Paul Griffin has released a new version of Simple PHP Gallery. This is the software that I use for my gallery and I’ve just loaded the new version up. It needs some tweaking to fit back into the site’s overall design. If you have any problems with it; please let me know.
Category: Computers
Be it a discussion of software or hardware; it will be under here.
As you might have heard, the activation servers for Half-Life2 are now allowing people to start playing. *sigh* It’s at times like these that I find my empty wallet depressing. This is the one game that I’ve been waiting for all year, but I’m broke. I’m especially broke because I want the game on DVD and the only way to get that in the US is to buy the collector’s edition (~$80). Ouch! Ah well, maybe being broke is a good thing and they’ll put out a normal edition (~$50) on DVD later for the US. They’re already releasing a DVD version for Europe that doesn’t require you to spend all that extra money for the collector’s edition; so it’s entirely possible.
If you’ve been involved in the WP community at all for the past couple of months; you couldn’t have missed that Root and Michael Heilemann have been… bickering back and forth about Kubrick and designs and usability and whatnot. From what I saw in the various threads on the WP Support forums, on both’s blogs and elsewhere they both need a good smack to the head. I’m too tired of the whole deal to really care who started it or who’s currently at fault.
Why bring it up then? Michael’s got a thread up that’s continuing the spat. Normally that wouldn’t be enough for me to bother putting a note up here but one of the people commenting on Michael’s thread said:
Quoting Root:
IMHO that is going to make WP less accessible to the self design end user than it is now. Some of us are quite interested in these things.
That means they’ll have to pay a designer to do it for them, hopefully. To that I say, “Bravo!” (There are way too many people running around loose on the Internet with a bootleg copy of Front Page calling themselves web designers, IMHO.)
Another person commenting replied:
There are way too many people running around loose on the Internet with a bootleg copy of Front Page calling themselves web designers, IMHO.
Hear hear
And that just pisses me off. I’m not a designer and make no claims to be one. I do have a very rudimentary grasp of CSS and a slightly better one of HTML. I’ve borrowed a book from a friend of mine and am learning a bit about PHP/MySQL. I do all my coding either in Bluefish1 or Notepad2. I looked at the template WP shipped with in v1.02 and realized it was beyond my skills to really modify at the time. So I grabbed a couple of styles from the Alex King style competition but I saw that under some circumstances they’d break. I wasn’t happy about that and I didn’t like that my blog’s style wasn’t something I’d crafted. I kept looking around for something better to use and then Root came out with his Trident template. I was able to drop that in and make a few modifications so that I had a style that’s my own. It’s ugly as all get out but I could alter it as I need it without having to shell out more money to indulge in my blogging hobby. And the idea that just because I’m not a designer that I must be using a pirated copy of Frontpage3 in order to work on my site is insulting! I also think that if WP v1.3 does make it substantially more difficult to create new themes for my site then I will have to an alternative platform.
1 When working on my desktop and booted into Linux.
2 When working on my laptop, whose CD-ROM drive sucks so bad I can’t get windows off the machine.
3 Frontpage is a piece of crap! I’ve had to use it at work a few times and it writes the most horrific code! If you’re going to claim that people are pirating web design software; why not credit them with pirating something that’s actually useful.
I installed WP 1.2.1 tonight and am in the process of restoring some of the hacks/plugins that I use for CoffeeBear.net. If you notice any oddities or problems; please let me know.
Also, I’m sending a trackback on this entry to Craig Hartel‘s site to try double-checking on whether or not trackbacks are broken in WP 1.2.1.
Thanks to my readers. Apologies to Craig for picking on his blog.
I was off reading Adam Gessaman‘s site and noticed that Firefox had tossed an icon that I’d never noticed before into my status bar. I clicked on it and was presented with a list of alternative style sheets to use in viewing the site!
Ok, maybe this is only cool to geeks like me who enjoy web design but wouldn’t it be nice if every site offered you the ability to change your style sheet at will? And didn’t require some crappy Javascript to pull it off?
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