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. To get around this, people in the early days of the web began inventing new ‘tags’ to indicate style, such as the FONT tag to indicate what font to display the text in, the B tag to indicate bold text, and the I tag to indicate italic text. To get more flexibility in page layouts, people began to use the TABLE tag to make different sections of text display in different areas, rather that all in one column.

However, all of this new styling markup causes a big problem: it interferes with the purpose of HTML, which is to describe the text on the page. For instance, the TABLE tag, which is being used for page layout, is actually supposed to be used to present tabular data in columns and rows. The new styling tags like B, I, and FONT don’t describe the text in the document at all.

That means this method of styling a webpage is little more than a hack, a way to make the system do something for which is was not originally intended. It also obfuscates any real meaning that might be contained in the markup by essentially reducing it to a needle in a haystack.

It should also be mentioned that while this method of styling your webpage might work just fine for your web browser, it can do some really bad things for other kinds of browsers. For instance, if a blind person were to reach your website, their screen reader would have a lot of trouble interpreting meaning from the style markup you’ve provided. Also, search engines such as Google and Yahoo can gather a lot about your website based on the way it’s marked up; using markup to style your document will confuse the robots that try to index your page, which will negatively affect your rankings in search results (meaning that you’ll more likely to end up on the twenty-eighth page of results from a search for your name, rather than showing up on the first page).

The Right Way to Do It

If you use HTML only to describe the content (and not the style) of your document, how are you to make it look good on the web? I’m glad you asked; the solution to this problem is to use the right tools for the job.

There’s a second, complimentary language that you can use to style your well-formatted HTML. It’s called CSS, which stands for ‘Cascading Stylesheets’. The word ‘stylesheet’ should be pretty self-explanatory; it basically means a document that describes the styling for another document.

‘Cascading’ basically means that you can use just one CSS document to style every single page on your website; any change you decide to make will ‘cascade’ down to every page on your website. This makes styling changes a snap; instead of having to change every single page when you decide your site needs a makeover, all you have to do is make the change in one place and every page on your site will reflect that change.

It is possible to have a well-formed HTML document that very well describes your document’s text, while letting it look pretty on the web as well. All you need is a little CSS!

Here are a few resources to help you get started:

• The W3C XHTML Specification; XHTML is a version of HTML that permits no styling markup, which is what we want
• The Level 1 CSS Specification
• W3C’s Webpage Validator can help you find markup problems
• W3C’s CSS Validator, which can help find problems in your stylesheet
• The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines from W3C indicate and prioritize the various checkpoints that must be completed in order to ensure your content is accessible for people with disabilities

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:

• Meat
• Beans
• Tomatoes or Tomato Sauce
• Onion
• Chili Powder

Of course there are all sorts of variants; some leave out the meat or beans, but most recipes include both. Most included the onion. Some recipes had a list of ingredients as long as my arm. Judging by the sheer variety of chili recipes, I figured it’s pretty hard to go wrong, so I made a batch of “basic chili” using only the ingredients I listed above.

Here’s the ratios I used: 1 pound of (browned) ground beef, 2 cans of beans, 1 can of crushed tomatoes, and a half an onion, chopped up.

From that base, I just seasoned to taste with chili powder and left it to simmer 1-2 hours until suppertime. And boy, it was darn good. I never dreamed a good meal (with a Tupperware vat full of leftovers in the fridge) would be so easy to make, either. At least not legitimately, and by ‘legitimately’ I mean ‘without a microwave’.

In the future, I’ll be able to experiment from this base, refining the recipe until I can make world dominating chili. You heard it here first.

I hope you readers weren’t terribly bored by my chili-related ramblings. If so, complain, and I’ll find a more interesting topic next time.

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.

The Redemptive Cycle

You’ll probably have observed sometime in your life that much of creation is governed by cycles. Again, not to go into too much detail, some of these things include the seasons, day and night, the tides, the phases of the moon, the human sleep cycle, along with the menstrual, respiratory, and circulatory cycles, the electric current we use today, along with most machines used to turn various forms of energy into actual work. Also, light and sound and every form of broadcast signal. All of these things are governed by cycles, and they are just the tip of the iceberg.

