make that VERY, VERY clear), it took longer than expected.
Web design can be so complicated -- I love it, but at the same time, I hate it when things break for no reason. For instance, for some unknown reason, the way things were displaying in MAMP and the way they display right now on the live site were not exactly in-synch. I get that the JSQuery stuff might not work on a MAMP install without doing something to it -- something I can't be bothered with adjusting -- that's fine. But I spent a good 45 minutes trying to figure out why my links weren't showing up as with the correct background/hover over, only to find out that they look just fine on the live site. In the words of the late, great Heather Chandler: "Fuck me gently with a chainsaw." An aside, sadly Kim Walker, the actress who played Heather Chandler, died from a cerebral hernia, caused by a brain tumor, in 2001.
Anyhoo, in addition to MAMP's shortcomings, I'm also having to deal with the fact that I don't know how the WordPress default style class systems work as well as I thought I did. That's not true, I never really took the time to learn them; I'm still not as good with them as I thought. Why does this matter? Well, because in order to get my Bookmarks list to look like it did before but with the new full roll over system, I have to figure out how to fix the style classes to show descriptions without breaking everything. I'll figure it out - it's just frustrating. I'll probably have to do the same thing with my Twitter plugin too. I really need to work on getting this theme widgetized, not because I necessarily like widgets, but because it could potentially solve so many of these styling problems.
While I'm bitching, I would also like to say that it is 1:49 AM and I can hear people breaking bottles or some shit near the trash compactor, which is fairly close to my apartment. I live in the first group of buildings, and actually, I have a pretty sweet location -- my deck overlooks the pool. But as a result, I'm near the front of the complex and can hear this sort of shit. It's annoying. At least the my neighbors who used to get into yelling matches moved away. That was like, not great. It woke me up a few times. I finally just started screaming through the walls to "shut the fuck up" and then I started blasting Nine Inch Nails directly at the wall at like 2 and 3 AM. Fair is fair. Plus, I learned from ER that you don't want to get directly involved in neighborly domestic disputes. That dude punched the hell out of Abby after she sent the wife to a half-way house (it didn't help that she had started drinking again and wasn't really using the most sound judgement in talking to him through the chain-lock).
Oh -- bitching item #3 -- I need a new cell phone. Like, I had to open mine up yesterday so that the LCD screen would start working again. This was right before I paid $75 for a haircut. How Geek Chic is that? I open up my phone and then get my eyebrows done and my hair cut.
I want the new Blackberry Curve. Anyone want to get me one? Or contribute to the "Buy Christina a New Cell Phone" fund? Bueller, Bueller? Yeah, didn't think so.
Out.
13 people have left comments
LindaSherman said:
I'm in the midst of trying to launch a blog on wordpress.org and you are slightly terrifying me.
You want a Blackberry instead of an iPhone? I thought you were a Mac Girl.
Christina said:
Linda,
Please don't be terrified, honestly, WordPress is the easiest system with the most options and support of all the various blogging platforms out there (at least in my opinion). My problem is that I like to be difficult and alter perfectly good beautiful themes for my own benefit, just because I like to be difficult. WordPress is a great system, and despite my own personal issues with it from time to time, I really do think that in terms of options/ease of use, is is probably the best platform out there for the user who isn't an expert in PHP.
I want an iPhone, but I refuse to enter a contract with AT&T (I've had bad experiences with both AT&T and Cingular, and now that they are one company, I refuse to give them $80 a month, on principle as much as anything else). Trust me, if I felt more confident about the state of the unlocked phones, I would buy one of those. Unfortunately, I think I need a phone before that will end up working itself out 
Gary said:
Christina I like your blog design as it is not cluttered and very easy to navigate. Keep up the good work and keep pushing yourself each day to be creative.
Jay Cuthrell said:
While my Blackberry 8830 has been rock solid, I still harbor not-so-secret desires for an iPhone.
Christina said:
I hear ya Jay! Trust me, if I could reconcile using AT&T, I'd be there. I'm probably just being overly stubborn (I was last with Cingular in January 2001 -- so it's been 7 years, though my mom had a bad experience with them as recently as two years ago after the Cingular/AT&T Wireless merger, and that was before the most recent SBC/AT&T acquisition), but I really despise the idea of being tied to a carrier I hate just to use a phone. Once the unlocks become more hassle-free (and they are getting there) with upgrades and such, I'll probably consider it.
Good to hear about your BB though!
Chris Murphy said:
Hi Christina -- I just read this post -- it's actually a very good thing I did because I felt that I was leaving something significant out of my README.txt and you've pointed it out nicely. Since I refactored many of the sidebar styles, I didn't exactly include instructions on how to extend/interchange them with other sidebar elements (e.g. bookmars formatted like recent comments). Hopefully this will help:
1. You will need to output your bookmarks in the following XHTML format:
%bookmark_title%bookmark_description
This should give you a similar structure as the recent comments, so that the while list item is clickable.
2. Take a look at the classes used in the recent comments. You will need to specify the following in your list:
That should be it. You can use the same structure for your tweeter feeds, if it doesn't turn out, let me know which plugin you are using and I'll put together a custom sidebar box for it. Hell, send me a list of sidebar widgets, I'll develop a series of them and make them available for download
Christina said:
Chris,
You are awesome! I figured I would have to do something like that (esp. as far as the class system), but you have helped me out immensely by commenting with that XML string. Awesome!
Chris Murphy said:
I suppose I should have read the "allowed markup" before posting 
This is what was supposed to be in #1:
<li><a href="%comment_link" title="%bookmark_title"><span class="heading">%bookmark_title</span><span class="excerpt">%bookmark_description</span></a></li>
Choosing a CMS/Blogging Platform… | www.ChristinaWarren.com said:
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Jared said:
BlackBerry has been great to me. The new OS 4.5 slated to come out by this summer will have full support for streaming media (including YouTube) and a whole bunch of additional consumer-oriented features. E-mail is incredible on it, too. There's a tiny learning curve but it won't take long to get over it (I was mainly poisoned from two and a half years of WIndows Mobile experience). Oh, and you can change the BlackBerry's battery without sending it back to Apple (or voiding your warranty ;))
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