Chad Miller

The Right Way To Style

Webpages, for those of you who are uninitiated in the world of web development, are built from a type of code called HTML, which stands for Hypertext Markup Language. Essentially, the idea behind it all is to take a standard text document (something you’d create in Notepad), and mark it up (using HTML) to indicate additional information about the contents of your document.

Hypertext is actually a fancy technical name for a link. Regular text becomes hypertext when it is hyperlinked to another webpage. That’s the basic definition of HTML.

HTML also contains several other ways to tag your text to indicate various things about it. Among the most common are a tag to indicate a group of sentences as a paragraph (the P tag), a tag to indicate a text segment as a document heading (the H1 through H6 tags), and the list tags (UL, OL, and LI,) which indicate ordered or unordered lists of items.

How Not to Style HTML

Changing text into hypertext is helpful, but it’s not very pretty. Essentially, your document will read as a single column, top-to-bottom, in a single font of a single style. [Read more →]

Makin' Chili

A few weeks ago, my wife and I were really craving some good chili. As she is still in college, and as I subsisted mostly on ramen noodles and Wendy’s during my years as a bachelor, neither of us is very well versed in the culinary arts.

Between the two of us, we didn’t have a single clue how to make chili.

Our appetites not to be deterred, I knew just who to ask. (Google, of course!) My main goal was to find out just what defines chili. Now I am not much of a recipe-follower; instead, I like to understand exactly what I’m doing and why. That way, I can freestyle when I want to or need to.

So I Googled ‘chili’ and examined a whole bunch of recipes. You wouldn’t believe some of the things people put in their chili. Anyways, from looking at all the recipes, I found a number of common elements:

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Art’s New Direction

Society as a whole, and art in particular, have gone through some major frame-of-reference changes over the last couple of millennia.

Not to get into too much detail, our roots are in a premodern viewpoint, which basically takes the stance that the divine is directly responsible for everything that is currently unexplained. This proceeded, a few centuries ago, into the modern viewpoint, which covers a bit of a spectrum. It starts out discovering science and natural law, which can explain most of the world around us. Modernism started out attributing the existence of the world to the divine and everything else to science, but it later cut out the divine altogether as it attempted to use various comical scientific theories to explain existence itself.

Obviously, with the wholesale philosophical removal of the divine, man’s search for the meaning of existence became pointless, as the final statement and obvious conclusion of modernism was that existence itself is meaningless. This was the spark that started the fire of the postmodern viewpoint. With the loss of order and meaning provided by the divine, and with science saying that there is no meaning, art and culture fragmented into many different factions, one saying, “We must now create our own meaning,” and another, “We must now create art that is without meaning to reflect our true state,” and another, “We must transcend our current states to find meaning in a higher plane of existence,” and still another, “Each of these is correct in its own way.”

This is of course, a topic for another post, another time. What I’d like to address today is the future of art and culture.

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The Refrigerator Incident

This weekend was one of those wonderful, extended weekends where everyone has Monday off.

My wife and I therefore decided to host a cookout Monday here at our new home. Folks started showing up at about 2 in the afternoon, and stayed until about 2 in the morning. A wonderful day!

When mealtime came, everyone was of course most helpful in the kitchen. I’ve been a stage manager for about six years, so when it comes to big group projects like that, I’m generally the take-charge type, giving everyone assignments and making sure everyone has what they need.

Naturally, everyone was in and out of the refrigerator all day and all night…I’d estimate the door was opened no less than 150 times Monday. I understand that there is no actual mechanical connection between the door of a refrigerator and the guts that actually make it run, but I believe all that action broke our refrigerator’s poor little cold heart.

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My Favorite Website Platform

There are more websites than ever out there in the vast realm of the internet. Everyone seems to have a website, from the largest companies in the world to the smallest and most eccentric communities built around the weirdest interests you can imagine.

Most websites are built for one purpose: to communicate information. Every other function of a website is generally going to be a subset of this singular purpose. This can of course be refined to target a particular audience, communicate an intended message, and use selected medium/media, but in the big picture, this is all communication.

And communicating information over the internet using a website has never been easier, as more and more tools are developed which help people to build websites (many of which require very little technical knowledge). Now some of these will produce better sites than others, depending on what you want out of your site, but today I’m going to tell you exactly what platform I recommend for building small- to medium-scale websites.

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Freebie: Desktop Background

I did this in Photoshop at about 7:15 AM this Saturday. My wife loves it, and she suggested I put it up on the site for everyone to download and use as they see fit.

This is currently the desktop background on my Mac, and as such it’s sized appropriately (1680×1050). If you want to use it for your desktop, it should be fine, even if your screen is smaller. Just click the thumbnail above, then when the full-size image loads, right-click it and select ‘Set as Desktop Background’. From there, you should be able to ‘center’ the image, and click OK. That ought to do it!

This image was made from a freebie photo I found at Stock Exchange, and I put the fake sun and sunbeams in using a tutorial I came across at PSDTuts, along with some resources they link to.

Hope you folks enjoy!

Traffic Court

I’ve never been to traffic court before. However, I recently had the joy to be able to spend a large part of one of my days there.

I got a ticket for an expired tag about a month ago (on a holiday, of course). Generally, I’ll just pay the ticket and be done with it, because it normally costs under $100 to make it go away.

Paying the Ticket

So last Tuesday, I went to the ‘Ticket Payment’ window in the Municipal Court building in downtown Jackson (a joy in itself). I had heard people gripe about this sort of thing before, so I was prepared for the ticket-window workers to be a bunch of grumps. To my surprise, the ladies who work at the ticket window are not only human beings, but they are kind, sweet ladies.

“Great!” I was thinking to myself. “This won’t be so bad at all! I’ll just pay these nice ladies and be off on my merry way!”

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Site Launch: Lee Farrar Bailey

Lee Farrar Bailey is one of my best friends in the world. He’s also a major talent in the Operatic and Musical Theatre worlds today.

I first designed his website nearly a year ago. It was a simple site, but it got the job done. But now that I know a lot more about web design, I have rebuilt his site from the ground up.

If you haven’t checked out his music already, you can listen to samples of his music (and order his CDs) on CDBaby. It’s highly recommended!

Lee’s Website: Lee Farrar Bailey

Term of the Day: Yak Shaving

I’m sure we all have heard the old story about the man who wanted to get some work done around his house on a Saturday.

The man decides he’ll start by cleaning the leaves off his roof, but realizes that he needs to fix his ladder so he can get up there. So he gets out his ladder and tools, but realizes he doesn’t have all the tools he needs. So he gets in the car to go get the right tools from the tool shop, but realizes he needs gas. And on the way to the gas station, he realizes he needs some cash. While going to the bank, he realizes he left his checkbook at home, so he goes home to get it…and so forth.

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Portable Webdev Platform

I know there’s a great number of my readers out there who are also keen and avid web developers, always looking for the coolest, newest web development technology. OK, there may not be many of you, but nonetheless, I’m going to show you today one thing that’s made my web development life much easier.

The Web Development Process

Generally, when I’m designing a website for someone, I’ll follow several steps in the process. The first several steps are outside the scope of this article, and involve interaction theory and information architecture and data structures and all that. But then I get down to designing the actual page, and that process follows these steps:

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