Much of what we humans consider beautiful in music and drama is governed by cycles. Music will cycle in theme and verse. Drama will go up and down in tension on a micro scale while the whole plotline builds tension and resolves on a macro scale. In fact, as the postmodernist viewpoint languished from lack of meaning, “postmodernist art” discarded this cyclical structure and beauty in reflection of a lack of meaning.

But the world isn’t really like that. The world does have meaning. Cycles do appear throughout creation. In fact, if you look at the Bible’s account of existence, man was created in God’s image (at the top of the cycle), but then fell (the downward turn) and was condemned to die (bottom of the cycle), and was redeemed by Jesus to live forever with God (back to the top of the cycle). The entire existence of man can be defined as one full cycle.

This recurring theme, the cycle of God, reflected in nature and man, is what I like to call the Redemptive cycle.

So What’s Next?

I stated at the beginning of this article that my intention was to look forward to the next direction art and culture would take, the next viewpoint shift we have ahead of us. Believe me, everything before was necessary as exposition for this.

You have likely already deduced the connection between the evolution of worldviews presented in the first section of the article and the examination of cycles in the second. Culture and art has been, up until this point, in the first few stages of a full cycle. We started at the top of the cycle with the premodern view, we’ve fallen through the modern view and have hit bottom with the postmodern view. Naturally, the next phase of this cycle will be the upward turn, the redemption of art and culture.

But what will this look like?

Our culture is a crystal vase that has “freed itself” from the confines of its shelf, fallen, and has consequently fragmented into thousands of pieces upon encountering the floor. Each of the pieces has scattered in its own direction, and it simply seems hopeless that the once-beautiful vessel of culture and art can ever be put back together again.

The Missing Ingredient

Culture and art likely never will take on their old forms again. Even if we did manage to collect all the pieces, there’s nothing to hold them together, or to prevent them from coming back apart once we got them all into position.

However, if an artist comes along to glue the pieces together, there’s nothing to say art and culture has to be what it was before. When our pieces are put back together, art and culture will be something that it never was, that it never could have been before it was broken. That’s the very nature of redemption.

Perhaps the broken pieces of our vase will be assembled into a beautiful crystal sculpture.

The missing piece is God. If there’s any hope for our broken culture, it is that He will put it back together again.

Please note that the vase/sculpture illustration is borrowed from the 2002 film Joshua.

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.

Death In The Family

Throughout the evening, people kept checking the freezer for ice, but it seemed like the water in the ice trays just didn’t want to freeze!

The next morning, as I was working (in my home office) my wife came in to let me know that nothing in our refrigerator is cold. The fridge was dead. We had figured that this refrigerator was on its last legs, so we’d been planning to replace it, but we were hoping to wait at least until the New Year. Alas.

I had an old mini-fridge from college out in the garage, so I hauled it into the kitchen and plugged it in and we loaded everything that could fit into it.

So I called into work and told them I was taking the day off, then we went shopping for refrigerators and bought a nice one, one of those side-by-side models with a water filter and a spout in the door.

Replacement

Unfortunately, this came at a pretty bad time as far as buying a replacement goes. I’ve just started paying tuition, and while we can afford it, we don’t have a lot of surplus after that and living expenses.

If you’ve ever heard of Dave Ramsey, you’ll know he gives great amounts of applied common sense in the form of financial advice to his audience via books, seminars, and his radio show. In regards to taking control of your finances, you’ll know the first thing he advises his audience do is to set aside $1000 in an (easily accessible) emergency fund in the bank. After then becoming debt-free, you are to add to it until your emergency fund can cover three to six months of living expenses.

I am in the middle of this third step, building the emergency fund from the original $1000 seed up to the 3-6 month expense coverage. As this was an emergency, I withdrew from the emergency fund to buy the new fridge. Across the next couple paychecks I get, I’ll put the same amount back into the emergency fund.

You have no idea how nice it is to be able to handle a moderately significant financial ‘crisis’ like this without breaking a sweat. We’re not financially hurting, and we don’t have to live on rice and beans for the next three months because of this. We didn’t have to put it on a credit card and pay it back at 29% interest or whatever the going scam is these days. That feeling is awesome.

