06.16.06
For Patrick
Mouseover for full effect:
Patrick owes me a milkshake now.
06.14.06
The Button I Made
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I’m working on a project, as some of you know, that will involve such links, and I wanted the buttons to look good together. Amazon has lots of different buttons and logos, as well as code generation techniques to put iframes and banners on affiliate sites. Netflix has very little that I could find, so I made something myself.
The “Rent from” font isn’t quite the same as Amazon’s “Buy from” font, but it’s close enough, I think (I used Arial Narrow, by the way). It’s kind of hard to read in black on dark red, but I tried white and that just didn’t look right. Anyway, the Netflix logo is legible, and that’s enough to get the purpose across in context.
Feel free to use it on your own site; all I ask is that you copy it to your own server rather than linking to mine. Steal my bandwidth, and I reserve the right to replace the image with something embarrassing.
05.08.06
Moving
No, I’m not moving, but this blog is. Actually, it’s already moved.
For the past several years I’ve had a dedicated server to play with—I’ve gone through three different companies, run a small (read: unprofitable) hosting business, and learned a lot about server administration. Now it’s time to downsize.
There are some major changes happening in my life right now—most of my readers already know about them, I think, so I won’t go into them here—and I’ve decided to move to a shared server to save both time and money. I decided on DreamHost because, for the money, they come closest to what I and my friends, family, and clients have become accustomed to. In fact, for a fifth of what I was paying before, we’ll get the same amount of disk space and twice as much bandwidth—and still get all the useful software installs like SpamAssassin, MySQL, and WordPress. Most importantly, the whole thing will involve a lot less work for me. No longer will I need to deal with keeping software up-to-date, for example—a chore on which I’ve consistently fallen behind of late.
The site may not always respond quite as quickly, since we’re now sharing CPU time with whoever else happens to be on our shared server, instead of about a dozen relatively sleepy domains on a ridiculously overpowered server for our meager needs. So far, however, I’ve been pleased with the responsive and intuitive account control panel, and have had no major problems with the transition of my domain from the old host to the new one.
If your site is hosted with me, expect to get an email soon detailing when your domain’s transition will take place and what configuration changes, if any, you’ll need to make. I think in the long run we’ll all be better off in our new home.
05.10.05
WordPress 1.5
So I’ve finally started the switch to WordPress 1.5, largely at the behest of my dad. I haven’t upgraded his site yet, though, because I found out in the process of upgrading my own that version 1.5 uses themes—which is great, and terribly convenient, but makes upgrades a bit troublesome if, like my dad, you’ve gone to all the trouble of making fancy custom templates featuring carefully arranged family photos.
So I’m waiting to find out what he wants to do about that, and also I’m going to have to figure out what I want my own blog to look like now. I had been using a few lightly modified WP 1.2 templates I found somewhere, and in my haste to get rid of the default look I’ve now switched to an overly-elaborate WP 1.5 theme, but I’ll try to come up with something a bit more “me” in the near future.
01.31.05
Thinking with Type
For those who work with text, either in print or online, Thinking with Type, the online companion to a book of the same name, is an invaluable resource.
