bwpdsigns.com

Was looking at this site today and thinking that at 1280×800 (full screen on my laptop, not that I ever view any sites that way) there’s quite a bit of white space on the right. Now I don’t think this site will work centered, so I’m thinking of making a few scribble sketches to fill the right white space. What do you think? Oh wait, I turned off comments to stop the V1grA comment spamming that was a problem. Sorry.

I’ve updated the templates for this site. I’ve found quite a bit of styles that need updated in the templates, mostly because I’ve added comments and the search feature back into the site. I’d turn them off but maybe looking at them will force me to keep working on things.

Here’s a quick list of things I’ve been working on when I have a few spare minutes.
Portfolio
My portfolio site bryanpaulus.com has been live and looking terrible for several months now. While I’ve thought several times about redesigning it there’s quite a bit of things involved with that and I’m not really ready to dive into that yet. As for the portfolio section of this site. I’ve been working on a script to read the XML file that drives bryanpaulus.com that way I’ll be updating both sites at once. The script is pretty much ready. I learned a bit of PHP and XML in the process and I’m sure that will be handy in the future. I’m pretty much down to the point where I need to just finish styling things a bit. Depending on how creative I get with things that could be done tonight or next week. Look for Portfolio to be live soon.
Pure CSS Left Nav
I’ve mentioned previously that I’m working on a Pure CSS left nav for this site. I’ve also written an article that’s documented my development of the nav. The nav is ready but I need to updated all the templates in the site in order to implement it correctly. Look for that soon.
Left Nav Creation Article
See above The article should be ready soon. I want to take some time to make sure the article is marked up correctly and develop a style for articles in general, including a print style sheet. Look for this to be added in stages.
This brings up a good point. Do I add the article as a post? Do I create a category/nav section for articles? I’ll have to put some thought into this.
Resume
As my nephew so kindly pointed out my resume link is broken. So thus I’ll get that together so that it can be posted.
Sketchbook
I scanned about 5 pages of my latest sketchbook and 1 scan of a page from several years ago. See for those that know me, they know that I go through phases where I get “addicted” to certain hobbies or projects for about a good week or two. I spend a good amount of time concentrating on that hobby or project until the next addiction comes around and slowly transition out of it and into the next. Thus I have about 10 sketchbooks from over the past few years with about 10 sketches in each, and not many of them worth showing to the world.
So from here out the goal of the sketchbook section is to show a bit of my artwork/sketches that I don’t find particularly terrible. This need to show this work is a constant nagging at myself that I’ve been given these talents by (insert any religious figure or higher being you care to choose here) and it’s really a shame that they are essentially wasted because I never pursue them. Wasting talent is a terrible, terrible thing in my eyes, you should always try to do things that your talented at whether they are practical or not. (NOTE: Please pursue talents that are legal and safe).
Anyway, I’ve started to style up the sketchbook area and am in the process of getting that together. I initially set up the section as another category thinking it would be a blog style area, I’m not sure at this point if that’s the best format. Maybe with my new found PHP/XML skill I’ll look at that as a possibility. Thoughts? Oh wait I haven’t turned commenting on yet. Damn!
Wrap it up
That’s about it for now. Also in the works is a new Web 2.0 style version of bwpdsigns.com. You guessed it rounded corners and gradients…Just kidding, well maybe. Never can tell.

If you’ve spent more then say 5 seconds in the message boards or article comments on Yahoo.com you’ve probably come to the same conclusion that I have. People are morons. Comments, Message Boards and Forums are a waste of time. Seriously. I’m officially stating that Yahoo.com should really just shut off comments. There’s rarely anything written that’s even remotely intelligent most of the time it’s flame wars, spam or other people with too much time on their hands that like to troll through message boards looking to piss people off.
Mean while I’ll turn comments on for this site as soon as I update the templates and make sure everything is styled. We all need a bit of web traffic right?

One of my earlier posts was about solving the mysteries of Movabletype. I’ve since solved a few and made an advance toward actually being able to launch this site. In the settings (deep in the advanced settings) you can set the default extension of the pages Movabletype generates. Meaning that instead of .html I now have all pages publishing as .php. The next test was to actually see what happened when I tried inserting PHP code into the templates. I popped a quick print statement into the main template rebuilt the site and downloaded the file it created on my server. Sure enough there was the PHP code written nicely in the file. Checked the source of the page it was processed properly.
This may not sound that exciting, interesting or actually be anything that you didn’t know, but for me this means that many of the things I’ve been wanting to have on this site, will be able to happen on this site.
Progress is being made, no matter how slowly it seems to be happening.

As anyone reading this blog or the previous version of my blog will know I’ve been working on new site design for at least a year. The production of it has been roughly 3 months or so? I’ve been through several CMS systems, a few blog softwares and recently a commitment to making Movabletype work with my visions for this site.
MovableType has a few mysteries that I need to solve to get this site together and live. One of the features of my site is the “current listening” that reads an ASP script connected to a Database that my iTunes posts to. I’ve really not found a way to make the MovableType system read includes yet. I have stumbled onto some documentation that may help and also found a way to have the files built as PHP files vs. HTML. I’m hoping this will help. We’ll see.
Another reason I’m hoping to use includes is I really want to be able to make the nav an include file. More then that I want to be able to script it so that I can have it open and select the appropriate category’s nav item based on it’s current post. If I’m in the “flash” category, it will be silly for the nav to be closed.
The other thing that’s driving me crazy about the system is that it is set up to post the latest Entry as the default for the “home page”. It’s a blog system not a CMS system so I understand this feature, here’s where it is a problem. I have several Catagories that have no posts yet. So they link to 404 Error Pages. So I made a generic “Coming Soon” post to fill the space for each category. Well now my last 4 posts are all “Coming Soon”.
I’d like to see a feature to only post those to the categories not to the home page. Why? Well I don’t really want posts to my “other” categories being on the home page. I’m envisioning people coming to this site to see valuable content. If I post somethigng to my “life or lack of” category I really don’t want someone coming looking for “flash” items to have to look at me bitching about some child on the train that wouldn’t sit still.
I think I’ve found a way around this. Apparently there’s a filter plugin, or a way to add filter tags to the Templates that will hopefully allow me to restrict certain content from appearing on the home page. Until then I guess I’ll just have to live with it.
Okay back to work..I’m sure there’s something I should be doing.