I’ve got quite a bit to cover here so I’ll make ‘er good.

The new Psychostick design is finished. It’s not active as of this writing since I’ve fixed a few more bugs (the last post ended up being irrelevant after I simplified some CSS), but I’m going to go on record and say that it’s once of the best designs I’ve ever come up with. I took a different approach this time and put everything aside (and I do mean EVERYTHING) and focused on it fully. I didn’t even play video games. After about a month and a week, it’s finished.

I’m launching it Tuesday morning and waiting for any bugs to creep up.

I’ve decided not to be afraid of PNGs anymore. Apparently Internet Explorer 6 and 7 doesn’t render PNG alpha transparency properly, thus many designers are weary of using them. The filesize is larger too.

The advantages of PNGs?

• The awesomeness that is alpha transparency
• It supports millions of colors like JPEGs.
• They just look better than GIFs and JPEGs.

Hopefully within the next year or two fear of PNGs will be completely gone and those who use old versions of IE are banned from the internet somehow.

The new Psychostick design uses PNG files where necessary, and parts of the page take longer to download with slow connections. At this point it’s so much less of an issue; most people have broadband nowadays and don’t use older IE browsers. Those that DO are usually older, less savvy folk who still churn butter by hand.

Anyway, blah blah blah internet blah blah blah graphics blah blah blah cake.

I’m also able to work on the new album again, plus I can continue my work on Alfredo Afro. I haven’t even touched my yet-to-be-released web comic since I started on Psychostick’s design, and my involvement with the new record had been reduced since then. This is no longer the case. I’m all, back and stuff. It’s time to get these projects DONE so I can get paid. I need a new Mac. :]

I also just snagged one of these. Wacom Intuos 4 Medium. This thing doesn’t just rock, it METALS.

Awesome Wacom.

For a productivity tool, I’ve switched to Omnifocus from Things. In the Mac world, there’s a huge debate going on between these two programs. Often times they’ll be a large drawn-out article comparing the two in extreme detail. In contrast, I can easily deduce for you which one would be better for you.

• If you are a business owner with many, many tasks and can’t afford a secretary to keep track of everything, go with Omnifocus.
• If you are a normal Joe with a day job and are just trying to keep things in order at work and at home, Things is more up you alley.

These two programs are both modeled around the “Getting Things Done” methodology, which is (in my opinion) the most robust way to make yourself productive. So if you feel as if your life, both professional and personal, is cluttered, you should definitely check out Getting Things Done. Read the book and decide for yourself how you prefer to keep organized.

Alrighty, gonna hop back to it. Maybe I’ll try and finish a comic today to snap into the queue.

So I had the pleasure of discovering a nice little bug when testing a new design in Safari for Mac. I had two floating DIVs with negative margins floating on the right and left side of the main content area of my design. These divs are being stretched to reach 100% height on the page so that the repeating background is always there no matter how tall the page gets.

There’s a bug with Safari for Mac and Chrome for Windows. If you HAPPEN to have negative margin divs that float left or right with a 100% stretched background, they’ll just not appear at all. I scoured and searched the ‘net for answers on this bug with little to no real answer until I made a discovery.

These bugs are dependent on the doctype declaration. Of ALL things to cause this, it’s a DOCTYPE issue. I would have never guessed this as I’ve never had this creep up in all my years of being a web geek.

So, I found some code that sniffs out browsers and OS types to resolve this. Goes a little something like this.

include("Browser.php");
$browser = new Browser();
if( $browser->getBrowser() == Browser::BROWSER_SAFARI) {
	echo "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC \"-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN\">";
} else {
	if (($browser->getBrowser() == Browser::BROWSER_CHROME) && $browser->getPlatform() == Browser::PLATFORM_WINDOWS) {
		// That's right - NO DOCTYPE DECLARATION. At least for now.
		echo "";
	} else {
		echo "<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN\"
\"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd\">";

}
}

Yep. It’s utterly ridiculous that the doctype affects whether or not a 100% vertical background div with negative margins. (Note: The above is based on a class that is very efficient at sniffing browsers and OS types. It’s by Chris Schuld)

For those who struggle with this bug, I hope this helps. I’m also posting this for Google and other engines to absorb.

Not that “gotta-collect-everything-in-Oblivion” busy, but actual busy!

