Bulging at the Seams

AdamPolselli.com’s traffic has steadily risen over the past twelve months. That is, until just a couple days ago when the site was added to Paul Scrivens’s CSS Vault. (Thanks, by the way!) Since then, the number of hits and visits has tripled, and today I even received an email warning me that my domain is about to exceed it’s bandwidth limit.

I’m going to try to ride out the rest of the month and see if I can make it to February. By then, all of the traffic from CSS Vault will most likely have died down. Anyways, consider this a warning… I could be gone for a couple days!

You’ve GOT to Be Kidding

Why did someone post 90 random comments throughout my entire weblog today? Because I was just wondering…

Going through 90 entries to delete one comment from each is not something that I have time to do right now, so could the person out there with the IP address 80.58.11.45 get a life.

Thanks…

A Trip to the Garden

Today I spent about an hour roaming through a large garden at a nearby art institute. It was a cloudy day, but I still brought along my digital camera, hoping to snap a few shots that were worthy of being posted in my photo gallery. Well, what do you know, a few worthy photographs was just what I got. Check ‘em out. “Large, Steel Sculpture” is my personal favorite.

By the way, happy September!

The Transition to Strict

Yesterday, I spent a couple hours making the switch from XHTML 1.0 Transitional to XHTML 1.0 Strict. It was actually very easy. My most common validity problems were using the align and border attributes for images, and using the target attribute for links.

The only pages that I had trouble getting to validate were the individual archive pages, so I am turning to all of you for some assistance. When validating, I get the following errors:

• there is no attribute “language”
  <script type=”text/javascript” language=”javascript”>
• there is no attribute “name”
  …/mt-comments.cgi” name=”comments_form” onsubmit=”if…

I really have no idea how I can get rid of these two things, because it seems to me that they are both necessary. Help is appreciated!

Pull Quote Code Updated

I have changed the pull-a-quote code just a bit, in order to keep my markup as close to semantically correct as possible.

I now use a blockquote instead of a div to define the pull quotes, as suggested by a few visitors. Although the div solution produced valid mark-up, the blockquote method is the “semantically correct approach.” If that phrase sounds familiar, I stole it from Sunny.

The “Trial” Is Over

AdamPolselli.com’s tagline is no longer “The Trials & Tribulations of a Young Designer.” When I first started my weblog in May, I still was not exactly sure what I would be discussing, but I assumed it would be about my “trials and tribulations” as a young designer.

A few months later, I now see that AdamPolselli.com is more of an overall design periodical, and not so much a personal journal. Therefore, I have changed the tagline to “Everything Design.”

It’s very general, and not the most creative, but that’s what I was going for. I like to discuss all types of design, from web design to industrial design to graphic design. I also like that it is shorter.

Enjoy!

The “Perennials” Have Bloomed

You guessed it — another new section for the site. This one, called “Perennials,” is a guide to the some of my more notable entries that deserve a more prominent spot on the site. Well, at least I think they do. Enjoy!

Creating an MT-Powered Photo Album

If you have not already noticed, the Photography section at AdamPolselli.com has been completely rebuilt. So, what’s the catch? I’ve used nothing but MovableType to manage and update the entire thing.

After reading “Beyond the Blog” at A Whole Lotta Nothing, I was very intrigued at the thought of using MovableType as more than just a weblog app. So, last night I sat down, made some scratches on a couple post-its, and proceeded to recreate my photo album entirely from scratch. Here is exactly how it was done.

The first step was to figure out which MT fields would stand for what data. I needed a thumbnail photo, a full-size photo, a title, and a category. So, easily enough, I layed the data out in the following manner:

• Title = photo title
• Primary Category = photo category
• Entry Body = the uploaded and embedded thumbnail
• Extended Entry = file name of the full-size photograph

With all that decided, I then had to create the templates. I began with the index, or homepage, template. All it takes to display all of the thumbnails is a few lines of MT template tags and a bit of CSS:

<MTEntries>
<a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>" class="img"
title="Click to Enlarge Photo"><$MTEntryBody$></a>
</MTEntries>

div#photography img {
border: 1px solid #000;
margin: 5px; }

The master archives were easy to create, pretty much like any other weblog archives, and the individual archives, although very different from all of the other pages, were still just as easy. Again, all it took was a few MT template tags and some CSS:

<MTEntryPrevious> «
<a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a>
:: </MTEntryPrevious>

div#indphoto img.photo {
border: 4px double #FFF;
margin: 20px; }


So, to add a new photograph, I first click “Upload File” and upload the full-size photo. After it uploads the image, I simply close the upload pop-up window. Again I click “Upload File,” and this time upload the corresponding thumbnail. When it gives me the option, I select “Create a new entry using this uploaded file” and click “Embedded Image.”

Now, on the Create New Entry page, I fill in Title with the photo title, select a Primary Category, the Entry Body is already filled in with the thumbnail image, and in Extended Entry I type the filename (i.e. sunset.jpg). Just click “Save” and that’s it!