Sugar High-Five

Posted on 22nd April 2011 in Something Daily

Last night, I was in the mood for chocolate. So I put on my slippers and walked downstairs to the Duane Reade and bought one of these.

And then I went back up to my room and on the way up shared the elevator with two girls, each of whom I offered a truffle. They both took them, of course, because who can resist chocolate, especially when it’s offered by a dude with a strange mohawk on your dorm elevator? So I took the rest of the bag up to my room and ate the whole thing in ten minutes while listening to Earthless, who are a cool blues-metal band who kind of sound like a more rocking Black Sabbath. Let me just say that eating the whole thing in ten minutes was a very bad idea. I couldn’t sleep from the sugar rush, and also my stomach was killing me as a result of it being filled with mostly dark chocolate. Seriously, bad idea.

Apart from that, yesterday was a bit weird. I did make a ton of progress on the Wonderleague website, taking the time to implement the foundation of a small-scale content management system that will allow whoever it is that ends up maintaining the site to easily edit the content. The blog section will be WordPress-based, but the rest of the site will essentially be a pretty frontend for my CMS built around a database of music, video, and upcoming tour dates. So far I’ve built the system by which entries can be added and edited by the administrator. It just occurred to me that I still need to implement a deletion function as well. That’s coming soon. This really isn’t as difficult as I thought it would. I’m getting a lot of incredible PHP practice, and building something really usable that I can put into my portfolio. Keep in mind that it’s really my first time doing something quite like this on such a scale. It’s going well though!

Sweet, rad, everything is awesome.

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Taking it Personally

Posted on 14th April 2011 in Something Daily

I have learned an important lesson about freelance web design. Essentially, it’s not a good idea to get attached to a design that you’re doing for someone else if that person has a design in mind already. If you get attached, then it feels like a personal attack when the client asks you to make a change based on their ideas. I’m learning very quickly that it’s important to be accommodating to whatever the client wants, because regardless of how much you know (or think you know) about ‘good’ design, that knowledge doesn’t matter in the least if you’re going to lose the job over it. The way I see it right now, the job of the web designer is to find a niche between the design principles that he understands to be effective and the requests of the client, combining them in a way that satisfies both the client and his own sensibilities.

I made the mistake of taking it personally when my roommate, for whom I’m building a site, asked for a bunch of changes to my design. That’s the last time, I think.

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Stick to WordPress

Posted on 12th April 2011 in Something Daily

In the wake of this weekend’s amazingly fun and educational hackathon, I find myself with a renewed drive to start learning and building cool stuff. You might have noticed that this drive, which is something that I usually have no problem cultivating, has recently been scarce for one reason or another – probably related to the rush of apartment-shopping as well as the letdown after finishing a major project such as Spaceratops. I was feeling pretty unmotivated, and when that happens, you start to get posts about Emma Watson and panda bears…which are actually great. I’m going to do more of that. But also, what in the world is going on in my tech life?

Like I said, my drive to learn stuff is firmly reinstated following the realisation that I actually do have some degree of sweet skills, as evidenced by the fact that I held my own on a group project and didn’t let everybody down by failing as I worried I might. Included in the new list of stuff that I want to accomplish: make a Twitter mashup – I don’t know what right now, but I want to play with Twitter and Hunch’s APIs (also Trendrr). Also, get deeper into web design/development. My Twitter profile says that I’m a “freelance web developer”, so maybe I should start living up to that. Yeah, sounds like a good plan. My roommate asked me to build his website for him, saying that his basic concept was a Tumblr blog with subpages (something that Tumblr doesn’t allow for).

Of course, I started off quite optimistic, only to realize fairly quickly that what I was setting myself up for was the singlehanded construction of my own content management system for this one website. He wanted his site to function as a blog, which would require all the functionality that we expect from WordPress of Tumblr (comments, administration, tags, all the rest). I realize that while, in truth, all of these things are completely within my current skill set, it would take me, one person, far more time that it’s worth to create something as full-featured and smooth as WordPress. This in combination with the fact that WordPress is free to download and supports custom styles has steered me off the path of committing myself to the creation of a decent CMS. (I still want to try my hand at this, and I will – just not for someone else.) So now, instead of writing the whole thing myself, the project has changed to the implementation of a custom WordPress theme for my roommate. Still a great thing to put in my portfolio, if perhaps not as gratifying as the singlehanded creation of the next big blogging platform.

And the funny thing, as my other roommate pointed out, is that knowing how to build a WordPress site may actually be more valuable to many employers than knowing how to do a CMS from scratch. There’s something sad about that to me – the fact that the one that requires less work and knowledge is more highly rewarded. But both are great learning experiences, so I’m not complaining.