A Word of Advice: If you don’t have an emergency fund like this, start one. You have no idea how good it will make you feel to have it when you need it. And believe me (and anyone else with sense), sooner or later, you will need it.

Also, if you don’t know Dave Ramsey or his financial advice, I can’t recommend his book Financial Peace enough. Buy it, borrow it, check it out from the library, or swipe a friend’s copy, but read it.

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.

Content Management System

A Content Management System, or CMS, is almost certainly the way to go with a website if you think any of the information on the website is ever going to change. Even for websites that I build and maintain myself, that no one else will ever have to change, I will always use a CMS.

That’s because a CMS does one key thing that is absolutely vital for any website whose information is ever going to be changed, updated, or amended by a human being:

It separates the content from the presentation of the content.

This is such a vital factor because otherwise the human being is going to have to dig through piles and piles of HTML computer code (the code that dictates how a webpage is laid out) to find the little section where the information needs to be changed or added. Even for a computer geek like myself, who thinks in HTML, that is quite a large and time-consuming task.

There are plenty of other perfectly reasonable, technically sound reasons for keeping your content and your presentation separate, but for me these reasons are all second to the time I save by being able to just go in and change or add whatever I need to without worrying about the code or technical details.

The CMS I Use

My favorite Content Management system is WordPress, and it has been for quite some time. WordPress started life as a fork (geek-speak for ‘Divergent Copy’) of a blogging system called B2.

WordPress was itself considered a blogging system (and nothing more) for quite a while, until it evolved into the robust CMS platform it is today. In fact, I have built more than one website managed by WordPress that don’t have any blog elements at all.

Here are some of the many reasons I use WordPress over just about everything else:

• Open Source License. Yes, this means it is free of charge.
• Broad User Community. Anything I want to do with it has probably already been done, and someone can tell me how. If not, I can figure it out and tell other people.
• Easy Setup. WordPress is available as an easy 1-click install from every web host I’ve ever used, so there’s no getting down into the gritty details of FTPing packages or setting up your database; this can all be done for you with the click of a mouse.
• Abundant Themes. Since the WordPress user community is so broad, there are already hundreds (if not thousands) of already-built site themes, so if you don’t want to get into the computer code, you still have ample options for visually styling your site.
• Custom Paths. You’ll notice that as you browse around my site, the web address (the stuff after http://) concisely indicates exactly what you’re looking at; there’s no numbers or ‘index.aspx’ pages or anything like that. WordPress can do this automagically.
• User-Friendly. No one for whom I’ve ever built a site based on WordPress has yet had much trouble at all in changing, adding or removing information or content on their website.

I could go on, but you probably get the idea. If you are considering starting a website for yourself or your company, you’ll not find any platform that is better to start with than WordPress. I highly recommend it.

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!

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!”

Not so. “That’ll be $192.50,” said the nice lady as she smiled at me. Come again? “$192.50. Would you like to see the judge about it?”

The Judge? Did that mean I was going to court? Did that make me a criminal? Was I under arrest?

“Um, I think I’ll just pay it.” I got out my checkbook and opened it, and started searching for my pen.

“Are you sure you don’t want to see the Judge instead? I could get you in tonight…you’d be the second person in line.”

She seemed to really think it would be a good idea if I went to see the judge. “I can’t really make it tonight, I have other commitments.” I found my pen.

“How about Thursday? I can get you in to see the Judge on Thursday at 3.” She wasn’t giving up! Maybe she knew something that I didn’t.

“Um, I’ve never been to court before. What would I tell him?”

“Just show your face. That may be all you need to do.” Really? I could just show my face and maybe get this $192.50 fine reduced? I guess it’s worth a shot, right?

“Okay, what time on Thursday again?”

“Be there at three. This building, room 127.”

Coming to Court

So Thursday came around and I was at the courthouse at 3. Now when I was there before, it was quiet and still, and there was no one around except the building entrance guards. So I naturally expected the same thing when I got there on Thursday. Of course, this was not the case.

