The Naked Green

Only in Colorado does a geek ride his mountain bike up and down hills to get to the library only to pick up books on PHP & MySQL, take a drink from his Nalgene, ride back and actually enjoy it.

Soon, I hope to be designing database driven websites that are so simple to maintain, even the client can do it. Why I want to work myself out of a job, I don’t know. My new found knowledge will probably be used on my business website first. There is some serious learning to do before then, though, which explains why I picked up MySQL/PHP Database Applications. I hope to spend enough time with my head in the book to make some headway progress before I get busy again with two prospective jobs in April as well as some flooring.

Side note: Thanks to Simon Wheeler, creator of phpdev, who made it a breeze to get PHP MySQL and Apache running on my Win machine in minutes! I’m excited to get going and the last thing I need is to spend hours trying to configure programs.

I’ve been struggling with balance, lately. I’ve been working a lot on web design lately, which is also my hobby. It’s wonderful to do something I love and express the God-given desire and skill to create. I feel like it’s detracting from my relationships, though…my relationship with God and my wife, Jamie. It’s not that I work all the time, but I always seem to be thinking about web design…trying to escape into the world of XHTML, CSS, PHP, etc.

Often in my prayers, I have been telling God that my budding business (really a seedling now) is His. Today, I echoed that saying, “Father, you are the owner of this business.” I started to say, “if this business gets in the way of my relationship with you or Jamie…” then I remembered that I just made Him the owner. How would God’s business detract from His primary concern of relationship? It’s good to know that Jesus is the CEO and I’m going to have to trust Him to do what’s right for the business.

I’ve got a lot of great ideas for design and I want to recognize the source of creativity, Jesus Christ. I have also said it before, but I’ll say it again: Jamie is my inspiration! If you ever want to make some good art, find yourself a wise and creative queen and do whatever it takes to marry her.

I guess I should have waited to reveal the latest Green Cite winner until today. What kind of a boring day would that have made St. Patrick’s Day Eve? I mean, we get to open one gift on Christmas Eve, why shouldn’t we extend the Green Holiday?

I don’t know why I never really noticed St. Patrick’s Day before. I’m not one for holidays in general, but here we have the perfect one. It’s not all jumbled up with different meanings because it lost its meaning long ago (just kidding). It’s not very commercialized (that speaks for itself). Best of all, it’s full of green!

St. Patrick was a slave who escaped and converted to Christianity. He felt his calling was to evangelize which he did quite effectively all over Ireland. He made many enemies on his mission and was arrested several times, but is known for great things such as raising the dead and driving the snakes out of Ireland. Sounds a bit like the Apostle Paul, doesn’t he?

St. Patrick’s Day is a traditional day for spiritual renewal and offering prayers for missionaries worldwide.

- st-patricks-day.com

The green color comes from the shamrock…

Patrick traditionally used a shamrock to teach about the Father Son and Holy Spirit. Trinity symbols are used in many different cultures and symbolize unity in diversity.

Jamie and I are celebrating tonight by going to Bennigan’s for some great food. I think I’ll stay away from the green beer, though.

I have not died, nor have I forgotten to bestow upon some poor unsuspecting soul the glorious Green Cite award.

We have come to the paragraph where I ramble on about random things to make it look like it has content and to bother the reader. Hey, it’s not like you can’t skip these sentences if you’re in that much of a hurry to find out the winner, but you’ll never know what you may have missed. Actually, if you’ve read up to this point, you haven’t missed much. So, with no effort at transition, the winner: Green Dezire “the personal blog of Andy Kettle, a web designer and developer from Worcester in the UK”! His love of green extends all the way into his eyes! With all the web design I’ve been involved in, I figured I would pick on a colleague. Congratulations on winning the award you never knew you wanted, Andy!

Brought to you by Mr. Green. All contestants will receive “really cool points” just for qualifying. Stay tuned for more wonderful greenery right here on The Naked Green.

Work has taken on a new meaning as I’ve been pounding on a floor (very carefully) since Monday. My desktop calendar still says it’s Sunday, but my knees, hands, back…actually, my whole body tells me otherwise. We’ve been putting in long hours to get a small town home with enormously large floors covered in prefinished oak. Tom decided it would be good to throw in a border for free (called advertising or something…something like “my head hurts”).

It’s all the debut performance of a well honed (we will be by the end of this job) new company on the block: Hardwood Cafe. Tom is the owner and has sentenced the two of us (my brother and I) to appear each morning as far away from 8.00 possible. We’re enjoying our duties, but the help gets a bit out of line (I’ll let Stephen tell you about it). Humor aside, it’s great to be working with my hands and I appreciate the job.

