Paint Stains

How Not to Display Your Artwork on the Web

Every conceivable and worthy piece of advice is covered. It is a righteous, if scary, rant for an online artist to read, so much so that I found myself grabbing my chest while reading in case the upcoming thou-shalt-not would describe one of my sins. I think I'm OK, but I have done some dumb shit before, and my bio and some other pages probably could use a clean-up.

That said, I have been to those sites which take over your whole screen with no escape (and without asking) and/or that display thumbnails the size of ants, and yeah, those sites are annoying. Glad I'm not alone in thinking so...

And oh,

Happy new year to you! ;)

No insult of offense meant to MSIE users, but this really is the worst browser EVAR.

I'm tearing out my hair because even the most basic of CSS (like "display: none") does not want to behave itself in Mac IE, and absolute positioning CSS is giving vastly different results in Firefox and Explorer (MAC AND PC environments) even when I'm outlining margins, paddings and positions to the nth degree, not to mention paring the details down and everything in between.

THROW MSIE OUT THE WINDOW. PLEASE. SECURITY ISSUES alone should make you abandon MSIE for ever and ever. Love yourself, and download Firefox. Just the tab feature alone will make the switch worth it.

Edit: Issue still not fixed. It ain't just the "display: none;" thing, though of course, that is shockingly lame. I'm not talking about a grandfather version of MSIE even. Just the fact that a page can look fine on MSIE in a PC platform but be completely screwed in MSIE on a Mac. I mean, totally screwed. And far as I can tell, the page looks correct in every other browser on both platforms.

And I'm really under-describing the problem. The formatting issue is on a menu include, which means the menu on EVERY page on the site looks screwed in Explorer on a Mac.

*weeps*

Not Dead Yet from Spamalot playing in my head as I can post here after my surgery and say that: It went really well! (Aside from the nausea and starvation I had coming out of anaesthesia because I couldn't hold down my food for several hours after.) So many things (about the care, speed of treatment, ease of getting necessary drugs and diagnosis, paperwork, and of course cost) were different this time from the last experience in Raleigh, that calling it the difference between night and day is an understatement. The contrast is close to, I think, the difference between the deepest depth of hell and a lower rung of heaven. Even physical pain was way less this time. So many things were different. It's just too much to even write about. Never again do I want to experience American healthcare. Not in the state it is currently. And I feel bad for writing this.

The patron saint of the hospital where I had the surgery this last time was St. Francis of Assisi. This surprise was very welcome on the day of my admission.

Meditation rocks. Just wanted to throw that in. I'm looking forward to the 2-day workshop with the venerable Thubten Chodron at the end of this month. She's in Singapore at the time as I - the universe really likes me this month! Her writing just clicks and has made a difference more than anyone else I've read before. For the past 2 weeks, I've stopped cussing at people. No more "F%^king George W Bush!" Starting to read DailyKos with more calm - which I always thought had to be impossible. Alas, I still do think people can be stupid, and I'm still occassionally cussing at electronics.

And now, it's something like back to work for me - got one art commission on the table, and some PHP work to do. I've got a library of script components I can now put together to make CMSs ... because I still can't find a free CMS I like - it's not like they aren't good (e107 looked terrific, trying it out) but most of their features and scripts are so bloated compared to how my coding style is developing, I can't quite commit myself to liking and committing to one. I'd spend too much time stripping it down, down, down.

Talking about which - I'm going to get to work. See ya later!