Blogging | Loving Jacqui

Amy Minsky and Carolynne Burkholder from Canwest News Service write:

Facebook shown to increase jealousy in relationships

Be careful when you surf Facebook, or your relationship status may go from “married” to “it’s complicated,” researchers warn.

Amy Muise, lead author of the study, said the jealousy is caused by overexposing partners to triggers.

The more time you spend on the social networking site, the more likely you are to feel jealous, according to a study from the University of Guelph.

Article continues: read it here.

I certainly think Facebook (and blogging and chatting) can lead to less time spent together by the couple. This can even be a good thing, at times, because interactions with others make people more interesting and absence makes the heart grow fonder. To a point.

But it DOES seem rather silly to be communicating with Jacqui by Facebook when we’re living in the same house. And we were doing that. So I guess I sidestepped the problem because I stopped and now I have no clue who says what to Jacqui on Facebook.

Although I’m interested!

The article goes on to say:

Georgina Hobbs-Meyer, 24, is one of the victims of divorce sparked by Facebook jealousy.

According to an article in The Guardian, Hobbs-Meyer stumbled across her husband’s Facebook correspondences with another woman.

“And once I was in, I was hooked. Their lusty e-mails touched on bad beat poetry, but were infused with textspeak, their coy cyberflirts rife with emoticons,” Hobbs told the British newspaper.

Well at least the article admits the divorce was sparked by her jealousy.

“beat poetry” … hmmm. And oh no! Emoticons! Argh!

Call in the divorce lawyers. That’s a rational response.

*

* There’s a bad one.

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Just a Little Note…

… to test out the ScribeFire extension for Firefox.

OBTWILY.

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Secret WordPress Security Flaw Exploited by Users to Change Editors’ Posts – Details Sadly Won’t Astonish You

WordPress.org came out with a new security release version 2.3.3

Apparently, the previous version allowed a registered user to exploit a security hole and edit anything in the blog.

Amazing.

If you’re using the WordPress 2.3.x series, you can download the complete version or just the security fix here.

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WordPress

I migrated Loving Jacqui to new blogging software, WordPress, so I can use the comments again.

Previously, I used FTP (file transfer protocol — a method of publishing your web pages to the server) “Classic” Blogger to publish web pages to a server and blogKomm, a .php script to keep comments beneath my posts on my own pages.

I liked it for design reasons since Blogger used popups for comments, which are less user friendly and didn’t suit the look and feel of my blog.

However, look and feel be damned I say! I kept on getting slammed with comment spam. Also, it stored all the comments in one text file meaning the entire file had to be scanned every time someone opened a web page. As the file grew longer, it would naturally degrade speed and performance and this could only get worse.

WordPress on the other hand uses a combination of core files, theme files (determining the look of a site, the position of page elements, etc.), and a database to pull different parts of a page together including posts and comments “on the fly”.

This is actually slower than using normal web pages on a server, but has the advantage that it can handle hundreds or thousands of comments much easier. Oh, and it’s well maintained software with better anti-spam solutions. And it’s a lot more fun to use for publishing than Blogger’s is.

Classic Blogger, believe it or not, rebuilt most of the website every time you published one post. So it was fast in the beginning, but now with over 100 posts, took longer each time I used it. So you’d click the “Publish Now” button and wait. And wait.

Then it would tell you it was taking a long time (as if you didn’t already know). Then ask if you wanted to continue. Why yes, you do. So you’d click a button telling it to do what you told it to do five minutes ago. Often this would happen again.

Now it’s quicker. Using the new software, for all intents and purposes since you’re only publishing the one post and updating a few entries in the database, the lag time is about the same as when you click the send button of an email. The amount of data transmitted is similar.

For web page download speed from your perspective, WordPress can use “gzip” compression to reduce their size and serve them to you quicker, provided your browser supports it. WordPress also can create “cache” files (static files generated automatically the first time a user visits a page, so when subsequent users visit, they see the cache file and the database doesn’t need to be queried as often) to handle higher volume if necessary, something which has not been a problem!

Greek blogger Nick of ngtech.gr has also devised an interesting change to WordPress’s cache module so it compresses the cache file and stores it as such, then it’s served as needed. Other solutions involving cache don’t allow for any compression at all or, if they do allow compression, force your server to do the work of compressing the cache file each time a user’s web browser requests it.

