So, as it makes sense, I’m gonna blog about the progression of my site. First things first, I am working on the content. First, I’m trying to write it. Nothing groundbreaking, but worthwhile, hopefully. The content is structured in HTML5 (hopefully semantically). Basic navigational elements? Check. Pithy Bio? Check. My profiles on other sites? Check. So what’s missing?

Contact form for one. I got tired of fighting the spam battle, so now I just link to my profiles on other sites with social features. If you want to reach out to me and don’t already have my contact info, hit me up on one of those networks. They do the hard work for me, so use them for what they are good for.

Portfolio. I’m not looking for work. There’s not much to show in my portfolio that’s particularly groundbreaking. So, it’s gone, for now. Maybe it will be back when it’s worth looking at. Until then, no need taking up space with it.

Still considering adding my twitter feed. Not sure if that brings much value to this site though. Especially since I tweet some of my new blog posts. Just not convinced of the value add.

Anyone who has styled forms understands the frustration that is the input/textarea (or whatever your weapon of choice for masochism). They can be frustrating to make behave consistently. I found a technique I used today that I thought I would share. I seriously doubt I’m the first to use it but none-the-less maybe someone hasn’t seen this before.

I had always assumed inputs (from here on out, when input is used, assume all inputable form elements) act weirdly. They aren’t inline, they aren’t block, they are just… weird. While most of us have become accustomed to dealing with this, this can be particularly troublesome making them do things like behave like a block level element but have padding.

In a proper block level element, if you want it to take up the full available width and have padding, it does that by default. Maybe you have to set width: auto. But even when you set an input to block level element, it won’t behave like one.

CSS3 introduced a nice little property called box-sizing. Essentially with a value of border-box this can make an element behave like Quirks mode in IE. Initially my response to this was “WTF?! Why?!”. But this allows you to turn it on for 1 element. 1 element that normally won’t adhere to the box model for block level elements. So, without further ado, full width inputs with padding:

Tonight I made it to my second Austin JavaScript Meetup and I left thinking “Dammit! Why have I been missing these?!” Well, I know why but the point is, I’m there now and plan on making the rest of them.

Tonight Joe McCann gave a talk (with attempted demo) of node.js. Things went wrong as coding live is often prone to do and we were left with more of an explanation than a demo. Still, Joe’s an excellent speaker, engages the audience well and does a good job of keeping the banter going while working through the issues. I’ve learned the JS group has no lack of banter.

Andrew Dupont gave a detailed demo about scripty2, the successor to script.aculo.us with specific highlighting of the trials and tribulations of CSS Transitions.  The picture he painted was grim and discouraging for blazing out on your own and doing the CSS Animations yourself. Of course, that’s where scripty2 comes to save the day. It normalizes the behavior across all reasonable browsers. It’s still in alpha but has some promising merits. I’ll be interested to see where this ends up going.

All in all, this was a fruitful meeting and I may break down and present something next month. To be certain, I don’t have the polish of these presenters so it’s something I will have to give some thought to. We’ll see…

You may have noticed the new digs. You may have noticed I actually posted something. You may have a noticed a terrible mental visual in your head. Yeah, sorry about that last one. I am starting my blog anew. I have ported over the last few posts that were worthwhile and am primed to get going. However, I made some changes I feel are worth sharing.

I am not going to try to scope the content of this blog. That is a mistake I have made several times and it just never works out. This is going to be a blog about whatever I feel like posting about. Tech, personal, photos, videos, quotes, code, whatever. My only rule is the general rule I have about putting things in writing (only do it if you don’t mind being quoted on it).

I have finally moved off Wordpress. I have used Wordpress for many years and have loved it, but it’s time for me to try something new. I like the idea of making my content easily accessible, easily postable and some incidental social aspects to it. So I moved my blog over to Tumblr. However, for blogs about code, code samples and whatnot, I have decided to use GitHub. I like the idea of people looking at the code I have written, being able to download it succinctly, do whatever they want with it and even easily recontribute it to the world. GitHub does all these things very well. However, I want to show code examples in my posts. This is where Gist comes in. I can put files, snippets of files, whatever on their site and just embed them here. Yes, it’s a script tag. I’m hoping it won’t be too big of an issue, because the convenience for me and I believe for anyone that wants to use the code should be worth whatever compromise I have had to make around progressive enhancement. Github even styles the code for me.

Which brings me to my last point. Style, I have none. Well, more specifically, my blog has none but hey… if the shoe fits… I will eventually style this blog but I didn’t want it to get in the way of my content or hold me up. So I have decided to launch the site naked. This will force me to concentrate on markup and content of the site, making sure I have things as appropriate as possible, then layering on the design.

So, here’s to hoping I actually stick with it this time. Oh, and stop picturing me naked.

I would have never guessed I would be blow drying my range out this evening. Apparently the cleaning lady came today and while she does a fantastic job, apparently she got the cooktop too wet. When electronic ignitor switches get too wet, they just start igniting. No gas leak, nothing else wrong under than the ignitors were firing. Turns out a little blow dry session dries them all out and it’s right as rain.

The thing is, I found this out by Googling for it. I even talked to my dad who is my go to person when I need to know how to fix something and he had never heard of it. I just wonder what would have happened had I not had the internet to figure this out. I suppose I would have paid way too much for a technician to come out and be victim to his or her whim.

Long live the internet!