A Geek’s Life

I know I know, I keep saying I’m going to finally theme this blog of mine, and I still haven’t gotten around to it. What can I say, it really just hasn’t been a priority for me. I’ve been focusing on the work I have to get done in such.

Speaking of, I’ve just completed a marathon of three brochure’s in two weeks. Well ok, only two of them were actually designed by me, the third was for the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, and they had some sort of technical catastrophe or something, and I had to finish the brochure work. So call it two and a half. But either way, it’s been hectic, and I’ve put in some overtime to get everything done in time.

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Well first off, welcome to my new blog.  Well it’s actually the same blog, what I should say actually is that I’ve moved!  I’m now being hosted by (mt) media temple, and I’ve got this fancy new url, and my fancy new website up and running.  Now the time has come for me to really turn my attention to Wordpress.  I’ve been dabbling a little here and there for a while now, but now I’m diving into the deep end and am working on some themes, including one for this blog here.  My other themes that I’m working on I plan on throwing up on ThemeForest…you know, I talked about some of this stuff already didn’t I?  Ok, enough of that.

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You know what I can’t stand?  Trying to talk about myself.  Describing myself.  I’m never good at it.  Myspace / Facebook profiles and the like.  And now I was writing out what I want to say in my introduction to my portfolio.  And it gets a little difficult for me, because I can’t seem to put something on the screen that sounds good.  I don’t know, it probably sounds kinda weird.  How hard can it be to describe the services that I provide?  But I’m trying to give the intro a bit of a flair, and I don’t know if I’m really doing that or not.

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Nettuts+ just posted an awesome new entry entitled 10 Rare HTML Tags You Really Should Know.  And it really is as it says.  A few things in there that I didn’t know about, but will definitely come in handy down the line.

Web developers these days are often expected to know and work in multiple languages. As a result, it’s tricky to learn everything a language has to offer and easy to find yourself not utilizing the full potential of some more specialized but very useful tags.

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Cripes I’ve let this blog die.  I just haven’t taken the time to write anything at all lately.  And this is kind of stating the obvious, since you can plainly see the lack of posts.  Bah.

Well, I’ve been working on my portfolio, and for once I feel like I’m making real progress.  The design is sort of the same as the main site is now, in that it’s the same colors and feel, but much more proffesionalized (see, I can make up my own words and there’s nothing you can do about it).

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Well, technically I got it done just before the new year, but it will be my first one printed in 09.  Anyways, I finished up my design for the Polar Bear Run & Walk brochure, sent it out to the printer this morning.  I think it came out pretty nicely, Polar Bear always has a snowy winter theme to it but I think this is the best one I’ve done yet.

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So typically, now is the time when I’m not busy actually working race events, but instead preparing for the one in the coming months.  This means getting the events up on the KLA website, designing the brochures and newspaper ads (which we just started doing this year), all stuff to keep me very busy.

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Well, the new site design for kenlongassoc.com is finally live.  I’ve been trying to get this done for almost 6 months now, and while that sounds like a really long time, you gotta understand that I do a hell of a lot more than just the website and brochures at this place.  Until recently I hadn’t been able to focus on the new design because of all the events we had coming up and stuff that I had to get done that didn’t involve the site.

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So I’ve noticed these external link icons cropping up a lot, such as on Wikipedia, and I thought it would be a good thing to put onto the new KLA site.  So here’s the CSS code I’m using to do that:

a[href^="http:"] {
background: url(../images/externalLink.png) no-repeat right top;
padding-right: 10px;
}

a[href^="http://www.kenlongassoc.com"], a[href^="http://kenlongassoc.com"] {
background-image:none;
padding-right:0;
}

The first bit puts in the icon, and of course the second bit keeps it from showing up on internal links, cause that would be stupid.  The problem that I’m noticing, is the icon also shows up next to images that are linked, and I’m not sure how to prevent that.  It looks bad when next to images, and also moves around my Flickr feed, and that’s just no good.  I’m sure I’m just missing something that should be completely obvious, but I need some help on this.  So here is my cry for help.

Wow, it’s been incredibly busy at work lately.  We have this one event every year, and it just grinds everything to a halt for a few weeks before the event day.  And I mean everything, not just working on other stuff, but personal lives too, hence, no blog posts lately.  Been getting home late, tired as all hell, heh.  Starting to get back to normal now that it’s over with though.  I’ve actually managed to get some work done on the new KLA site, which is awesome, hadn’t been able to touch it for about a month!

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