Take a Look In the Distance
I know it has been over two months. Trust me a month ago I was going to make a post. In all actuality the wait was worth it because I have content. The past few months I have not been ignoring the site. I just haven't come up with any threads. I have been constantly tweaking the site here and there. I honestly don't think that the tab has ever closed in my browser from the little things that I do to make this place better. Of course you probably don't notice it but that's what I'm here for today. To rub it in your face!
I recently picked up a CSS book called CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions by Andy Budd. You can see examples of the book or purchase the book on the CSS Mastery Website. I have to say that Andy BuddAndy's Website. You can see his genius at work here and even leave him some feedback. is a web design genius. In his book he goes over good design techniques, standards, accessibility , and even browser compatibility. I recommend it to anyone struggling with CSS. Why am I telling you this? With this book I have learned a lot about CSS that isn't just syntax. I learned about design. Design technique that I have implemented into this site. I use to hate design because I didn't understand it. With the knowledge I manage to make the forms look nice and neat and not like a blob of random text boxes.
I also want to point out that I have converted the site from XHTML 1.1 to HTML5. Though the site validates as HTML5 (with the warning of it being experimental) it is not finished. I plan on taking advantage of it. The transition so far was pretty simple. I only came across two real errors. The first one is that the acronym tag is obsolete. All I had to do was change them to abbr and viola. The second problem is an HTML5 specific that has probably drove most developers insane. For some reason you're not allowed to use ISO-8859-1 character encoding. Instead you must use UTF-8 or the recommended Windows-1252. I went with the latter as I really don't feel like installing fonts just to use four accents. If you really care to know the differences in the character encodings then you can look them up on Wikipedia. It's way too nerdy for even me to explain.
Also, so people can shut up about this, my site was created to see if I can do it. The whole purpose of this site is to test my web development abilities and to keep up with the ever changing standards. The content of the site follows my life and my goals and if you don't like it then you can go read some kids blogger about how he/she hates going to high school.
Posted At 2010-08-07 13:07:50 by DeadWolf :: ( No comments )
Polishing the Site
Polishing makes me think integration of Polish people.
It's been about a month since a real update and I know that I said I'll be posting more (I lied). Of course my attention to the site has remained. I fixed a few CSS bugs so that I can now have pages smaller than the nav. I also converted my login from sessions to cookies. The new host has a time out on sessions and it was causing me to loose content by it logging me out before posting. I have the cookie login set up similar to the way sessions work. I just have to take the risk of the cookie being on the computer. I fixed a few other minor bugs so the site looks a little more clean and polished.
Aside from site work I've also been spending what little free time I have learning more about Linux. I've gotten pretty comfortable with it and with the Compiz tweaks that I put in place it's a bit more homely (and leet). I tried out Gnome-Shell to find that it was a horrible mess. I honestly like how they are changing how the operation system is run but it has its problems. I also understand that it is still in development and things are likely to change. When the time comes to update to Ubuntu 10 I hope that I won't be forced to install Gnome-Shell.
If you want to try Gnome-Shell yourself just run these commands (be sure to disable compiz before hand)...
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell
gnome-shell --replace
I must warn you that it's still a little unstable. If you want to get the latest build then you must compile from source with jhbuild. I couldn't get it to build so I won't provide a how to. I feel if you're gutsy enough to build from source then you won't need my help.
Posted At 2010-01-19 00:08:00 by DeadWolf :: ( No comments )
Change of scenery
I've been working on this style all day so it better be amazing to you. I came up with the genius idea of adding the arch to the banner to cover up for the misspell... I mean to express my philosophy behind the name.
I decided to go with a simplistic look. No I did not forget to design around the mana day thingamabober. I decided to leave it open. You know what? If you don't like it then you can leave!
I ran across a few markup mistakes while working on this. Mistakes that still validate. W3 needs to work on their stuff. These mistakes were big enough to throw off the whole design but small enough to drive me insane. I took the p tags off of my footer because it was conflicting and I also hate blind people. They don't need to see my copyright... THEY'RE BLIND!!! That whole accessibility test thing I did a few years back is nonexistent now so that's one less freaking standard I have to deal with.
I just have a little rage from the countless hours I spent tinkering with CSS... I HATE CSS!!!
As I said in my previous post. Things are changing and the style is just one step in my master plan.
Posted At 2009-12-16 18:41:39 by DeadWolf :: ( No comments )
Migration
As some of you may know I am poor and can't afford web hosting. I was paying $15/month for hosting. Now I'm paying much less through a different provider. As good as Thinkhost was to me I can no longer afford the service. I had to look elsewhere. I've found that new hosting provider and I have already migrated. Notice the difference 
. The more I fiddle with this new service the more I fall in love with it. I feel bad for leaving Thinkhost but this is business... Right? Right!
With the new host there are some changes that may or may not affect you.
Due to the massive amount of bandwidth consumed from the videos, walkthroughs and future videos will be hosted on Viddler or Blip.tv. They don't charge me for bandwidth.
No off site linking of my images (You can try but it will not work). If you like it download it and host it yourself using bandwidth that you pay for.
Things are going to be changing around here so get use to it.
Posted At 2009-12-13 14:08:18 by DeadWolf :: ( No comments )
Pink for October
I remembered this year. For the whole month of October my site will be pink to raise awareness of breast cancer. NBCAM link is off to the side and will always be there after October passes. You can go to Pink of October for more information about this event.
Now, other than the style and banner change, I have been doing some work as to adding content to this place before I decide to cancel my hosting and let my domain expire. If you notice on the left in the Navigation that the Math anchor has been replaced with a Walkthrough anchor. Once I realized that no one cares about math other than Randall Munroe, my dorky brother and I, I decided to do something else a bit more entertaining and somewhat sought after(by n00bs). Everything that is posted in that section is self hosted and will not be put on youtube, viddler, et cetera. At the moment only my Link's Awakening walkthrough has been uploaded so If you haven't seen it go watch it now in the new Archtype-k video...... JW player..... Hey I can't recreate something that great plus it's free.
That's all for this update. If you have any comments about the walkthroughs or a suggestion or a request leave a comment or email me. Also, Don't forget to help fund breast cancer research.
Posted At 2009-10-01 22:02:30 by DeadWolf :: ( No comments )