Yes as I’ve been honing my web skillz I realized how very important a faq or a faw (frequently asked worm) or a fab (frequently asked block) is, but because I’m so very lame in Illustrator, I opened Bryce and tried to remember how to use the darn program.

Then there were my excursions into logo making:

I wonder if I’ll ever get good at that? I took Illustrator classes but I open that program and I can’t remember how to do anything in there. I even had a hard time in Bryce and I used that for years! This post will probably be too huge to load.

Oh and Akismet has officially blocked over 20,000 spam now. I have under 1000 comments, how sad is that? But my penis is ginornmous!!

Image via Wikipedia

Is not making any bloody money. I was told I was charging too much, more than those “expert” and “professional” coders. Funny the one job I got beat out of had 807 errors! I originally said 121 errors, but that was just on the front page. And the guy gave him a 5 star rating. I mocked up a site for him and my validated perfectly.

So yesterday another gave me a hard time, even though I bid lower than the only other bidder.  So then he asked me if I knew how to fix a couple boxes on his website (to prove myself, I guess)  that the professional had all mucked up. So I did, and I let him know he had 33 validation errors just on his front page.  But I’m apparently not a professional because I have yet to get my first job through Elance. I do have a portfolio up on there but sloppy coders are getting all the jobs.

This guy has it right: My Review: Elance.com isn’t a Scam But…..

My Result: Passed

His Result: 121 Errors, 3 warning(s)

Nice huh? Not to mention he made his page with tables and most of his errors are from all that inline styling. At least he could have put it in the css. Don’t use bloody tables for layout!. That is so obsolete, yet there he is with the paid job and here I am jacking around.

Man, I love that stuff! It’s just a different form of art really. I finally got the chance again to set up a set. It doesn’t do much for my routine, but it does a lot for my mental health (except for the times the code is being stubborn and it takes me forever to figure out why). My latest project is for my friends new food truck business, too bad I’m not close enough to sample the food! Take a look at those guys, would you trust them to cook for you? I would, they are better cooks than me (which isn’t that hard). So if you ever get to the Houston area, take a gander at their website and find out where they are, you could get yourself a delicious lunch!

The first page was the worst, because header.php, index.php, sidebars.php, footer.php, it ALL gets nested in there together. Holy moly that was a bear figuring out. Or maybe the sidebars were the worst because practically every code I ever received for a widget was not valid! You would think they could do a little better than that. My amazon widget, which you no longer see here until I figure out how to make it valid, had 60 errors! Stupid things like a bunch of ampersands that need to be coded the html way, and other strange stuff. Some of them I solved by going to tinyurl and making a more reasonable link.

So right now, every single thing on this blog is valid except an old pictobrowser post. Which hopefully I’ll get that one figured out too. I am amazed at how many plugins do not validate. My gravatar plugin was throwing errors. On the setting page it puts css styling in there and a size. In the error list, the size was not enclosed in quotes, and it wouldn’t let me enclose it in quotes! It also wouldn’t let me delete the styling that was throwing an error. So I disabled it, set it here to use avatars and they show up okay. It was a bit trickier sending it to my choice for a default avatar. The Youtube plugin does not validate either, nor the audio player plugin. Pretty annoying, now if I could remember what that Google Analytics that I disabled was interfering with… My test blog with all those different media examples must be a real disaster.

I also think I have those bloody threaded comments working.

Now that I have this good, remind me to check my new stuff every month or so :p It would be so much easier if I didn’t like all that media stuff. Check yours, go to W3C Markup Validation Service to test it. You can just put your main blog address in but when there are several posts it does get confusing. I just went page by page like blog/, blog/page/2/, etc. Of course you should also check your css at their CSS Validation Service. I’ll admit I was lazy with my blog, my websites I always make sure validate

I got my book database started by gosh. Still having a problem with searching by genre for my page, although I can search that way in phpMyAdmin no problem. Getting it right for a webpage is a bit tricky.

My Books

This is but a drop in the bucket, but I’m off to a good start!

This is the second site I made for friends and I know so much more than the first time. Since I solved a huge snag I had today I’m feeling rather proud and thought I’d share them. This was the first one and the very first time I attempted an entire site done in Flash. It’s actually pretty cool, you can import everything in xml files so the owner can update those with images and text without having to own Flash.

This is my latest and it’s incomplete yet but it won’t be long now that I solved the snag I was having. I plan on redoing my site at some point but so many interesting things get in the way. Plus I signed up for the Asp class this term. I expect it to be just as challenging as the php one was. Challenging is good, I love this stuff

Edit: Second site is done and uploaded to his host and working perfectly!