As hinted in previous posts, I am also the proud papa of hardwoodcafe.com as my first commercial project. I hope to add more clients to the list of “The Portfolio of Mr. Green” on my own company’s website (yet to be built (yes both)). An exciting new leaf is turned and it must weigh about as much as a box of hardwood flooring because I’m beat.

Jamie also has some work excitement, but that’s a story for another blog.

Now it’s time to finish up the laundry.

Today I realized that I could use PHP includes to make a more modular website design almost like a template. What I realized was that I could use PHP without knowing anything about it! So I went crazy adding <?php include('filename.txt'); ?> all over the place and breaking up my XHTML into smaller bite size pieces. I quickly learned that the file location is from the server root (/home/user/public_html/filename.txt) and not the URL.

A problem that came up (there has to be at least one) was with my <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?> line at the top of my document. It was causing my newly made PHP document to break. I figured it was because of it being similar to the way you begin a PHP statement. I didn’t want to get rid of it is part of W3C’s Recommendation for XHTML 1.1. I found out found the answer had to do with the short_open_tag variable….
(more…)

There’s an interesting discussion going on over at SimpleBits about typing. Hunt and peck vs. ten finger and then there’s the hybrids. I don’t feel so bad after seeing so many people that don’t type “properly”.

My last day “on the job” was last Friday, but I spent the day today training my boss and a lesser manager. I will also spend tomorrow training another manager. Apparently, it will take three well paid managers to do my job for half days while they search for a suitable replacement. Is that an ego boost or what?

The position was great in that I had plenty of time to myself in a quiet room to play on a computer. I “owned” the position and could was very much in control of how things happened. It was also very detailed work.

I’m glad to be moving on, though. It’s hard to do something day in and day out that is losing your company money. It was a dead end job and I could feel it. The satisfaction was just not there. Working tomorrow will be good because it means I get medical insurance for March, but I need to get on to my web design work. The first phase deadline is this Friday…that’s more exciting.

It’s yet another post about long hours trying to trick Internet Exploder into working. I worked on Jamie’s blog or a while today to implement a newish design and learned some tricks, too.

Thanks to LPD, I have found a new solution (if you can call it that) to the lack of PNG transparency support in IE instead of using filter: alpha(opacity=60) which ends up washing out the colors of the PNG image.

This hack uses the horrid looking, non validating filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(enabled=true, sizingMethod=scale src='75p_honey.png'); to accomplish this simple feat (simple in Firefox, that is). Of course, then you must hide the actual background-image: url(/folderto/sample.png);, so we use #content[id] to hide it from IE. Simple, isn’t it? Well, that lovely hack job makes links all but useless in IE (you see them, but they don’t work). So, for some reason only old Billy knows, you have to add position: relative to all child elements (#content *). Here is a sample:
(more…)

No, I don’t have some mind-boggling, profound idea to share with you. I learned something (that may be mind-boggling) about CSS today.

I was working on some CSS for Stevish.com, I came across some strange code:


margin: 0 !important;
margin: 0 6px 0 1px;


Not knowing what it was, I promptly deleted it with no adverse effects and moved on. Then I thought better of the situation and figured I should find out what this strange “hack” is supposed to do. That was not easily done to to search engines removing the ! in !important. alltheweb was the only one I found that would keep it and even then I got plenty of importants and some hokiness. I did find what I was looking for: 6.4.2 !important rules of w3c’s CSS2 Specification:

CSS attempts to create a balance of power between author and user style sheets. By default, rules in an author’s style sheet override those in a user’s style sheet (see cascade rule 3).

However, for balance, an “!important” declaration (the keywords “!” and “important” follow the declaration) takes precedence over a normal declaration. Both author and user style sheets may contain “!important” declarations, and user “!important” rules override author “!important” rules. This CSS feature improves accessibility of documents by giving users with special requirements (large fonts, color combinations, etc.) control over presentation.

So it’s an actual CSS declaration! It didn’t seem to make sense in context, though, because there are two margin selectors in the sample code. So, I figured it was yet another “standards compliant” hack to deal with the infamous Internet Exploder. I decided it would be quicker to mess with the code myself and found that IE will override an !important declaration with a second selector (margin), while a standards compliant browser such as Firefox will not.

Here’s an example:

Using the following CSS:

style="color: green !important; color: red;"


This sentence is green in Firefox and red in IE.

There may be people searching for the “exclamation point important” hack or the “exclamation point important” declaration and with search engines not reading !important right, I thought I would help.