I did an interview with Mark Blevis a while ago, wich was going to be for his show, Electric Sky. Unfortunately, he had some problems with the audio recording wich prevented him from using it for a show, so instead he used the interview to make his latest Mashed-podato clip for the Canadian Podcast Buffet
I come in about 20 minutes in, but even if you’re not canadian you should listen to the whole show. Mark and Bob do a really great job.
Get the show here. Kudos to Mark for making me sound interesting. And about the technorati tag… i had to! hehe (see, if you listen to the whole show you’ll get that joke).
Technorati Tags: Canadian Podcast Buffet, Mark Blevis, Bob Goyetche, Electric Sky, podcast hotdog, SnowyDay
Earlier this year, around march, i took a job doing some maintenence for a website. I will not link to the site, but i will tell you this: it was the damn most awful site in the whole internet. Last time i checked, the home page alone was 1.6 Mb of just text and the ocasional image (and that’s because i got tired of waiting and stopped it - i’m sure it’s larger). Don’t get me wrong, the job was pretty cool; good work enviroment, very flexible hours and great people. The pay, on the other hand, was ridiculously low. Think of a low number… ready?…
No, it was lower than that, seriously. Try again.
No, lower than that too.
And than that too.
Ok, we can be at this all day, so i’ll just keep going. So, the site was awful, built on FrontPage (the boss wasn’t stupd though, he once told me “ugly sites sell more. Have you ever googled ‘Ugly Websites’?”). Part of my job was to move this site to a new one, using this program called XSitePro. When i first interviewed for this job, the boss asked me “have you ever used XSitePro?”, in a sort of gloaty voice, like this program was the best thing since sliced bread (i think i also heard some fanfare too…). I didn’t know about it, but he assured it was easy to use. Needless to say, i hated the program every single day i worked there.
Last night i checked the website again out of curiosity. It reminded me of this XSitePro software, so i went and googled it. Here, look for yourself. Nothing but review after review, all with affiliate links at the bottom (pretty similar to the site i was working on to tell the truth - so there really is a market for these kind of things or, wouldn’t surprise me at all, the boss was also behind XSitePro…) . Even one titled Xsitepro - is this the only Honest Review on the Internet? has an affiliate link at the bottom, and it’s posted on several articles sites. I looked at 15 pages of a google search for “XSitePro review” and couldn’t find a review that looked… well… honest.
So, here it goes, an XSitePro unbiased review, for real.
Should you buy XSitePro?
No.
Why? Because if you’re thinking of buying this program, you’re on Windows (it’s not available for any other OS), and if you’re on Windows, you already have FrontPage, wich is pretty much as good at building websites as XSitePro (i.e. not good at all). It may have all those easy publishing tools, but the WYSIWYG interfase is awful. Good luck trying to stylize a link. And the code it writes is terrible. Three words: table based layout.
“But!”, you may say, “XSitePro has all those useful tools like SEO optimizing!” Ha, i laugh at that. It’s pretty much useless. There’s a reason why SEO specialists charge so much.
If you’re serious about your online business, either get a real WYSIWYG program (you can get some even for free) and spend some time learning how to use it, or pay someone who knows what they’re doing to do it for you.
I left that job after a few months, to start SnowyDay. Now i do my web design with the best HTML editor available, the Notepad.
Technorati Tags: XSitePro, notepad, html editor, build websites, ugly websites
Another SnowyDay design!
Connecting the Dots, the blog for new marketing company, crayon
Technorati Tags: Snowyday Design, crayon, Connecting the Dots
I’ve been planning a trip to Montreal to spend the holidays with Cat and Bob for a while now. Well, now it went from plan status to fact status, as i have the ticket on my hands. Actually, i only have a reciept, yet they still charged me $10 for ticket emission… the bastards.
And another thing, i have a connection flight in Miami, for wich i have to wait 8 hours. If anyone has any tips on what to do on the Miami Intl airport (or any airport for that matter) for 8 hours, i’ll appreciate it!
Technorati Tags: CatFish Show, Bob Goyetche, Miami, Montreal, flight
For 30 days, from October 10 until November 8, Yahoo! users worldwide can contribute photos, writings, videos, audio – even drawings – to this electronic anthropology project. This digital data will be gathered and preserved for historical purposes…
…you’ll have your handiwork presented to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, projected on one of the most famous relics on the planet, AND then beamed along a path of laser light into space. This will definitely be something to email the grandkids about someday.
