Redirection

So I’ve been using WordPress.com for a few days now I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it all. I am, once again, moving. Not back to Blogger, but to my very own domain. I’ll still be running WP (ver. 2.2) scripts, but on a server of my own. Technically, I’m sharing it with David and Queenie but nevertheless, it’ll be on a tasty self-serve server.

To find me, you can head on over to http://www.the-ppole.com/ – David helped me snag up the domain today after I asked him about it last night around 12 o’ clock. Considering the fact that the man has summer school to worry about too, I really don’t know how he got on top of it so quickly… Impressed.

It’ll take me a little while to set everything up nicely but as for now the posts and comments and whatever are all functioning swimmingly. Sorry for any inconvenience (like cookie hashing and bookmark replacing) this may have caused you.

Firefox vs. Opera: Round Two

Today I’ll be looking at usability in both Firefox and Opera. The main concerns I have for a browser’s usability include Cookie and Password Management, Customization, Rendering, and Bugs/Quirks. For today, I will only be talking about cookies and passwords.

Why does this matter?
Seeing as how I’m someone who enjoys the ”set it and leave it” way of doing things, I am very much concerned with how a browser handles my settings. I have a list of sites that I visit often which require cookies to function properly (like Gmail, for example). I have so many accounts (four different ones just for Gmail) and on so many different sites with so many different variations of “johnnysasaki” and “larker” and whatever else I can’t recall at the moment that I do not like sitting there and thinking for a minute or two before typing in my username and password. I also don’t like trying various options before getting it right. This is why I really think cookies and passwords are so important.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Gameplay

I was reading about this on Kotaku but the video wasn’t working so I looked them up on YouTube for myself. Obviously, sickness ensued…

Firefox vs. Opera: Round One

As per Herman’s request, I’ve done some very simple tests to get a feel for differences between Firefox and Opera. Two things I’ve looked at this time were Load Times and Memory Footprints. These are completely objective observations and I have not changed/fudged any numbers. How did it go?

Opera 9.22 Int’l

Update: I would be glad to do comparisons between the two on my machine. I’ve been considering that actually, since load up times (for example, of Speed Dial pages) become extremely important for someone who opens new tabs as often as I do. Memory footprints are also going to be important for people like me without more than a gigabyte of RAM. I’ll get on a side-by-side soon.

Keeping my promise from before, I have decided to give Opera another chance to prove itself to me. I had ventured once into these strange waters but did not have anything to show for it except for a lasting impression of “This just doesn’t feel like my Fox.” I decided then that I would, given the right amount of time, try it out in earnest at a later date. Since I’ve upgraded from Blogger to WordPress, I also figured it’d be fitting to try out Opera at the same time. So what did I find out?

Conflation

While perusing through my usual schedule of friends’ blogs, I came upon a post on Alex’s that got me reading an article by Hans Madueme. I usually don’t read articles as they tend to be much longer than the standard one or two paragraph blurbs on people’s blogs, but this one’s really good. Here’s an excerpt:

info @ the P.Pole 07.23.07

Here I am blogging happily on WordPress. Surprisingly enough, the decision to swap over didn’t take me too long and I’m (so far) glad that I have made the switch.

5 things I like about WordPress:

PSP 3.40 OEA

Aside: This is my first post on WordPress. It’s fitting that it’s got to do with looks, because I think this new page is looking pretty hot with the Blix theme (and my own header image). I can’t edit my CSS on the standard, free web version but with themes as clean and functional as these, it’s not a big deal.

I’ve been killing it on my custom firmware for the past month or so and honestly, I don’t understand how people can get by without it. I mean, yeah, the standard come-with Sony firmwares are fine and all (not to mention pretty) but there’s just so much you can do (i.e. not very much at all) in terms of customization. I mean, you can change the hue of the icons/ shadows/ text and the image used as a background but that’s about as far as it goes when it comes to the basic Sony-brand firmware. I’ve yet to install my own theme yet but I intend to once my PSP is done charging (I have a tendency to be a complete battery whore). So, did I brick up?

info @ the P.Pole 07.19.07

This is the big 500th post! Woo! Thank you! Thank you! This place couldn’t have come this far if it weren’t for you (or me, I suppose).