This puts a drain on server resources especially in a shared hosting environment — where several websites share one HTTP (static page) server and a separate MySQL (database) server.

Unfortunately, I can’t use WordPress’s cache function while keeping the options to switch themes between “Original Blue” and Ghastly Pink”. Some people claim the wp-cache plugin can be modified to overlook the stylesheet cookie and still function. However, I have never seen a solution which actually works. If you have one, please advise!

In addition to migrating over posts (using a script) and comments (by hand!), I also rewrote the XHTML and CSS for my theme so it could validate as proper XHTML. Blogger produced buggy code that never validated. WordPress is capable of producing clean code.

(For example, using the old code, in Internet Explorer 6 on long web pages, the bottom half of the sidebar would be stuck to the bottom and there’d be a huge gap between it and the top half. Using the old code, I hadn’t yet been able to fix it and now I don’t have to.)

I removed the flyout navigation menu above each post, put in a navigation header at the top, added a calendar in the sidebar (viewable only in non-Internet Explorer browsers and Internet Explorer 7 and up) so you can browse for any posts published on specific days, and included feed capabilities in case you want to get Loving Jacqui in your favourite feed reader — I’m told this is becoming a popular way of getting blog and news content.

Oh, and I installed a new photo album because the old one was so difficult to use. I didn’t really like it. Yes this new one was complicated to install; I had to make some special accommodations on my web server to get it to work…

… but now, how do I create a new photo gallery?

Well, I make a file on my computer with a name, put photos in it, and FTP it up to my server. And that’s it. The file becomes a new gallery and any photos are named automatically based on their file names. The software also chooses one of the files as a thumbnail. I can change that later if I wish.

Very sweet. So it’s as easy as backing up files.

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XHTML

Yay, I recoded ChristophDollis.com from HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) 4.01 Transitional to XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) 1.0 Strict.

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Sales Buckaroo Hits the Road

Well, I was told by several business professionals my preferred self-title of “Sales Buckaroo” gave the wrong image, that of a “cowboy”.

Well damn if that wasn’t the idea.

They saw this as a bad thing or something. Hmmmmm. I guess I watched too many westerns as a kid.

One thing I agree is it had a “shoot from the hip” quality. And certainly that was my plan.

Yet that plan wasn’t working worth squat!

Since I spent the last month getting organized and learning how to manage work flow — and only then did my purpose and goals come into clear focus — I’m professionalizing.

Sales Pro it is.

I had to throw out $120 worth of business cards and print some out on my inkjet. Which I hate. (I love my laser.) And I had to drag it out of a box and set it up again. Anyway. The new cards…

(Click the image to visit my new business homepage.)

(Click the image to visit my new business BLOG!)

Now, it’s time to find a client and make them a ton of money.

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You’re all right [Title Edited]

Jacqui Bear,

I’ve been too busy to write here lately and you’ve been bugging me about it.

When I get more settled in, I will.

In the meantime, know that every day I think about you and when I make business, work, or financial decisions, you’re on my mind each day.

You’re the first woman for whom this was true to any appreciable degree. You’re kind of like that bit of sand that’s stuck in your sandals after you walk off the beach onto pavement.

Redacted

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Special Thanks

… to Dave and Dot Sutton at Sevenoaks Art for offering to provide a Sevenoaks logo-free can of walking Spam optimized for Loving Jacqui’s background colour. It’s for use on my intro-page to the invite friends form that you can see by navigating to:

» “… & Other Options”
→ “Options”
→ “Email This to Your Mates”

in the menu above.

Dave also created the animated Canadian and Australian flags in my sidebar and his website has many intriguing animations, graphics, and tutorials. If you have a website, I recommend visiting:

P.S. Dave just offered. It’s not done yet. Gee. Hold your horses, Jacqui.

UPDATE: Can of spam delivered. Dave promised and he delivered, for no other reason than it’s his hobby and he’s a decent fellow. Thanks for helping, Sevenoaks!

I will not tell her until then. Because I’m cruel.