For starters, let’s talk Alfredo Afro. I had to put it on hold last week due to a little Psychostick store launch, but I picked back up on it yesterday and things are moving along. 46% as of this writing, which at 60% means I’m done with the website and it’s ready for beta testing. The remaining 40% are the actual comics themselves. That part will probably take me the longest. Some I can crank out in an hour, and some are far more complicated and take several hours.

Investing time and money into this is becoming more a reality for me. Not in a bad way, but in a “woah, this might actually work” direction. Here’s a little clutter on my desk right now:

Yep. Paper, pencil, rulers - old school. You can see my little Wacom tablet where the blue circle light is.

Of course, many of you are asking, “Can you actually draw worth a damn?” My answer is, “I can draw well enough to get away with LOOKING like I can draw worth a damn.” Does that make sense? It will hopefully before the end of the year. Heh heh.

As of right now I have to finish more of the programming and work on polishing the site. I try to hop from web development to drawing so I don’t burn myself out. So far so good, but the real test lies when I’m cranking out two comics a week consistently. The mid-term lies in actually completing the initial batch of comics. I’ve got something like 30 comic concepts sitting in the queue. More are added regularly.

I try not to get ahead of myself either; usually at this stage with a project I’ve given up. This is definitely a sign that I should see this through to the end. I’ve got a few people genuinely interested in what this is going to turn into. By the time it launches, if all the pieces are in place (and they should be), it should spread like a viral wildfire STD. Hmm… trying to picture that… ouch, eww, and uhh, *barf*

Anyway.

Tomorrow, my stupid band and I will be hashing out some new songs. There’s a ton for us to do there, plus I’ve got to redesign and optimize Psychostick.com as well as a few other things. Oh, let’s not forget the artwork for the new record too.

Busy? Naawhhh…

Oh, I sold my iPad. Crazy, huh? iRawrb selling an Apple product. What’s wrong with me?

I’ve been messing around with WordPress and I’m very pleased with how it works. Essentially it’s exactly what I’ve been trying to create but it’s just far more robust and feature filled. And it’s free. FREE.

I’m on the verge of deciding to convert Pluh.com to WP. At this point Pluh.com is one simple thing; a goofy online blog/article system. There’s also the potential for actual video and video game production and transitioning over to this system would completely work. Completely.

I’ve got a new design in mind to work with WP’s system, then the conversion shall take place. This shouldn’t be to difficult; I can create an RSS feed specifically to import the articles. From there I should be able to assign categories for all the articles. I might even end up writing custom import queries to get other stuff properly imported.

Then there’s the comments; that’ll take me a while to nail, but that’s another custom import script. Should be painless after some testing.

I’ll probably keep the forums just for those who want forums for some reason. I have to fix them though; problems have been reported. Oh yay. I’ll probably have to completely restore the old database then run yet another upgrade.

Then I gotta tour. Heh.

There’s quite a bit to do though. I’ve got to find a way to import the comments from my old blog system and then organize these blogs by their proper category.

I urge you to be patient as I do stuff. Thanks.

Here’s a portfolio of a few sites I’ve done in the past. I do it all; programming, design, database design.

Thanks!

Yeah. Did you know that if you have a trailer almost out of sight in a neighborhood you will still have people complain?

“Awh lookie thar Matilda! That thar trailer ain’t made of unicorns and pixie dust! Let’s complain because it’s gonna go ingest them thar local virgins EVEN THOUGH it’s just sittin’ thar, not at all unattractive to my faceholes, doing nothin’ to impede on our daily lives! Pass the XXX jug fer ‘mah liver decimation and crank up thar Billy Ray!”

Seriously?! And not only has my gracious buddy received one complaint, he’s received MULTIPLE! It’s just a trailer! It’s not even dirty! It’s doing nothing to you! Move on with your lives! Take up a hobby! Try learning a new language! I wanna go around knocking on their doors asking, “Really? It bothers you THAT much? It’s just a trailer, practically out of sight. I’ll give you a wowwy pawp if you, I dunno, USE YOU ENERGY ON SOMETHING PRODUCTIVE!”

*ahem*

My apologies. I don’t like to vent publically but… I feel it was well justified.

