Google has violated my trust and changed my homepage without authorization. There’s a reason why I use Safari instead of Firefox, and that reason involves proper UI elements on webpages. I will not tolerate Google deciding to use asinine -webkit-appearance CSS styles to make them appear the wrong way. Also, the obnoxiously large search text was novel for about 5 minutes until it just got…annoying.

To fix this problem, add the following to your custom style sheet in Safari:

.lsb {  -webkit-appearance: push-button !important; }

.lst { font-size: 12px !important; }

You can do this by creating a file, custom.css somewhere on your Mac and then adding these lines to the file in your favorite text editor. Once that’s done, open up Safari > Preferences… > Advanced  and select that file as your “Style sheet.”

Google should be back to it’s normal self again. Now just to fix that horizontal bar that seems to have solidified…

EDIT: To re-fluidize the horizontal bar in the search results, just put this little guy in there too:

#cnt {max-width:none !important;}

The -webkit culprit!

I’m looking at redoing the site again this summer. It’s been a while since I’ve totally redone the look, and I’d also like to incorporate some of my other spin-off’s like jolevideo and duck podcast.

The gallery needs to be further integrated with Lightroom so that I don’t lose motivation to actually POST photos, and it’s probably time to provide a bit more information about myself considering I put jole.ca on all my business stuff now!

I’ve learned a lot about WordPress in the past years so I’m hoping to integrate some tricks like image attachment to make this blog a bit more interesting! Have fun!

In attempting to look classy while writing “Joy ” in French, Canada Post ended up infringing on jole.ca logo territory. Good thing I’m not registered!

So I’m thinking the WotW is quite inversely proportional to my actual thoughts or something, because this was probably the biggest week for me ever, just…learning so much about myself and the world around me, and yet the reflections on the board are far from inspirational. Maybe that’s a good thing, because we can’t have amazing weeks all the time, so most of the time the whiteboards will be good? I’m not sure, but here’s this weeks in all it’s grayscale glory. (I’ve been keeping my camera in B&W mode, and noticing that a lot of other people do too. It’s a good idea: you can focus on the color balance without being distracted. Plus when you shoot in RAW it is still kept color once you download it.

So the main scene here is my closet. I reorganized it recently and thought about the giant multi-function printer thing I have in there that I use exclusively for scanning. (I got it from Kevin, and the printer fails and our house doesn’t need more faxes so…) Anyway essentially everything has sort of grown around it, because I keep all my rolls of tape in it’s paper feeders, and it makes me think of a jungle growing around something abandoned in it. (Notably, the abandoned truck in this book from my childhood.)

To the side in that square is Kevin “steaming” the inkjet heads of our old printer. Inkjet spa.

Some interesting thoughts from this week: WordPress has won my heart. My dream is to have all the websites I manage on my Safari toolbar, so that anytime something needs to be changed I can hit Command-# and be in their admin area. I’m starting with elderadvocates.ca, where I’ll be merging all the documents into a giant RSS feed with a bit of PHP and then importing them into WordPress as posts, then converting them to pages using the lovely p2pConverter. I did notice a glitch with it though: it doesn’t seem to handle converting pages with quotation marks in the title. I suspect there’s an escaping issue in the JavaScript somewhere, because it asks you to confirm changing from page to post. (Which, quite honestly isn’t that necessary considering you can switch it back just as easily…)

I’m pretty sure it’s just as easy to do it right in the SQL database too, which might be more efficient for bulk conversion. 

Have a good week everyone!

One thing that drives me mad is how every content management system (CMS) out there is now based around the concept of blogging, and yet most companies and simple website designs are still reliant on fairly basic static pages. As web developers, we go out and find the most advanced *blogging* tool there is because it’s stable, consistent, and easy to setup (read: WordPress…almost), and then watch as the client sits back and doesn’t actually post content in a blog-centric fashion.

This doesn’t surprise me. After all, if they hired me to implement their website, they probably don’t have too much information that needs to be critically shared on a regular basis, and unlike bloggers who are seeking to provide fresh content, get readers, and thus ad revenue; they don’t have much incentive to publish. (Look at me!)

As I worked away on fbcedmonton.ca which I setup with textpattern a while back, I started to drive myself insane realizing that in order to create a static page, you need to:

1. Create an article (blog post)
2. Create a “page,” or essentially a layout method that is statically selecting that post ID.
3. Create a “section” or area for which the page will be served using a specific themeset.
4. Create the link to the section within the navigation if an automatic nav generation tag is not in place.

This Tuesday I bought a whiteboard from Kevin after a long voyage to different Superstores on both of our parts. (Random thought: wouldn’t it be nice to have a stupidity checker? I just wrote that sentence wondering if it made any sense whatsoever and then just kept typing waiting for a squiggly line to indicate to me whether I was being moronic or not…)

Point is I have a whiteboard carefully mounted on my wall. I’ve found that having a large amount of space to just draw, sketch, take notes, and create is quite useful and mind opening. My plan is to not erase the whiteboard until I’ve taken a picture of it, and posted it here under the “Whiteboard of the Week” category. Who knows, things might just get interesting.

So what’s in this week’s whiteboard?

• Front and center is the wintersaurus, the prehistoric creature that will be showing up on your lawn soon if you live towards in the Northernly parts like I do. As you can see there are some tobogganists enjoying their day on his back. (No, not tobacconists)
• Up to we have The Running Man. (No not this one.) This running man started out as just a continuous run, but his persistence was interrupted, and thus it is two arrows. This came to me one morning (probably Wednesday…hump day) when I was feeling rather lethargic and realized that I just had to keep going and eventually the end of the week would come.
• Parachute Man is symbolic of the excellent Coldplay album “Parachutes”. He became tridimensional a few days after I drew him
• Finally our last creature is a bit of a complexity even to me, one which I can only describe as…Windshield Cat. I mean really, what else do you see in that illustration besides that?

So as I’ve been trying out my new site for a while, I’ve realized that eliminating the jolephoto gallery wasn’t the best idea. Photos are still best viewed in a gallery, not in blog posts. The gallery never really “left” because jole.ca/gallery was still there and it still the place I upload my photos before they’re processed into WordPress.

So the link is back in there, if you’re here for the first time and just want to browse, that’s still the best way, and if you want to get more information, there’s always the blog post about each image. (Heck maybe I can put in a link-back at some point…we’ll see.)

Happy browsing!