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New Homepage Now Exists

Posted on 2nd April 2011 in Something Daily

The idea occurred to me recently that I wanted to have a place online that functioned both as a portal and hub for my other online presences (twitter, tumblr, this) and as a networking tool for me to direct people to via word of mouth so they could get a look at my resume and portfolio. So over approximately the last two weeks, I put in the work to register the domain and buy the hosting, moving this blog to my own host as well as moving the domain name threestegosaurusmoon.com to here. I also just sat down last weekend and decided to design the homepage, which was surprisingly easy in light of the fact that this was really my first experience with CSS. The design part was easy and fun; the process of implementing the design across multiple browsers was not either of those things. Once I had a design worked out nicely in Opera, I tested it in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and….Inernet Explorer (don’t get me started). Basically, everything was a mess, since I didn’t know from experience what to avoid in the first implementation. But I had a five hour shift last night where I wasn’t doing much of anything, as well as access to a Windows laptop running IE9, so I had a great opportunity to iron out all the stupid horrible display bugs that it imposed upon my design, which worked more or less the same across all the other browsers I tested. Like I said, please don’t get me started on Internet Explorer.

Anyway, the nap I took yesterday before work enabled me to stay up until about 2:30 putting the finishing touches on emmettbutler.com, including the automatic emailing form and custom favicon and 404 pages. I also implemented a tagging system for the gallery of my work using (for the first time) object-oriented PHP, which is actually really awesome. Sometimes, when I don’t use OOP for a little while, I forget how awesome it is. But it is really useful. This is my first website, but I’m actually quite proud of it. And, in light of how easy it was to make (took me about a week without Dreamweaver or anything of the sort), I’m very open right now to the idea of doing freelance web design for people who need it. It’s exciting. So yeah, check out my new website. I like it.

Now I’m going to go buy that Four Loko skateboard deck and maybe some old computers, depending on the price. Bye!

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Internet Explorer is the Opposite of What is Good

Posted on 1st April 2011 in Something Daily

Today, I ran into what I discovered to be the least fun part of web design. Being more or less finished with my design and implementation, I reached the browser testing phase. I had looked at the site under construction in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera a few times during the process, but today was the first time that I checked it in all of these browsers as a finished entity. And let me just tell you that the results were not pretty. I knew this would be the case since the very first time I built a page in Opera only to view it in Firefox and see it destroyed, so I understood that this part of the process wasn’t going to be a walk in the park. It’s about 90% correct under the four mentioned browsers as of right now, with a few random missing link images in Chrome and a text/input field overlap in Firefox. These are really pretty minor things. It’s even working mostly correctly on iPhone already. There’s one browser that clearly hates me, though: Internet Explorer. I wasn’t expecting much more, but it was still awful to see my poor homepage razed to the ground upon opening it in IE9. My dividing boxes aren’t aligned properly, all the border images are detached, and there is a lot of text overlap. As of right now, I can’t really even conceptualize how to go about fixing the issue – this is probably because I’m incredibly tired, so it’s ok. Knowing me, I’ll have this solved by this time tomorrow. Still, this just makes me want to make sure no one I care about gets suckered into using this backwards browser. Even my mom uses Firefox. Firefox is great. Don’t use Internet Explorer.

I decided on my next skateboard deck, when the time comes. It’s this one.

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Free SNES Sprites? Yes Please.

Posted on 29th March 2011 in Something Daily

I discovered a site called nes-snes sprites a few days ago that has a huge collection of (you guessed it) NES and SNES sprites, often in all of their animation states, available for download. Right now it’s just great for nostalgia value for me, but I’m thinking about making some gifs with them, or maybe putting one on the header of my site. The site also has a decent collection of soundtracks from those two systems, which I’m almost inclined to put on my iPod and listed to for fun. I have a serious thing about chip music.

Posting daily starts to become difficult around the middle of the semester, for one reason or another. Sometimes it’s the increasing workload from classes, but it’s always the “stuff is happening” mindset that starts to kick in soon after midterms. Even if it’s not incredibly busy, there’s this feeling of having places to be and stuff to do. At least there is for me. Of course, I feel like I always have some project or another, and the more enthusiastic I get about whatever it happens to be, the less time I find myself having to do almost anything else. But that’s just me. Also, my living space is quite often much louder than it needs to be, mainly due to myself and my roommates all being close to 20 years old, fans of music, and owning big speakers. This sometimes makes it hard to concentrate on anything, which is a big reason that I’ve been spending more time in the courant library recently.

Speaking of my website, the design/development process is going well. The method I had been using to retrieve a Twitter feed via the Twitter API wasn’t working under Ubuntu, so I figured I’d at least attempt to make that better. As it turns out, I’m able to use a very similar method to the one described yesterday to get the tweet data from an RSS feed. Also, I’ve added some cool-looking stylistic elements to the homepage design, and given the header (my name) the Double Dragon treatment, which I was able to do with a font I found here and a bit of Gimping.

Also, my roommate gave me his GameBoy Pocket today! The stars have aligned in my favor! I was just starting to think about buying one, and then this happens. Seriously, that is awesome. I also picked up Street Fighter II Turbo yesterday, which is of course much harder than I remember it being. Ryu is quite annoying with the Haduoken.

