All posts by Sean Feeney

Redesign: My WordPress Journey

Design, Pixel Precise, SeanDFeeney, , ,

As noted before, when I created this site I wasn’t sure which direction I wanted to take it. My decision is to make primarily a Design portfolio showcasing my work with a blog component. It is not that the blog isn’t important to me but, I wanted to show equal emphasis on my design work and capabilities.

When I set out to redesign this site it quickly became clear, I had a lot of work to do. I wanted something simple, clean, usable, creative and stylish. The landing page is the most important part of the site. I set out to welcome guests with the entire site experience in one place. After some thought, I found that I wanted to create a static page with dynamic content. Researching WordPress, I realized this was harder than previously thought. During my research, I kept reading about pages vs. posts and how there is a hierarchy of pages. Determined to understand this hierarchy, I consulted my previous theme’s template and Google. I only became more and more confused. People were talking about widgets and different pages that have specific semantic meanings. My template seemed to be missing something. The confusion lasted until I saw a forum post, where someone was trying to use these WordPress features and couldn’t figure it out. They posted their confusion on a forum and received the reply, “you probably have an old theme.” I then consulted the default WordPress theme and saw template php pages to take advantage of these new features. It was clear at this point, I had to abandon the old theme and plan for the future. I decided I was going to utilize the templates of the default theme to build my site.

Now that I had some ideas down I knew I had to act on them. When I was first putting this site up, I found a theme and just improved upon it. I did this with the built-in WordPress theme editor. This presents its own challenges, including, every change saved gets applied to the live site immediately. In a proper development environment this is less than ideal. After some more research, I came across xampp. Xampp is an application that turns your computer into an offline Apache web server. This was the perfect solution because I could export my current site and database information; then, built a new theme around this established content.

The design was created completely by me with Photoshop; then, sliced up for this website. I chose a dark theme because they are said to be among the most difficult to create. You are limited to the colors, lighting, and textures you can use. With lighting limitations, depth becomes difficult. This then became a challenge I had to complete. I feel I successfully embarked on the journey through the dark side to create a complex design that somehow has an elegant simplicity.

Looking good only works, if it’s functional. I paid particular attention to layout and the future; two concepts that are seemingly unrelated but, have more in common with each other than one may think. That commonality is functionality. In terms of layout we can look at coding. The coding is heavily reliant on CSS, PHP, HTML and JavaScript. This combination of coding delivers a fast, clean and flexible environment. This will lead to a platform that is ready to take on whatever the future has to offer. These do play a role in developing for the future but, not as much as out next topic, the browser. At this stage in the game the browser has become the most talked about part the web. The term “modern browser” has become a popular term; a term that refers to the ability to support web standards and enable the ability to understand HTML5 and CSS3. When deciding how I would code this site I chose not to fully utilize the features of CSS3 because support is still scarce and require hooks like -webkit (safari and chrome) and -moz (Firefox). The final version will drop those hook causing me to rewrite a bunch of code. Planning for the future has some serious decisions.

One of the biggest decisions you have to make now is whether to support Internet Explorer 6. I decided to take the same stance as big companies like youtube.com have taken and not support this site on Internet Explorer 6. Aside from the coding horror of trying to make IE6 render properly, Microsoft even seems to indicate that they support the browser for the lifetime of the operating System it was shipped with, by saying:

The engineering point of view on IE6 starts as an operating systems supplier. Dropping support for IE6 is not an option because we committed to supporting the IE included with Windows for the lifespan of the product. We keep our commitments. Many people expect what they originally got with their operating system to keep working whatever release cadence particular subsystems have.

Since Microsoft has decided to drop mainstream support for Windows XP, they will therefore drop support for Internet Explorer 6. Microsoft will only continue to offer support for XP over extended contracts. This is not something the general consumer will buy into and is mostly for corporations who need an extension to upgrade hundreds, if not thousands of computers. My site’s users are generally consumers without extended XP contracts. Therefore, I have dropped my support for IE6. IE6 is not one of the aforementioned “modern browsers.” There is little reason for any consumer to continue to use IE6 because you can get far more features, security, and usability enhancements from any of the later released web browsers. Internet explorer 8 was the first Microsoft web browser that didn’t seem to break any of my websites when using stylesheets from Firefox, chrome and opera.

Thank you for taking the time to stop by my site. I hope you enjoy your stay. Feel free to comment on posts and send me feedback. I am always looking for work. If you want consulting or for me to build you a site, don’t hesitate to use the contact form and send me a message.

ASUS P5N-D Realtek HD Audio Static Problem

Tech/Gaming, , , , ,

Recently I purchased an ASUS P5N-D motherboard to replace the one that failed in my Dell 8400. This ended up being a Dell proprietary nightmare and needless to say I ended up with nearly a whole new rig. Since setting it up, I had to iron out a few kinks. One of which was an annoying static that came from my 2.1 speaker system (that came with my Dell 8400 a few years back). After searching the web for a few days I couldn’t find anything helpful. Most everything suggested hardware failure or driver issues. Turns out that it is a problem with the internal speaker volume. Wait… what?!? Yes, the internal speaker volume is what caused my issue.