The line to get inside the building wound through the lobby, out the front door, and down both sets of stairs onto the sidewalk in front of the courthouse. What on earth could all these people be here for?

I took my place in line and casually made conversation with the guy next to me. “You here for traffic court?” I asked. He was here for traffic court. All these people were. And I was at the back of the line.

It could be worse though, right? All I’d have to do is wait in line, then let the Judge call me, reduce my fine, and I’d be out of here. Right?

Not so. I stood and waited in the courtroom for two and a half hours. He didn’t call my name. Just as the ticket window was about to close, I stepped out of the courtroom and dashed to the ticket window to make sure the lady had indeed put me on the court’s schedule for today.

She had the day off. So I had another kind, sweet ticket window lady search the office for my ticket. “It’s not in here, sir, it must be in the courtroom,” she told me. Well, that’s good…it means I just have to keep waiting.

So I went back to the courtroom and waited more. After another hour, the court was all but empty.

“You were supposed to be here for court today, son?” a court officer asked me. “Yes sir,” I replied. He said, “Give me your copy of that ticket, and I’ll find our copy.”

Twenty minutes later, he came back. “I can’t find it.”

So the judge asked for my copy of the ticket, and called my name. I went and stood before him, as I’d seen several hundred others do when their names were called. “Chad Miller,” he said, “you’re dismissed. Time served.”

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

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.

A situation like this is called “Yak Shaving.” The term was apparently invented by a guy at MIT (source) to describe “Any seemingly pointless activity which is actually necessary to solve a problem which solves a problem which, several levels of recursion later, solves the real problem you’re working on.” (source)

I came across this term today in an article I was reading on one of the many blogs in my Google Reader. Ironically enough, when I tried to investigate the term by clicking on it (it was a link), it took me to another page which took me to yet another page…but I eventually got the definition.

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:

1. Code a static instance of the site.
2. Create from that model a theme for the CMS Du Jour.
3. Test the theme and CMS on a test server.
4. Deploy the theme to a live instance of the CMS.

Of course, you immediately see a problem with using this model for your own web development. “Chad, all I have is a PC running Windows. I don’t have a test server that can run all those fancy CMSs.”

Wanna bet?

The One-click Server Installer

It’s actually a lot easier than you think to set up a test CMS environment on your development PC. Content Management Systems normally run on a server technology “stack” that consists of the following:

• An Operating System (Like Windows)
• Server Software (This is the program that gives your browser a webpage to display when it asks politely)
• A Webpage Generation Engine (Which basically makes it so you don’t have to hand-craft each individual webpage)
• A Database (Which is where all the content, like the text of your pages and the pictures are stored)

Fortunately, you don’t even have to know any of that in order to get it all working.

There’s a little program called WAMP (each letter stands for one of the items above) that will do it all for you! All you have to do is install the thing.

And that really is all there is to setting up the server platform.

The Content Management System

Now all you have to do is get the CMS running on the platform you just set up. Piece of cake, right? Actually, it is. Three steps:

First, put your CMS on the server. Let’s say you’re using an easy CMS like WordPress (which this site runs on). First thing you’ll do is download the WordPress files and unzip them. You’ll want to move the unzipped files to your new Server’s root folder (if you installed WAMPserver, it’s probably C:\wamp\www\).

Second, you’ll add a database for WordPress to use. If you installed WAMPserver and now have it running, it should have put a little icon in your taskbar next to your clock. When you click it, you’ll get a menu, and among the options will be “phpMyAdmin”. Go there.

This is a pretty complicated interface, but I’ll give you a shortcut. Go to the “Priveleges” option about 2/3 of the way down the midddle column. Just add a user. After entering your new user’s information, check the option to “Create database with same name and grant all privileges,” and save. (Note that you can make the password easy because no one else can access this server.) That’s all you have to do to make a database.

Third, just go through the installer. Enter ‘http://localhost/’ in your browser’s address bar and click the directory where you installed your WordPress files. It should be a very quick (less than 30 seconds) matter to configure the CMS to access the database you set up.

Voila! You’re done. Really. That’s all there is to it.

Now you can take your CMS with you wherever you go.