Shauna Gordon

Code Is My Art

Box-sizing: Border-box and Changes in How We Use the Box Model

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Back in the days when Internet Explorer 6 reigned supreme, when Firefox was just getting its foothold and taking shares from IE, and Chrome was barely a Googler’s pet project, the browsers followed different box models.

Firefox (as well as the then little-known browsers Opera and Safari) followed the W3C standard box model, what is now known as “content-box”. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, followed its own box model, what we now call “border-box”. As Firefox began to rise and threatened IE’s market share, Web developers were singing the praises of the content-box style box model (which was one of the many W3C standards that IE ignored, and Firefox implemented), to the point that when Microsoft finally released Internet Explorer 7, it implemented the standard box model.

Project: Octopress Theme Toytown

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As part of yet another redesign and blog migration, I needed to create a theme that wasn’t so stock. I migrated my site to Octopress, a blogging platform that runs on GitHub’s Jekyll static site generator. It’s a great platform, as anyone who follows my Twitter or Google+ accounts is aware, but the vast majority of sites that run on Octopress use the default theme, or some slight variation thereof. As good and nice as the default theme is, it’s become very generic. I needed something different.

Anatomy of an Octopress Theme

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As you can probably see, I’ve updated my theme to something a little less Octopress. I still have a few changes to make, such as getting a background image that fits a larger viewport. It probably also needs some polishing for things that I haven’t run across yet, and deal with IE8 and below’s lack of support for RGBA and media queries, and I might toy around with how it responds to different sizes (oh yeah, and tweak how lists in the content are laid out), but other than that, it’s pretty much done.

I’m by no means a designer, so I doubt anyone but me will really like it, and if my history has anything to say, I probably won’t like it myself in six months, but for the time being, at least, it’s not the very generic, default theme. It also adds a base theme to the (currently insanely small) pool of Octopress themes.

Yes, Yes, I Know

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I know, I need to put a new theme on this thing. It’s funny how you start seeing something everywhere once you find out about it for the first time.

I’m not totally sure when, but I fully plan on building a new theme. I’d like to play around with responsive design, so this should be interesting.

I’ll also be looking into a sort of “tag cloud” for the sidebar, and a way to list the “tags” (or, as Octopress calls them, “categories”). I find it hard to believe that you can put categories into your posts and not be able to make use of them.

Oh, and your tip for the day - I never remember to use “rake” for doing Octopress tasks. I always want to run “octopress [task]”, so I added to my ~/.bashrc the line:

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alias octopress="rake"

To use it right away, just run source ~/.bashrc. :)

Yet Another New Home for the Blog!

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Yes, I know. It seems like I’ve changed blog platforms on an annual basis. With a little luck, this will be the last time.

What Happened?

In short, I became disillusioned with Blogger. It seemed like a nice platform, at first, but I soon came to find the cracks in the foundation. So, after some thought about what I really want/need in a blog platform, I decided to go a different direction.

Use Pidgin and Google Apps to Chat

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Who doesn’t use instant messenger of some form these days? Those of us from the days when there were as many chat programs as people probably have half a dozen accounts or more, or at least did at one point (who didn’t have ICQ, MSN, AIM, and Yahoo?). Thank goodness for unifying applications like Pidgin/Adium, Trillian, and others.

Now that some of us old chatters have grown up and created businesses (or at least business names) of our own, we may need to add our Google Apps accounts to the mix. This is a little trickier than just adding a Gmail, or other established provider, account, but thankfully, it’s not that difficult. I found, though, that start-to-finish instructions for getting set up on Pidgin were lacking, so we’ll cover them here. These instructions will work for Pidgin, and should work for Adium (the Mac port of Pidgin), though one may find the settings in slightly different places, due to convention differences across the platforms. The basic information should also work for other clients, such as Tillian, though, obviously, you’re on your own for finding were to enter everything.

Fun With Python!

I’m terrible about coming up with projects to do to learn a new language. As such, I generally pick them up as jobs require them. This makes it difficult to find a good reason to pick up a new language for me. So, when I made the decision earlier this week to learn Python, I decided to go a slightly different route - Gedit plugin development!

Making a Difference, Even as a Peon

We’ve all been there – the peon, low-level, replaceable employee at the bottom of the corporate food chain. Unfortunately, since we can’t all be wildly successful business owners, or get promoted to management almost immediately, we sometimes have to do what we can in our little peon positions. It’s heartening, then, to find James Shore’s Change Diary, via Jeff Atwood’s blog, from when James was working as a developer shortly after the DotCom bust.

It’s a long read, and I haven’t quite gotten all the way through it, but even what I’ve read so far has made it well worth the read. There’s success, there’s failure, but most of all, there’s proof that even one peon can make a difference in a company. It’s a lesson that employees and managers alike would do well to learn, I think.

Review: Fedora 16

Those who know me know that I’m a Linux fan (and a fan of Open Source software in general), so it’s probably no surprise that I run a version of Linux on at least my personal computers. In fact, being a PHP developer lends itself very well to using Linux on my work computers, too. Previously, I used Ubuntu, a popular Debian-based version. I still would recommend Ubuntu to those looking to get their feet wet with Linux, but my own path and workflow needs took me away from it with their recent change to a user interface they call “Unity”. I found the Mac-like Unity interface to be too hostile to my dual monitor setup, and at the time, Gnome 3 on it wasn’t very stable, and I didn’t really care for the other desktop UIs that are available. Since I actually liked Gnome 3, I decided to try a distribution that has it integrated. I was already somewhat familiar with the Red Hat family of operating systems from dabbling with it back before Red Hat proper became an enterprise solution, so Fedora (often referred to as Red Hat’s testing ground) seemed like an obvious choice.

New Home for the Blog!

Why the new home?

SilverStripe is great, but, like the rest of the platform, there’s not much to it. This isn’t bad in and of itself, I just don’t have time to essentially build and maintain the workings of a blog. So, I’ve decided to basically outsource that aspect, so that I can focus on the content of my blog, and the core of my website (which, admittedly, has been sorely neglected).