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Johann Sebastian Box

Posted on 27th March 2011 in Something Daily

I do actually have homework this weekend, which is thankfully a quite rare occurrence in recent weeks. I will be writing a short paper comparing Wendy Carlos’ performance of Bach’s 14th invention on Switched-On Bach with one by someone else where it’s the same thing but on piano. This should at least be more interesting than my earlier comparison of two performances of the same madrigal by Montiverdi (written in about 1638). I don’t have a problem with the idea of learning about baroque music, but in practice, it’s often uninteresting to me. Not Bach, though. Bach is sweet. It’s more the pre-Bach baroque that I’m talking about. If you’ve never listened to Bach, go do it right now. And then if you’ve never listened to Switched-On Bach, go do it now as well. And also, if you’re a pianist, try playing one of his inventions sometime. They’re not very easy, but so much fun to be able to play if you feel like practicing them enough. Ok yeah, Bach is the man.

So I’ll be writing that paper today, and also doing a bit more intensive design work on the “coming soon” emmettbutler.com homepage, which I hope will be up and running by about the second week of April. I just went through the process yesterday of learning how to scrape data from an RSS feed with PHP, and I built myself a little blog feed that shows summaries of my most recent posts on this very blog in a nice feed-y format. With that and the Twitter and the Tumblr feed, it’s shaping up to be a mighty fine homepage. Mighty fine indeed.

I decided that I’m going to live tweet during the hackNY hackathon on the 9th. That should be super fun.

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My Online Life Expands

Posted on 25th March 2011 in Something Daily

Today involved my first use of an API in any real capacity, as I used some websites I visit as examples of how to add Twitter and Tumblr feeds to a page. (By the way, I started a Tumblr.) It occurred to me today what I really want emmettbutler.com to be: ideally, it will be the hub of all aspects of my internet life. It’ll have this blog, my twitter, and my tumblr all represented in the form of feeds, as well as my resume, bio, and a gallery of stuff that I’ve made. In terms of these feeds I’m talking about, they’re surprisingly easy to implement – a lot more so than I expected. In the case of the tumblr feed, it’s actually just one javascript call that returns your ten most recent posts, and the twitter one is just two calls. Very nice. This is quite helpful in getting ready for the HackNY hackathon on April 9th, as I was looking for an excuse to learn practical applications of APIs like these (who am I kidding…I really don’t need an excuse). But to make a long story short here, as of today I’m starting to pick up steam on this personal website project. Also everything that I previously had on my roommate’s web host is now here on my own, so it’s certainly a good thing that I don’t have to keep directing people to emmett.ericsluyter.com. That was a little embarrassing. Not really though.

I once again haven’t really had a time since Tuesday in which I wasn’t doing anything productive, and that is continuing, as I’ve been either web designing, writing html, drawing a triceratops with aviators, or doing studio maintenance all day today, and I plan to continue this at work until I go to bed tonight. I will eventually burn myself out and be forced to take a break, probably. I’ll just watch a few more episodes of Dragon Ball Z. I’m going to see Eric’s show tomorrow at Gallatin, which should be super rad (and also something that’s not ‘work’).

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Vegeta! What does the scouter say about his room number?

Posted on 2nd November 2010 in Something Daily

My room at NYU

It’s over NINE THOUSAAAAAAAND! This is my dorm room door at school. Vegeta’s pretty angry about how high the number is; so much so, in fact, that he smashed his scouter over it.

Paying attention in class is tough when there’s so much you want to learn (ironic, isn’t it?) I spent a good portion of this morning going over a PHP tutorial and learning how it’s used to generate HTML. Having been discouraged from writing HTML in the past by how apparently daunting the process was, the knowledge that PHP can be used to speed up the process is quite encouraging. I learned from the a tutorial on devzone.zend.com the basic syntax, as well as how to use PHP in HTML pages to dynamically generate the dimensions of a table. I think it’s awesome to have the two so well integrated that all it takes to make a bit of content if for your program’s output to be in HTML format – and way less work than it could be!

It’s exciting to learn a new language. I remember being probably 8 or 9 and waking up really early in the morning to sneak to the downstairs desktop computer and page through my dad’s copy of “HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide” from O’Reilly. I think I built a website explaining how to do all kinds of different card tricks. It never went live, but it might still be on that home computer. I’ll dig up the source for it if it’s still around and put it up here…it’ll probably be comedy gold. Unfortunately, maybe due to my years with the School of Rock, I pretty much completely forgot how to write HTML and any other basic coding knowledge that I may have amassed; so when I started taking programming classes last year, it was all essentially new to me. The point is, I’m excited to get into making websites again, with much more enthusiasm this time! Hopefully this works out…

I just got within 23 seconds of finishing Ikaruga again. Before, I would feel pretty good about finishing around that area of the game, because it meant I was generally improving. But now, with success within my grasp, every time I make it to the challenge stage and fail is just a slap in the face. I know I’ll get it eventually, but the sting of defeat is a new and unwelcome sensation in my gaming experience. (In Ikaruga at least – in Team Fortress 2 it’s completely the norm, for example).

I listened to CSNY’s Deja Vu this morning – that is a great album. You probably already knew that. But they just have an awesome, classic sound. Check it out.

This is another webcomic that Justin turned me on to a few days ago. It’s called “Axe Cop“: written by a 5-year-old and illustrated by his 29-year-old brother. It’s so ridiculous (some would say…random?), and the fact that it’s written by a five year old may be what makes it funny, but hey….it’s funny. Check it out.

Thanks for reading!

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