Kjartan Mannes

To further improve my CSS skilles I took the chameleon theme in stock Drupal and modified it to use no tables, then updated my custom style sheet to position things. From my testing it is doable in older browsers. My main goal was to just get rid of the tables and clean up some minor issues, but now to add some more fancy stuff over time. I want to do something with Sliding doors as that seems like a powerful technique to learn, also CSS sprites seem interesting. CSS isn't that bad once you wrap your head around the box modele, and the differences in implementation in browsers. Not that learning hasn't been frustrating, there is always some small thing that ruins a site. Lots of good resources online though, unfortunately it is hard to find some fixes/hacks as they have weird names like Peek-a-boo. Wasn't exactly my first search term when I experienced the problem.

In other news I am mostly caught up on the various mailing lists and should be ready to start doing more coding on things like Drupal again. I've been doing some stuff in the background for a while now that it would be nice to finish with. Also been having a lot of interesting discussions with Drupal users which has given me new ideas. Things are moving, just not sure where yet. Starting to feel like I am in the backseet and someone else is in control of the vechile. I think it is time I took control again.

Had some free time so I decided to update natrak.net to run the latest CVS version of Drupal. Changed design while I was at it and re-organized the site a little. The update went well, just had to fix a few special modules I use on this site to work with the latest release.

Something about the site still bugs me though.. need to figure out what and fix it.

This weekend was internet less due to Telenor having serious problems, so I got an unexpected vacation from the net. This week will be filled with meetings and more budget talks. Always fun.

Sorry.

I've been experiencing some odd problems on my server for a while now. Turns out it was because of my hosting company re-organizing a bunch of things includinging their nameservers.

Once I updated the configuration files to point to the correct IPs things are working much better again. The old nameservers had been moved to a different location so they were conciderably slower to use to resolve IPs than they had been before. Today they stoped working all together causing me to check up on the name servers and me finding out that I was supposed to use a different IP.

Normally I'd moan about not having been told, but it turns out I had been warned just hadn't really registered it. Remembering the info in one mail among hundreds when you have really important things to take care of causes you to forget things like IP changes.

My fault, but now things are working much better again!

I'm mostly happy with the site colors now. I'll make some more themes available once I clean up the CSS a bit. I also intent to (ab)use Drupal to make it possible for people to change theme without making an account. I'm just too clever for my own good ;-)

I also really really want to do something with the site cloud and automate some more functions of this site. I follow a lot more blogs just never get around to adding them anywhere besides my bookmarks, which is a huge problem when I am not using one of my PCs and have to use Google to look up sites. Doh.

I also really should publish some of my tutorials on Drupal. I keep getting questions asked via email, instant messaging or IRC on how to do this or that and its just taking too much time. From now on I will really try to take my logs and post them online in a cleaned up form to build a reference library. I think its good all around. It is just one of those things I hate doing. Ever since I got pressured to write one to many essays in school I totally hate writing anything longer than 4 paragraphs. I'll think it all out in my mind but something clicks and I just refuse to type it out. If its all written in my head then why do I have to spend extra time to type it again?! Can someone give a brain to document converter? Didn't think so. Damn.

The exception are blog entries and emails which I just type on the fly and don't spend hours thinking about. Ofcoz the quality of those are nothing to speak of and I know I can do better. I just have to get over this writing phobia. I'll try harder.