Last night’s LoaH didn’t really go as great as I’d have hoped but I suppose it can’t be helped. Anyway, I still think it was alright (it could’ve been better… or could it?). The amps never came (in time) and I assume they are probably going to arrive between now and next week (right when we’re done “needing” them). I guess it’s probably best though, that we didn’t get new bass and guitar amps to play with in the rain. I think we did what we were decided on doing. I just hope we’ve got some better weather foreknown for us in the weeks/Wednesday evenings to come.

P.Pole’s [Custom] Template

I’m quite proud of my template for this blog that I’ve slowly created and altered over the years. It started out as a generic, one-size-fits-all kind of template that most blogs run on but I didn’t want my page to look exactly like all the others. Okay, to say that it’s completely groundbreaking in its layout is a huge exaggeration, but for someone without any actual knowledge of how to code (apart from some very primordial HTML), I think I’ve done quite nicely for myself. I mean, I had to pretty much move, shape, shift, and shapeshift by trial and error. Here’s how I “coded” the stuff on this page (which, by the way, looks proper only on Firefox so far, by my testing, because of my “coding”):

1. I imagine something cool I want to achieve and catalog it away for a rainy day.
2. I take note when I see something I cataloged on another site I happen upon.
3. I press Ctrl + U (read: “View source”).
4. I sift through to the good part and see if it’s something done without javascript (which I don’t know how to use).
5. If it’s javascript, I sigh and move on. Otherwise, I move on to step six.
6. I go to Google.ca and look up something along the lines of “HTML (or CSS) [tag] tutorial” where [tag] is whatever the hell tag or function or whatchamacallit I saw the other page using.
7. I then read through and try to understand how the tag and its parameters work.
8. This is the fun step: I spend hours and hours typing in stuff mostly haphazardly, clicking “Preview”, and then going back to make the appropriate (i.e. guess and check) corrections.
9. When this is all done I marvel at what I’ve created for a few moments before I check its rendering in Internet Explorer (explosion) and then in Opera (assplosion).

If I had any idea whatsoever how to code this all properly without relying so much on guess and check, I’d be able to make changes so that my page would render decently across all forms of web browsers. Sadly, I do not have the patience to sit down and really learn this stuff as it bores me. And anyway, I think I sort of enjoy my current way of doing things too much to give it up. Firefox tricked me into thinking it kept web standards before, but now I know that the developers took a few liberties with it (or so I’ve heard from watching videos of conferences with web standard discussions). Apparently they decided that some rules were better kept and others bent/broken. I don’t know what that means in detail but hey, I don’t think I’ll need to know all that to be able to enjoy my Webernets.
Nevertheless, I thought maybe since my current template is running a bit cluttered I would consider upgrading my template to Blogger’s new way of handling templates that much resembles Xanga’s styling pages. This would mean pretty much wiping my entire template settings (even though I simply love my fly-out/mouse-over menu things). And so, I decided to check out Blogger’s version of the template designer on my other “blog” (which is just there to reserve the domain and for testing such as this). I wanted to see if I could make it work towards my needs, whether it was worth the switch, and whether there might be a chance of my reworking my menus (again, my favourite part of this template) to work there. So far, no luck. I mean, it’s convenient to have them do kind of what I’ve done with the hierarchy look that now comes default but it’s not a mouse-over fly-out.
It’s got auto-adding and -sorting of new stuff (like links, archive links, etc…) whereas I update my template every month with the new links myself (every month I add a new list item linking to the new month’s posts). Still, I’m not convinced. It looks as if the new template designer thing is great for adding page elements and quickly editing them but it doesn’t do much in terms of allowing me to really tweak stuff with the HTML/CSS editor and that’s what I need to be able to do above all else. It’s either that or I just don’t know enough to be good at manipulating (the right bits of) code. Sigh.
Anyway, I’m going to stick with my current state of affairs until I really find a reason to switch over and get rid of/recreate my mouse-over menus. I love that thing. Mouse… over! Mouse… over! Wee!