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  • Wicked awesome new theme

    Posted on February 24th, 2009 Seth 7 comments

    Lane isn’t the only one changing his theme! After upgrading to the impressive new Wordpress 2.7 I found the beautiful Gears theme and edited it to fit my tastes. I hope you enjoy the updated look. Integrating Google Analytics into the new theme took a couple tweaks, similar to putting Analytics into the default theme. If you need help adding Analytics to Gears, send me a message and I’ll try to help.

    So, what do you think? Is Gears, as customized by yours truly, not wicked awesome?

    Internet , , , ,

  • Congratulations to Ryan and Kate!

    Posted on February 20th, 2009 Seth No comments

    My brother-in-law, Ryan Mire, got engaged to his girlfriend, Kate Curran, this week. They make a great couple and are very happy together. Andrea and I are very excited for them! Another round of food, fun, and general wedding bliss. Congratulations you two!

    personal ,

  • Let Google do the heavy lifting!

    Posted on February 19th, 2009 Seth 3 comments

    I love Google. They represent so many positive ideas about technology and offer an amazing suite of tools. Gmail is fantastic. I adore Google Calendar. Google Scholar is the only site I need for research. Google Reader is the best RSS feed reader on the market. Google Docs works a like a charm and is infinitely handy. I have entrusted my workflow to Google and had positive results. They’ve taken over the heavy lifting and ushered in an era of browser-based productivity that I agree with wholeheartedly. I’m excited today to use yet another Google server: I added Google Analytics to the site :)

    In last week’s Introduction to Usability course we discussed good and bad websites, and one student selected Google Analytics as a good website. The Analytics page provides all the necessary statistics on your sites traffic including their IP address and corresponding location, the number of unique visitors, and timing. It was characteristically Google: clean, easy to use, and hugely useful. I had no idea the service was free!

    Inspired by the class I checked into Google Analytics further and signed up. I added http://www.sethholloway.com to the service and they generated the necessary javascript–they even told me where to place it (though I already knew enough HTML to insert the scripts)

    Here’s the generated javascript:

    <script type="text/javascript">
  var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ?
                   "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
  document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost +
                          "google-analytics.com/ga.js'
                          type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
  try {
    var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-7555904-1");
    pageTracker._trackPageview();
  } catch(err) {}
</script>

    And the only change necessary to gather statistics from across the blog is contained in header.php. From your WordPress admin panel click Appearance->Editor->Header (header.php). Then locate this bit of code and insert the generated code where I placed the comment below:

    <?php if ( is_singular() ) wp_enqueue_script( 'comment-reply' ); ?>

<?php wp_head(); ?>

//PASTE GOOGLE ANALYTICS CODE HERE AND REMOVE THIS LINE

</head>
<body>
<div id="page">

    That’s it! So simple! So useful! If you haven’t already signed up for Google Analytics, do it now. The service is free, incredibly helpful and easy to use; even better, installation will take you less time than heating up that Hot Pocket!

    Internet , , , ,

  • Happy Valentine’s Day!

    Posted on February 14th, 2009 Seth No comments

    I’m not a huge fan of commercial holidays, but I hope everyone has a wonderful, relaxing day with people they care about.

    personal ,

  • Learning HTML/CSS?

    Posted on February 8th, 2009 Seth 2 comments

    Are you new to HTML/CSS? Knowing the basics of HTML/CSS is extremely useful. Below are a couple options to get started in learning HTML/CSS. There are great resources freely available at http://htmldog.com/ and http://www.w3schools.com/htmL/.

    So you understand there are tags opened and closed with angled brackets, “<” and “>”, now what? To create your site you have two main options:
    1) SSH in and poke around. Edit files with your favorite editor (nano, pico, vi, etc.).

    2) Modify files locally. This can be done easily two ways:

    2a) Download the Web Developer Toolbar addon for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60 then restart Firefox. Now you can use the toolbar to Edit CSS and Edit HTML on any page you view. To edit CSS: right click a page->Web Developer->CSS->Edit CSS. To edit html: right click a page->Web Developer->Miscellaneous->Edit HTML. If you find a configuration you prefer, press the save button and keep a copy locally. When you’re satisfied, copy your copy to the server (scp, ftp, WinSSH, etc.).
    2b) Right click on the web page and choose “View Page Source” to get the html page you’re currently viewing. For a pure html page, this will give you everything you need to know. It does not work as well on pages generated by web programming languages (for example, viewing the source of a google page gives you near-nonsense because they’ve obfuscated the details with their Python generation). This method will work perfectly for the SSE page, http://www.edge.utexas.edu/sse/. With the html page in view, you should be able to find a style declaration. In the SSE index.html you’ll see
    <style media=“screen” title=“currentStyle” type=“text/css”>@import “SSE.css”;</style>
    So point your browser to the indicated style file; in this case http://www.edge.utexas.edu/sse/SSE.css. You’ll then have the style files.

    Now you’re on your way to figuring out the Internet! View and edit your favorite pages or create your own. If you see something you like, view the HTML/CSS and learn! It’s quick, easy, and useful. Good luck!

    Did I miss something? Was this useful? How did you learn HTML/CSS?

    Update: Thanks for the help, Steve and Lane.

    technical , ,

  • Gamers are bilingual

    Posted on February 3rd, 2009 Seth 3 comments

    Thanks to Jason for this ridiculous video. Sure, I know all the terms and even caught a typo (nex should be naxx), so it made me feel good. Without further ado, here’s the awesomeness:

    But seriously, can I get some college credit for 1337 speak? I blame you Californians for a piece of reporting like this :)

    entertainment , ,

  • Let’s get tough on Wall Street

    Posted on February 2nd, 2009 Seth 1 comment

    Maureen Dowd says it nicely in her editorial in the New York Times. If you didn’t read the post already, you should. America needs to get upset, take action, and save the proletariat–not the fat cat. If the big banks fail, the free market will provide and there’s no shortage of smart people looking to make banking salaries. These guys don’t know anything special, well not in terms of stock trends at least–I doubt you know about million dollar bonuses, private jets, and $100+ bottles of wine :)

    armchair economist , ,

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