This is a perfect example of why Threadless is a cool company…who said shipping invoices are supposed to be dull?
Monthly Archive for January, 2006
I was idlly browsing a.wholelottanothing.org (pretty high marks on the domain name) and found this post about a real-time, search-as-you-type amazon search.
I have been playing with amazon searches quite a bit recently, tracking down sculpture books associated with particular artists to use on the sculpture website. I have noticed that amazon doesn’t really seem to have a good search algorithm, and most especially irritating if it doesn’t find an exact match it will give you a page of something which is ‘close’ to what you were searching for. For example, I search for ‘Jonathan Loxley’ one of our brand new artists and I get results for ‘Jonathan Lesley’, irritating when it is the fourth search in a few minutes and you aren’t reading the page, you are looking directly in the position that you know the first result will be in and thus miss the part where this is explained.
hmm, guess I have to add this post to the ‘rant’ bin after that…
Anyway…to continue…I thought it might be fun to chuck my name into MyBigRiver, amazon returned ‘Hill Street Blues’ while I was typing, and settled on ‘Death Wish 3′…does amazon think I am depressed? or a crime fighter? or simply a gun toting hard-case…?
Try It Out, any unusual recommendations about your life?
To continue the current trend of beta’s on websites, this (as you see it now) is the first iteration of the design. I added the screenshot just incase I ever get around to either finishing or changing it.
It is an example of automatic design. I didn’t really have much of an idea of what I wanted the design to look like, other than having a single column layout (mainly because I really like the feel of binary bonzai). Simply a case of tweak something, decide whether it looks better or worse, tweak something else etc…
Of course all of this was done through the nifty tft goodness of my laptop. Most of it is somewhat invisible on my crt so I may need to whip round the css and darken the greys a little.
The big ‘e’ was a lucky piece of photoshopping, the design needed something to balance it…so I used the design equivalent of duck-tape to do it.
In terms of functionality, the main task at the moment is to get my diggs and stumbles at the bottom of the page, next to the previous entries. The related entries plugin looks entertaining, although it works using a field which requires manual entry (due to the conversion from my old blog). So I might just cheat and try and edit the plugin instead 
As far as content goes, I do aim to add my portfolio to the site. I doubt this will be difficult, simply time-consuming. As well as horribly self-reflective, no doubt…
possibly one of the best uses of ajax…
A game where many people try to be the first to name the Flickr tags associated with a series of images. Sounds dull, but it really is pretty addictive…till your fingers start to ache…
phew…categorised 429 posts since the last post. Still haven’t really mentally visualised a style for the site yet. So instead I am fiddling with the scripts on my local copy of the site.
One thing I have found, is that wordpress does look very intimidating for a casual programmer, lots of files, classes and functions. But it is nice to see that the very basic header, loop, footer structure, one would expect, is there.
The other nice part is that it seems to be the ‘done’ thing in this massive community to simply re-touch the bits you don’t like in the script, maybe even add something new. Pah! and some say the open source community doesn’t exist.
So much yet to do…no real rush tho, i hope…
for the best blond joke ever!
Well, the archive is copied over to the wonderful wordpress. Of course it still each post needs to be properly tagged, categorised and named so that the nifty related articles plugin will work properly.
Oh yea, and I need to customise the theme a little, although K2 default is very nice, it isn’t exactly standing out from the crowd.
all fun though…