If you go to into the Realtek audio volume control there is an option for adjusting the internal speaker volume and the following steps will help you fix this:

  1. Right-click on the Realtek icon sound_icon in the task-bar.
  2. Select “Sound Manager” from the pop-up.
    sound_manager
  3. Now select the Mixer tab and click the arrow (highlighted in red below) until the PC Beep is visible.  Now lower it until the static feedback goes away.
    realtek_mixer

A Few Thoughts on Ubuntu One

Tech/Gaming, , , ,

Canonical has released it’s beta version of it’s first cloud-based operating system synchronization software, Ubuntu One. For anyone who knows me, I love Ubuntu and Dropbox. Although this is making big news, I am not very excited.

Cloud-based operating system synchronization software is a great idea; however, it will inevitably fail as the de facto standard. With the Ubuntu One service plan, you get 2 gig of storage for free and for $10 you get 10 gig of space. Smells like they are taking a bite out of the Dropbox success, right? Wrong. As much as this sounds like a match made in heaven to have a Dropbox like application built into the operating system, it is not. Instead, Canonical is going to add a service that is already provided but, with far less benefits.

Ubuntu is a great operating system and there are many reasons while I will continue to use it; however, the Ubuntu operating system is flawed. There are many problems with this operating system, see Bryan Lunduke’s presentation to get a view of the problems Linux faces on the desktop platform. Basically, Canonical is adding a redundant piece of software that they have to update and maintain; yet, they still haven’t addressed many of the problems that Ubuntu faces on a regular basis. Ubuntu 9.04 is the best version yet. Many improvements make it very stable, fast, and functional but, I still can’t use Photoshop, play mainstream games, and use other proprietary and superior, software that I can on windows. Perhaps Canonical should really be concentrating it’s resources on this aspect instead.

Since, I still have to switch to windows to use most of the industry standard software, Ubuntu One will not cut it. Dropbox will continue to serve my needs because I can install it on my work provided windows laptop, on both Ubuntu and Windows boots on my desktop and even if I had a Mac, I could install it there too.

In conclusion, software which caters to one operating system or oneweb browser will die a slow painful death. Every operating system has their benefits and draw backs. None of them are perfect. Take Internet Explorer for example. Microsoft keeps rolling out new versions of the web browser yet, they won’t create versions for different operating systems. Yes, you can install Internet Explorer on Macs but, there hasn’t been a new version since IE5. Also, there is IEs4Linux which hasn’t been updated since about 2006 with IE6 the highest version you can go and it is really buggy. Look at what we see happening, slowly but surely, alternative browsers like Firefox are taking market share. Even Apple understands this concept, you think the iPod would have had this much success if you couldn’t use it with windows? The era of operating system specific software is dead and gone. The companies that realize this will prevail, the others will fade away.

Are twitter hashtags dying?

On the Web, , , , ,

I was using twitter recently and started to realize that I don’t use hashtags anymore. If you are not familiar with hashtags you can check out the hashtags wiki. I originally started using hashtags to fill the twitter search void. Since Twitter acquired Summize, twitter search has been just as good as hashtags, if not better, at tracking topics; so, one question remains, are hash tags a dying feature?

I started using Hashtags only a few weeks after joining Twitter because I quickly noticed its growing popularity. It was a good way to fill the search void and keep track of various topics. Whether you used it for an internet meme, natural disasters and/or major new stories/events, it was a great way to find popular topics and follow them.

Lately, I have been finding myself less and less likely to use hashtags. At one point, hashtags provided what Twitter didn’t; now, since Twitter acquired Summize, that void has been filled and contains all the benefits of hashtags and none of the drawbacks. Twitter search is an official, real-time search without the # clutter and #difficultytoreadtopics (difficulty to read topics), that hashtags bring. The real-time search is a great feature; especially, if you are going to track a frequently updated topic. In my testing around the recent frequently updated topic, #asot400, twitter search found much more tweets than hashtags.org found, giving you a more accurate up-to-date representation of the twittersphere. Also, you can run a search on your topic of choice and every new tweet on that topic gets dynamically loaded to the search results. Twitter search doesn’t require the ‘#’ symbol; so, you are not limited to what people #tag. Tagging keywords can also make tweets difficult to read. For instance, let’s take a look at the following tweet:

Went to the #worldseries #redsox #game with @seandfeeney and the #beer was way too #expensive. BTW, #yankeessuck

Without the ‘#’ this would be much easier to read. Not to mention, stringing multiple words together like redsox becomes incredibly annoying. Also, tweets only allow for 140 characters and saving on characters is very important. If you tweet regularly, you will find that you run into that character limitation all too often. Finally, Twitter search will allow you to search on a string with spaces like “Red Sox.”

In conclusion, are hashtags dying? What do you think? The once void filling addition seems to not have much purpose anymore. Hashtags seem to be nothing more than a character hogging, legibility inhibitor with more limitations than benefits. Twitter search has all the tracking with none of the limitations. Twitter search will track hashtags and doesn’t require you to be followed by another twitter account the way @hashtags works. There are too many people who use the ‘#’ symbol and don’t even know that they have to follow @hashtags then have to wait to be followed back (which doesn’t take too long) in order for your #hashtags to be tracked.