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Web Design, CSS, and (X)HTML

Just finished making Loving Jacqui all Christmassy… we were talking about fellow British Columbian, Dave Shea, the creator of the Loving Jacqui template (before heavy modification).

He’s one of the luminaries behind CSS Zen Garden.

A year ago I had a roommate, Barry, who is a generation older than I, but he was just a very good friend to me.

I had a website I wrote in Microsoft Word. Here it is:

lovingjacqui.net/originalopenletter

(although I’ve since rewritten it in something other than Word!)

This is how I met Jacqui, of course, and writing it was one of the best decisions I ever made in my life.

But I couldn’t have cared a less about web design. Heck, I wanted it in old school “typewriter” font because it is the closest thing to handwritten and I wanted it to kind of read like a handwritten letter.

It did kinda bug me that when I opened it in other browsers other than Internet Explorer, it looked awful. But since most women I knew used IE, it worked anyway.

My roommate told me that he designed his websites in Notepad. This kind of floored me.

“Notepad?”

“Yep.”

I had no idea about this at the time, but all a website is is a text file using a simple language, (X)HTML: (extensible) Hypertext Markup Language.

It’s very logical and simple. Write it in a text file, change the text file “extension” from .txt to .html and you’re in business.

This realization floored me, but I was intrigued.

Anyway, when I found myself understanding that Jacqui was attracting my attention in a way other women aren’t, I created this blog for her.

Barry had also introduced me to the CSS Zen Garden as an example of how powerful Cascading Style Sheets are.

Go there and see the design. It’s attractive by itself, but look deeper… on the right hand column you’ll see several other designs by other web graphic artists.

They all use the exact same HTML. Try them out.

They are identical even if they look different. What has changed is that each uses a different CSS file. You can visualize why “Cascading Style Sheet” is the perfect name. Everything just flows from it in this neat cascade that you can control by assigning unique “classes” and “ids” to different (X)HTML page elements. It’s how on Loving Jacqui you can press the button on the top right and switch the webpage from “Original Blue” to “Ghastly Pink” and fortunately back again.

The CSS Zen Garden is known around the web for being a beautiful example that has inspired many including me.

I was also talking with her about how I don’t like “alpha-channel transparency” background images.

“What the —?”

Before on the Internet it used to be that your only option for transparency was you could take an image and save it as a .gif file (as opposed to the equally common .jpg usually used for photographs because it offers small file size and millions of possible colours: .gif only offers 256).

When saved as a .gif, it is possible to make certain pixels (picture dots) 100% transparent, which means you can see whatever is behind them.

This allows you to put an image of a dolphin, for example, on your aqua web page and it looks like it belongs there. Even if it really belongs in the ocean.

Newer, more capable web browsers than Internet Explorer: contenders like Opera and Firefox, the one I use, follow more closely Internet standards laid out by the World Wide Web consortium (WC3).

This makes things easier for web designers because while Internet Explorer is common, you’re always trying to make it do things that it “should” do, but won’t do, not without significant tweaking and, “Why the hell does it do that when I just told it to do the opposite?” that you just don’t have to bother with with these other browsers.

For years these other browsers have supported alpha-channel transparency.

You know how when you look through the water, you can see the water and the person swimming beneath it?

Partial transparency = alpha-channel transparency.

Now that the new release of Internet Explorer, IE7, supports alpha-channel transparency, more web designers are placing a background image on their page and then make the surface you write on partially transparent so that you can see the background image like a watermark. They then fix it in place so that when you scroll down, the picture stays and the text itself moves.

This looks very cool and gives the website a certain “unearthy” feeling that makes the site seem light as a feather. It’s beautiful.

But damnit. I come to a website to read and having a photo with light and dark spots behind a partially transparent page makes it hard to read. I guess I’m not 18 anymore, but as a 34-year old, I shudder to think what it’ll be like to read this when I’m 80-something and Bear is lovingly blowing the dust out of my eyes as we send instant telepathic emails enquiring about our prescription drug plan.

So we’re having this conversation, and I’m telling Bear about how I dislike alpha-channel transparency and I’m reading a comment on another blog and I discover this link:

α-channel transparency done right: A Jacqui Bear style “Pretty in Pink” theme even I can approve of