Curse of the Round Lace

July 30, 2008

I have an arch-nemesis, and its name is the round lace. Like the Joker, it has no origin story, it just always was, and its sole purpose is to antagonize the hero (that being me of course). I walk to my office everyday from my parking spot, which is like four or five blocks, and it never fails… my shoes will always become untied. Not just once, but sometimes three times in a one way trip.

Growing up, I don’t ever remember having this problem. In fact, I never took the time to think about what was on my feet as long as I could get to one place from another without any hindrances. That is until I got my first round laces. Suddenly I become aware of my foot apparel. The flat lace, the linguini of the shoe lace world whose functionality was often overlooked had somehow become replaced. Sure, the round lace looks inviting. I mean, look how easily and seamlessly it fits in between the holes of your shoes. Don’t let the beautiful physic of the round lace fool you though. Like the hot girl in your business 101 group project, she’ll fail to perform her function and you’ll be stuck doing extra work.

Please bring back the flat laces. Pretty soon the day will come when I’ll trip on my laces as I’m being chased by the monsters in the basement that only come out as you turn off the lights and are running up the stairs (as we all know). And then, my friends will be left standing over my grave, in agreement stating, “If only flat laces were still the standard for shoes, Dave might still be with us today.”

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Style Sheet Switch Situation

July 29, 2008

Ah yes, the old style switch conundrum. If you didn’t know, my site allows the user to toggle two different style sheets (hint: Click the light bulb in the top right corner). If you have been following my posts since the beginning, you will notice that I have had a little problem with getting my style sheets to load properly, leading to a text only version of my beautiful site. In my rage, I automatically assumed it was Expression Engine not loading my style sheets properly. Much later, after coming across this article on “A List Apart,” I came to the realization that it was the way I linked to my style sheets that caused the problem.

What I needed were two alternate style sheets, both with different titles, and one persistent style sheet. The persistent style sheet tells the page, “load this one.” Then, the alternate style sheets tell the page which page to load when the style switch link is clicked. Currently, if the page is set to the “dark” style sheet, when the bulb is clicked it will load the “light” one, and vice versa. Commence awesomeness.

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Victory is Mine!

July 16, 2008

I’m somewhat hesitant to say I’ve solved the css/styleswitch problem… but so far it seems ok. Apparently if you want to have alternate stylesheets you must have a persistent stylesheet to keep the site grounded. I’ll detail it more in a little bit. I’m sorry Expression Engine, here I was blaming you the whole time. It wasn’t your fault.

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Avril had it right

July 08, 2008

I work on the site less and less these days. Mainly because my tolerance for Expression Engine is running out. I can’t seem to get the ‘@import url("INSERT CSS PATH HERE");’ to pull my other stylesheets, even though there are a couple different forum topics on that alone. Don’t even get me started on why my stylesheets are getting dropped. I love the functionality that my site is suppose to give, but if I can’t find a way to make the stylesheets pull, what’s the point? I may have to search for another content management system.... hello, tumblr? You there?

....btw, the Avril title is a reference to her song “Complicated.” Don’t judge me.

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