This sounds like an amazing project. I don’t know what will i contribute with, but i sure will send something (some pics maybe?). What are you sending?
timecapsule.yahoo.com
Technorati Tags: yahoo timecapsule, dayphoto
…i really do have an I *heart* Coca Cola pin on my backpack.
Yes, yet another IE rant. Everytime that, like today, i have to spend 4 hours fixing the mess IE does, i feel like writing a big fat rant about it.
This website doesn’t work properly on IE. It’s just details, but they’re there. I will not bother fixing them; not because i can’t do it (i do it for client’s sites), but as a personal statement. Why should i fix something that isn’t broken on the first place?
The only reason IE has an usage share of almost 90% is because it comes bundled with Windows. IE6 is a bad product. It’s not just me saying; PC Magazine named it the 8th worst tech product of all times (and AOL is nº1, of course). But worry not! IE7 is right around the corner! is out… okay, worry, and worry lots. Who knows what whole new set of bugs will IE7 have. At the IE Development Blog (i’m too lazy to look for the specific post) they’re already asking web designers to fix their codes because the hacks used for IE6 might do a real mess on IE7. They’re asking me to fix the way i fixed their old mistakes, so thier new mistakes will be fixed too? What-ever. You should be less lazy than me and look for that post. The readers comments are hilarious.
Do yourself a favor. Download a standards compliant browser. I strongly recommend Opera. Or you can use Firefox, or many others.
And if you’re not on windows you’re already safe. Because come on, who on it’s right mind would use something like IE for Mac…
Edit: I just went to the official Microsoft IE7 site and look what happened (click on it to see it full size):
Nice.
Technorati Tags: browser, IE, IE6, IE7, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, virus
Meet my new favorite indie band (well, at least till the Rick Temporao CD i ordered gets here):
20 Minute Loop
Listen on MySpace or GarageBand
The funny thing is i was already going to write this last night, and then today Greg from the band left me a myspace comment not just saying “thanks for the add”, but showing he took the time to read my profile and leave *me* a comment. Now i like them even more (Rick Temporao did the same… is it that nice guys make good musicians?)
Technorati Tags: 20 Minute Loop, Rick Temporao, music, myspace, garageband
A client asked me for a navigation bar using a custom font for his WordPress theme. I couldn’t just hand code it and use images since he wanted the final user to be able to add pages from the WP control panel. I figured there had to be a way to do that; there is a plugin to replace the post titles with images (gee, can you tell?), so why couldn’t you use it for any other text? It took me a while, but i finally figured it out. This is what i did:
I made a menu on the header with the wp_list_pages tag.
<div id="menu">
<ul>
<?php wp_list_pages('title_li='); ?>
</ul>
</div>
title_li= makes the tag not display a title.
The menu is done, next is converting it to images. I started by getting this Image Replacement WordPress plugin. I had to fix it to get it to work properly. On that page look for a comment by Serge Lafont. I tried that and it worked like a charm.
The plugin lets you specify wich html tag you want to replace (h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, div, span and p), and even set a class. The problem is that the wp_list_cats tag outputs something like this:
<li class="page_item"><a href="...url..." title="Links">Links</a></li>
No good. I needed a tag around the page title. I had to change the output of the wp_list_pages tag, wich is found in the the template-function-posts.php file (on the wp-includes folder).
I had to look around a bit, as php is not really my thing, but i found the part that had to be changed. To locate it, do a search for “function _page_level_out” and scroll down a few lines. The part is this:
$output .= $indent . '
<li class="’ . $css_class . ‘"><a href="’ . get_page_link($page_id) . ‘" title="’ . wp_specialchars($title) . ‘">’ . $title . ‘</a>’;
I added a span there, like this:
$output .= $indent . '
<li class="’ . $css_class . ‘"><a href="’ . get_page_link($page_id) . ‘" title="’ . wp_specialchars($title) . ‘"><span class="’ . $css_class . ‘">’ . $title . ‘</span></a>’;
I copied the class from the li element, so they’ll both have the same class. Any other one class could be used too though.
Now the wp_list_pages tag outputs this:
<li class="page_item"><a href="...url..." title="Links"><span class="page_item">Links</span></a></li>
Perfect. And there is no problem if you want to use another theme in the future. All you have is an extra span tag that won’t bug.
All left to do is go to the plugin settings and choose a span class “page_item”, and voila, an image menu, fully editable. So far it works fine, at least in IE6, Opera 9 and Firefox 1.5 (all for WinXP).
The only drawback is that you can’t have mouseover effects. Oh well.
Technorati Tags: Wordpress, Wordpress hack
But you canadians still get a chance to get rid of Harper in Jan, right? (just trying to make sense of this mess here) 
