gregdoolittle.com

okay type nerds, today is your lucky day. there’s an entire film about typography. while 1.5 hours on the history and current usage of a font sounds totally boring to the average non-design person, i’m sure the film-artists will find a way to make it worth your while. i’m sure i’ll see it, and i’m betting some people from work would be interested.

i just found my new mentor for web design: boagworld.com. it’s a pretty cool site for beginners. they cover a lot of stuff you would never talk about in a class. and they stay very current with web standards. neato.

i’m taking intro to javascript as well as php (with mysql) this fall. both classes are online, which is pretty convenient. javascript should come fairly quickly since i took intro to programming with java. but php is kinda scary. i’m a little worried that this particular class will be too much all at once. it seems like a really cool language, based on how much you can do with it, and how simple everything looks on paper, but it’s also intimidating. i don’t have the required pre-requisites, but the teacher said i could take it if i’m willing to work really hard. i’ve never used mysql, so that’s another intimidating factor.

i’ve been lagging on syndicating this journal to my website. i need to officially put a hold on that idea. i’ve been meaning to spend time on it, but with weddings and birthdays and everything else, i’ve just been too busy. at some point during this semester, i’ll take another look at “php-embedding” this site. i don’t have time now (especially with school starting), and it’ll be easier then.

i set up a little mail() script on my website. i’m a little afraid of it being abused so i don’t want to post a link to it. this was my first (server) script; it was really exciting to see the script work when i sent myself an email from my domain. now i’ve got to figure out how to validate input fields… that should be a challenge!

i’m faced with the fact that i don’t have a whole lot of web design experience. i also have no formal design education (trust me, a bfa and design degree are two very different things). the skills i have right now would be respectable if it were 1996… but it’s not. when i look at job postings, almost everyone asks for some server-scripting skills, and i have none. my current job has nothing to do with the web.

my only advantage could be drawing. i need to do more of it with my web design. despite the my lack of server-skills and advanced web-design skills, drawing is really the only possible edge i have over real-deal computer science people (except for the ones who can also draw!). i’ve been spending most of my free time trying to learn web stuff, and not drawing… so my drawing skills have been waning. i really should be exploiting my access to illustrator at work. this is my new self-imposed ultimatum: make one vector “object” per day (just a tree or a bird or whatever; something simple) and post one of them in this journal each week. we’ll see where it goes from here… hopefully i can start a library of my own custom vector art…

i found livejournal’s guide on syndicating your livejournal account. they don’t mention using javascript/rss/xsl. instead they recommend buying an account so that you can create your own style on livejournal’s site. go figure. if you pay them, they give you a feed to your journal formatted the way you’ve specified. but i’m too stubborn to do this, and it seems like a cop-out. i’m still going to try to use DOM and ActiveXObjects with RSS and XSL. i’m sure if i ever learn perl, i’ll look back and wonder why any of this was hard… (or why i didn’t just get a paid account!)

woot!!!

finished up with an A in my XML class! it was getting a little tricky at the end of the course (writing recursive functions in xsl?) but hooray, i got through it, and i got an A (as planned!). the bigger challenge is figuring out how to use all this technical stuff in real world applications, given that i currently work somewhere where I will probably never use this programming language. i have to come up with these concoctions entirely on my own. the first two things i’m going to do are 1. syndicate this journal into my site (as previously mentioned), and 2. design the catalog section of a particular side project of mine using XML.

i took my final test for XML last night. i think i did okay. only needed to score a 78 to get an A in the class. so i’m not worried about it at all.

i start javascript on the 16th. it’s a short course, ending in mid-october. as soon as i take javascript, i’ll be academically “prepared” to look for jobs. but i will still have to assemble a portfolio. the one i have on my website is empty, and i still haven’t taken photos of my artwork or organized all the stuff i have at work. i might also take a course in relational databases (mysql and oracle), although i should probably spend more time on polishing my freelance projects and acquiring more of them instead.

must.. syndicate…. journal…

i want to take the rss feed of this journal, and put it on my website. i started to write the xslt that would format my rss feed into something that looked like it came from my website. i got through a good part of it before realizing that i wouldn’t be able to reference the xslt from my rss. why not? :: as far as my class was concerned, the only way to perform an xslt transformation on an xml document was to have a line referring to the xslt in the xml doc. i have no way of modifying the rss document to add any style sheet or transformation template to it… :: so, i’ve been researching different approaches to the solution. the two that sound like they might work best are javascript and php.

javascript solution would mean learning about DOM and writing a script that will load my rss file as an xml document, load my xslt document, and return the result of the transformation. this script would be inserted on the body of a page dedicated to syndicating my journal. it would automatically update itself each time the page is loaded. the only problems with this method of syndication are that the content will not be searchable by a web-spider/search-engine (no biggie for me), and that not all browsers are javascript enabled. php is a very similar solution, except that the two javascript problems are solved, and a new one arises: i have no clue how to write php. i’m going for the javascript / DOM model for accessibility reasons. it will also be a nice primer for my javascript course i’m taking next semester.