EVula's Blog

Well, this all went to hell in a handbasket...

"Oh yeah, my blog"...

Shitloads of spam. I looked at a few old entries, and there was spam in the body of the page. The fuck?

Just cleared all the spam out (including several thousand comments), but it looks like the server is choking on stuff. Arg.

I need to destroy the whole blog.evula.net system and put something else in place. MovableType has not aged well, and I can't just upgrade to the latest version because of how many users I have. I might just scrap the whole damn idea and move it over to evula.com....

/me kicks spam in the balls

Stupid spam...

Sorry I've been so quiet; been too busy to talk about why I'm busy. What fun.

Opening night for Constant Wife!

Tonight is opening night for The Constant Wife. I can't wait for it to be done, so that I can get my life back... I've been so tired all week. Bleh.

CSS victory

Okay, so the oft-discussed ACT 1 website... I fixed the CSS problem I was having.

Quick recap: I've redone the site with a CSS-only layout, but was having a problem getting the line down the center to appear properly. Currently, the effect is done with a 1px border on the opposing table cells. When floating the two content areas (one on the left for pictures, one on the right for the content), the background image didn't extend any further than a non-floated box.

Well! When working on a completely different project (actually, I was working on a proposal for one site, and thinking about a totally different one that never went anywhere), I realized the solution: put the non-floated footer <div> into the same box as the two content areas. This would force the background to go all the way to the footer, thereby maintaining the look of the table-based layout with none of the drawbacks.

I'm quite pleased that I've finally gotten this sorted out (the last sudden "aha, this will do it!" solution didn't work at all, so this was a nice change of pace). Unfortunately, I'm hella busy at work with other web stuff, between the site I was writing the estimate for (which will probably come my way) and a redesign of our company website, so launching the overhauled website won't happen for at least another month or two.

Grindhouse

Go see it Friday when it comes out. I just came back from an advance screening, and absolutely loved it.

I liked Planet Terror more than Death Proof, but I also have a soft spot in my heart for zombies (trivia: I wrote the vast majority of the Zombie Survival Guide Wikipedia article).

Also, the films are absolutely hilarious, as are the trailers. Werewolf Women of the S.S.? Hell yes, sign me up. :)

Been awfully dull around here...

No, I'm not ignoring the blog again; I just haven't had anything to say. Not only has very little of interest been happening lately (unless you want to hear about every little thing I do), I've been exceedingly depressed about my split with Molly, which certainly doesn't fill me with energy to sit and spit out stories (and I'm not emo enough to use my blog to talk about every little feeling I have).

So... that's all for now.

More ACT 1 website discussion

(Very quickly, my blog is becoming me just talking about my other websites. I promise, other stuff is happening to, but this is just the most interesting [unless everyone wants to hear about my clothes shopping spree today... yeah, didn't think so].)

Last time, someone (Cha0s) mentioned that, regardless of the problems the overhauled ACT 1 site has in IE/Mac, I should ignore it. I completely agree, but it's as close as I can (easily and consistently) get to IE/Win, which is still the dominant browser. If it breaks in IE/Mac, it could easily break in IE/Win...

Of course, the counter-point to that argument is the Skating website; IE/Win can't see the ice and the skater scrolls, but the CSS behaves properly in IE/Mac (ironically enough, because IE/Mac doesn't understand the IE-specific tag used to give that browser an alternate style sheet).

Oh Internet Explorer, you're so wacky...

So, for the ACT 1 site, I'm still holding up a bit with the full switch-over, but there's still plenty to do. For example, I'm switching the cast and crew tables on show pages (such as Arms and the Man) from a manually styled "zebra stripe" effect on the rows to a dynamically generated one; I've used this trick on the Unrestricted Awards table. This will make maintenance a lot easier for me, and will shrink the markup even more.

What is a problem, however, is that this is holding me up on implementing other things on the site, as I don't want to re-write templates. For example, I've been wanting to use phplist for a while for them; right now, they have a single person manually sending out emails to an aging mailing list from her personal Yahoo! account. A sub-par situation for everyone involved, and with the web-based system, people would be able to automatically sign themselves up for lists, as well as opt-out of things they don't care about.

I've actually got the stuff installed, I just need to finalize a lot of the stuff, such as customizing settings and, most importantly, altering the look of the site to match the rest of the ACT 1 website (I also have to update to the latest version, but that's not a big deal). Ideally, I'd do this after the CSS overhaul.

So... yeah, that's that. :)