Hemingway Outdoors 1.0

November 18th, 2007
Filed Under Design | Leave a Comment

I’ve been toying with a theme I found recently called ‘Hemingway meets Cognitive Combine I 1.0.’ I liked the basic idea of the theme, but I didn’t like the color scheme and font choice. So, given that it had a very permissive license, I decided to modify it to my liking for use in a project. I’m now also making this available to you.

The changes are simple: I used a bit more olive green in the page background, rather than the creamy color originally used. I also added a subtle background image to the header with foliage and plants on a slight gradient. As far as fonts are concerned, I set just about everything to use Georgia, since it renders beautifully and is available on both Windows and Mac, and even some Linux systems (At the time I installed it, the Microsoft Core Web Fonts were available to me in OpenSUSE Linux 10.2 as a separate download - I think Microsoft has now blocked this and now charges for these fonts). But as a backup, the fonts cascade down to Times, Times New Roman and as a failsafe, serif.

Another change I made was separating the comments and trackbacks/pingbacks on the comments page, something I’ve recently implemented on this site as well. In addition, if there are no trackbacks/pingbacks, that section is hidden.

I hope you find this theme useful. If you do, feel free to leave me a comment, trackback or pingback.

But wait, there’s more!

November 13th, 2007
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This is the miracle kit for every nightmare client I’ve ever had. I hope the do well with their 35 fonts per page, florescent colors, gigantic starbursts, no whitespace at all, and eagles flags and puppies.

The Ten Commandments of The Mafia

November 12th, 2007
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Italian police have found the “Ten Commandments” of the Costa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia, at the hideout of a captured Mob boss. It’s an interesting look at how structured the mafia really is.

No one can present himself directly to another of our friends. There must be a third person to do it.
Never look at the wives of friends.
Never be seen with cops.
Don’t go to pubs and clubs.
Always being available for Cosa Nostra is a duty - even if your wife’s about to give birth.
Appointments must absolutely be respected.
Wives must be treated with respect.
When asked for any information, the answer must be the truth.
Money cannot be appropriated if it belongs to others or to other families.
People who can’t be part of Cosa Nostra: anyone who has a close relative in the police, anyone with a two-timing relative in the family, anyone who behaves badly and doesn’t hold to moral values.

Craigslist meets Greasemonkey

November 10th, 2007
Filed Under Design | 2 Comments

I’ve really grown to like Greasemonkey, a Firefox add-on that lets you customize the way webpages look and feel. I’ve installed a few of the scripts for various websites from Userscripts.org. Some I’ve found useful, some I’ve not and later uninstalled them. However, I never could find one I liked for Craigslist. I love craigslist. I found my apartment there. I found the job that got me moved to Chicago there. I’ve found freelance work there. However, let’s face it: Craigslist is visually ugly. Thanks to Greasemonkey, I changed that to something a bit more visually pleasant, while not changing the functionality of the site.

It was easy to do, really. I dowloaded the Craigslist CSS file, and edited it to my liking (with the help of Dreamweaver to visually aide me). I then created a Greasemonkey script to simply @import that style sheet. Now one distinction: I have a Linux box running a private in-home-only webserver where I’ve placed this CSS file. If you don’t have a setup like this, and most of you won’t, you could always embed this CSS file directly into your Greasemonkey script. Just remember to condense the CSS file by removing all line breaks and tabs, and just make the entire CSS one long line of text.

Luckily, Craigslist has made this whole process much easier than I expected. They use one single CSS file for the entire site, so I could make all the changes in one file, and not have to worry about loading different CSS files for different parts of the site. Other sites out there aren’t as accommodating, making this whole process much more difficult.

It didn’t really take much to transform Craigslist into something a little more visually pleasing. I tweaked some of the colors, box shading, and fonts, and I was good to go. For the more design geek oriented out there, I used Segoe UI (from Vista) for the front page in place of Arial, and Georgia (from XP) for the text, in place of Times New Roman. I have a standard setup in Dreamweaver, that cascades the fonts as follows: Segoe UI, Lucida Grande, Trebuchet MS, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; and Georgia, Times, Times New Roman, serif. There are some ambitious re-designs out there, the most noteable being from The Design Eye team. While I could have gone further, I decided that just a few minor tweaks were all that was needed to bring Craigslist up to my liking.

Feedback time. Do you think I should set up a greasemonkey script for download that would accomplish this minor re-design so that others can enjoy it, too? Would it be useful? Or should I shut my trap and just keep it to myself?

The Great Ringtone Debate

November 5th, 2007
Filed Under Rant | 1 Comment

Nokia 6126 I’m a big fan of Gapers Block, a local Chicago site. One of the regular features of Gapers Block is “Fuel,” a forum where a question of the week is posted, and the users answer and debate. The current topic is “What’s the ringtone on your cellphone?” This seemingly has turned into an anti-cellphone and anti-ringtone diatribe by many users. To quote one user, C-Note, “Vibrate. Ringtones are for shitheads.” Now, I realize that there are many, many people who have really bad ringtones — really loud unintelligible rap or the really loud unintelligible attention-seeking female starlet du jour. I hear it on the streets, trains and buses.

But I take a different approach to ringtones. First, I make my own. I’m not really interested in paying $2.99 or more to my provider (in my case, ‘The new at&t’) for a ringtone. Furthermore, I don’t like their selection. I tend to make my own. It’s fairly easy. I use an audio editing program, and trim the song or sound effect down to ringtone size, and upload it to my phone. I end up with higher quality tones that are usually unique. For instance, my ringer for business calls is an office phone (sounds like the phone ring they use in 24). I also have my phone set up to ring differently depending upon who is calling me, so I know before even looking at the phone whether I want to answer it or not. There is a camp which believes the phone should always be on vibrate. I, however, miss a lot of calls when the phone is on vibrate because I don’t always have the phone in my pants pocket. If its in my coat, my hoodie, or plugged in to the charger in another room, I would invariably miss calls. And being self-employed, missing calls is not a good thing.

Not all ringtones are bad. Sure, there are offenders more often than not, sonically assaulting you in public. But when done right, with moderation and taste, ringtones are a good thing.