Anyway, I’m currently downloading Xcode for Mac. Apparently it’s a nifty tool to have with Ruby on Rails development. Web 2.0 fascinates me and I want to bathe in it’s shiny, reflective, glowey e-juices. I look at the sheer genious and simplicity of Twitter and think, “Ohhh I can do that!” The mere fact that it cuts development time by roughly two-thirds has me salivating like a teenaged boy in an erotic video game store. Did I talk about this stuff already? *reads previous blog*

Why yes I did.

Having my server squad update the operating system on my server is going to be necessary when I start transitioning over to Rails. Do I fear such a thing? Possibly. Transistions from server operating systems, especially from one physical server to another, has never been a copy/paste process. They tell me that the transistion is near seamless and I might have to go in and reconfig a few things, so that puts my geeky paranoia at some sort of rest.

My first Rails project will be Blargbox.com to get myself familiarized with the system. It’ll be a rather simple, yet incredibly functional, blogging site. I have no intention on making it a success, but I think it’ll be a nice thing to play with and get down. It’ll function kindof like Rawrb.com does, but allow signups and let people create their own Blargbox. It’ll have feeds, comments, messages, friends, blah blah blah – just simplified. And dumb.

I think.

What else… oh. Joshy sent me 110 changes to the DVD the other day. I flipped out. “Rawrb was done, but not anymore!” Meeeh. I finished 108 of those 110. The last two remaining changes contain one somewhat simple task and one really annoying one. I decided I don’t like video editing mostly because I have to endure the scrutiny of others. Wait… it’s scrutiny I don’t like, not video editing. Then again, perhaps I just need to relax and be gracious for the extra eyes.

NO! I’m just ANGRY!

Alright, I suppose I should start getting ready for my trip. Thanks for being there for my venting, anonymous internet reader!

OH! I also just became an iPhone developer! Now once there’s a high, profitable demand for “Hello world!” apps I’ll be a rich, bearded, trailer transgressor rather than the broke kind.

Because it’s already there. It’s already something that’s grown into a supergiant. I originally believed that having a supergiant of a website is what I wanted as a web developer. Visions of advertising dollars coming in danced through my head. I can’t imagine what kind of headache that would also entail. Servers upon servers of maintenance, having to regulate time to run a company of that magnitude, etc. That wasn’t what got me rethinking my Pluh.com plans though. What got me moving was with my new idea, the real personality, the customization, and the charm of what I had originally envisioned would be gone. It’ll be a massive application where people are herded around like cattle via mouseclicks and keyboard strokes. It kind of goes against why I do what I do.

I think the web is going into a different direction now, something beyond the scope of clicking around and poking friends. I’m not just a developer – I’m also an entertainer, and that’s something I often lose sight of.

I think my original vision needs to be breathed back to life, but with a stronger foundation. People want to be entertained, not herded, and that’s something I plan on implementing again. I have to start back at the drawing board, try some different stuff, etc.

I won’t toss aside my other ideas though. Who knows, I may find a better use for them.

Pluh.com has always been a fun-yet-frustrating battle. Just when I think I’ve got it figured out, I hit a wall or something else comes up. The editor-driven setup doesn’t work because it’s all volunteer based. How on earth can one keep a staff of voluteers motivated to update a website every day? It’s possible, but change is constantly moving that they often get pulled away into something else, like… LIFE for example. Kids, marriage, jobs, whatever. Nothing wrong with any of those of course.

So a whole new approach has been adopted on my end.

Crap, I gotta run. Show in New Port Richey, Florida tonight. Oh yeah!

I did a TON of stuff to TheDumb.org, most of which won’t be noticed by your average interweb going guy. El Duderino will be able to administer TheDumb much easier now. Hell yeah!

Psychostick.com got a little facelift as well as a lot of front-end feature additions, such as an Advice Column and an Articles section. After I blog like an awesomeface here, I’m gonna head there and add a few more SEO tricks and optimizations. Time for more Mod rewrite magic! Don’t you find this FASCINATING?!

I gotta get all this nerd out of my system before I hit the road in 2.5 weeks. Rawr.

After all this I’ll be attacking the Psychostick DVD and finally, Pluh.com. I’ll finally get to see what AJAX is capable of. From what I’ve seen on Facebook and Myspace, it’s very versatile if you know how to use it properly.

Oh, tons of Psychostick merch is being manufactured as we speak. Yay!