Dear Tumblr,

It’s pretty obvious that a large percentage of your users rely on The Missing E in order to enhance their Tumbling experiences.  The reason we use this  tool is because it fills in service holes and provides features that your dev team has neglected to build or hasn’t yet gotten around to building.  

Instead of telling me that this tool is BAD for the overall tumbling experience thanks to the many enhancements it provides, how about you guys fill these gaps yourselves so I don’t get forced into relying on third party tools and components to do it for you.

Thanks,

This Guy

This comic highlights exactly why my 3rd year portfolio project took me the entire semester to do rather than just a few weeks to build a simple html website like everyone else.   I, being the great long-term planner that I am, decided to build the website using a WordPress backend and a custom skin built entirely out of CSS.  As an additional challenge, i wanted a table-free design.  All column based content HAD to sit in a div.  Tables were strictly forbidden in this exercise.  Straight up HTML was also banned in favor of a more robust and ‘easy to update’ solution. Some minor problems with the approach: I did not know the first thing about how to set up apache, mysql, or PHP on my local environment - fun learnings were had there I did not know the first thing about PHP.  I had to teach myself.  Rather than using teach yourself books, I decided to read WordPress source files for whatever elements I needed to modify and hope I did it right. I did not know CSS.  I had to learn myself.  My best resources to quickly learn how to make it do what I wanted came from ripping apart existing WordPress themes and spending lots of time in CSS Zen Garden. As a result, I learned what I needed for the project rather than best practices.  I also spent an inordinate amount of time stumbling over CSS hacks to make IE6 support the bloody site.  Biggest pain in the butt EVER. Building 4-column layouts without any tables whatsoever is a total pain in the butt.  It didn’t help that I was teaching myself CSS in the process Building custom CSS for wordpress while not knowing PHP, CSS, or anything about how WordPress actually works will not bode well for a new web developer The web host I had chosen at the time was best known for their superbowl ads and their obscenely cheap pricing.  Turned out to be terribly flaky, incredibly slow, and had a dashboard interface so riddled with ads for service and feature upgrades I nearly gave up trying to work with them. So.  I put in a few hours a week every week till the due date.  It looked awesome at the time (to me anyways), I got an okay mark on it, and I now had this great site built on an easy(ish) to modify platform and a method to keep it up-to-date at all times. That site is now in the graveyard of the web and never got updated once I finished the project. After all I learned there, here I am, 5 years later.  Using Tumblr.  With a pre-built skin.
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This comic highlights exactly why my 3rd year portfolio project took me the entire semester to do rather than just a few weeks to build a simple html website like everyone else.  

I, being the great long-term planner that I am, decided to build the website using a WordPress backend and a custom skin built entirely out of CSS.  As an additional challenge, i wanted a table-free design.  All column based content HAD to sit in a div.  Tables were strictly forbidden in this exercise.  Straight up HTML was also banned in favor of a more robust and ‘easy to update’ solution.

Some minor problems with the approach:

  1. I did not know the first thing about how to set up apache, mysql, or PHP on my local environment - fun learnings were had there
  2. I did not know the first thing about PHP.  I had to teach myself.  Rather than using teach yourself books, I decided to read WordPress source files for whatever elements I needed to modify and hope I did it right.
  3. I did not know CSS.  I had to learn myself.  My best resources to quickly learn how to make it do what I wanted came from ripping apart existing WordPress themes and spending lots of time in CSS Zen Garden. As a result, I learned what I needed for the project rather than best practices.  I also spent an inordinate amount of time stumbling over CSS hacks to make IE6 support the bloody site.  Biggest pain in the butt EVER.
  4. Building 4-column layouts without any tables whatsoever is a total pain in the butt.  It didn’t help that I was teaching myself CSS in the process
  5. Building custom CSS for wordpress while not knowing PHP, CSS, or anything about how WordPress actually works will not bode well for a new web developer
  6. The web host I had chosen at the time was best known for their superbowl ads and their obscenely cheap pricing.  Turned out to be terribly flaky, incredibly slow, and had a dashboard interface so riddled with ads for service and feature upgrades I nearly gave up trying to work with them.

So.  I put in a few hours a week every week till the due date.  It looked awesome at the time (to me anyways), I got an okay mark on it, and I now had this great site built on an easy(ish) to modify platform and a method to keep it up-to-date at all times.

That site is now in the graveyard of the web and never got updated once I finished the project.

After all I learned there, here I am, 5 years later.  Using Tumblr.  With a pre-built skin.

Source: xkcd.com

rmsk8r05: “Look into your heart and you know it to be true.”
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rmsk8r05:

“Look into your heart and you know it to be true.”

(via snakelinksonic)

Source: rmsk8r05

Anyone else remember these?  Yea.  Neither do I.
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Anyone else remember these?  Yea.  Neither do I.

(via spliffington)

Source: ctrlu

On the word 'Fail'

  • eMadman: fail
  • madura: omg. 'fail' is like what junior high school students say
  • madura: what kind of underage girls have YOU been hanging out with?
  • eMadman: Madura. Fail