Somebody Call KRS-One!

See the BDP video here!

Found via the Huffington Post: Apparently the mayor of Los Alamanitos has sent out an email with an image of watermelons planted on the White House lawn to a local business woman and city volunteer who is African-American. No Human Stain style misunderstanding here. And no, it's not the same as those Bush-era broccoli jokes either.

Somebody Call KRS-One!

A Jennsweb Girly-Girl Moment

Found via Artfire on Twitter. Neon-hued vegan eyeshadow! Finally, a reason to stop smearing on that mixture of butter and food-coloring! (oh c'mon like you've never considered that while making xmas cookies)

A Jennsweb Girly-Girl Moment

Comedy: Society's Clearest Mirror

The Onion has a great writeup today on the Oscars. Which, due to childcaring issues, I wasn't able to watch, but apparently I didn't miss much.

Still, too bad, I really wanted to see Mickey Rourke win an Oscar. I love that "I think I may be living in an alternate universe right now" sensation.

Brought to you by the Jennsweb Morning Coffee series.

Bonus link here!

BTW, my three year old asked me for a cup of coffee for breakfast. Should I be worried?

Comedy: Society's Clearest Mirror

Wordpress Chicklet Hack!

My latest client wanted to have some RSS feed buttons in a sidebar of their company blog. Turns out, chicklets come in all shapes and sizes and they wanted everything to line up in a nice little grid. What to do?


Step 1. Get your chicklets

I found two good places to get feed chicklets. The client had a Feedburner account, so I signed in, and went to the feed I wanted to connect the chicklets to and then clicked on Publicize > Chicklet Chooser. Then, it was simply a matter of selecting the Feed Reader icons that I wanted to use and copying and pasting the code into a text file.

Another method for grabbing chicklets is to try Top Rank's chicklet chooser service. It offers a slightly different range of chicklets and helps you cover the bases.

Step 2. Put the chicklets on your blog.

The Wordpress blog I was working with had a widgetized right sidebar so I took all the various chicklet code snippets and added them into a widget, then wrapped them in a Div entitled "Chicklets". (Jenn Tip: Tables only work in certain browsers, Safari freaks out over tables and CSS mixing)



Then, since the chicklets were going to be in 2 columns, I created two divs inside the first one. Chickletsleft and Chickletsright. Then, it was simply a matter of assigning floats, widths and text-align.




Step 3. Customize your chicklets

Take a look at your blog and see how the chicklets look. Most chicklets are 16-17 pixels high, but the width can vary by 10 pixels or more. If you look at the code for each chicklet you will notice that some actually contain the image dimensions in the img src tag and you can change the width there. This works if you are only shortening it by about 3 pixels or so. Some chicklet code snippets only give you the image and no way to manipulate the size. Never fear, you can substitute your own custom-sized chicklet! Simply take a screenshot of the chicklet you need to resize and then create a new file in your image-editing program that is the "standard" size you want. In my case, 90 by 17 pixels worked. Then, copy and paste the screenshot of the chicklet into the new image file and save it. Now, you can modify it to your heart's content and then upload the optimized jpg, gif or png to your web site's images folder.

Step 4. Upload your custom chicklet

Using your FTP program, upload the image to your website in the images directory. If you have lots of images, you may find it worth your while to create a sub-directory called Chicklets.

Step 5. Customize your code snippet.

Now, all you need to do is replace the current img src file path with one that points to the custom chicklet image on your server.

For example:
img src="http://buttons.googlesyndication.com/fusion/add.gif"
would become:
img src="http://jennmearswebdesign.com/wp-content/themes/anubis folder/images/chicklets/googlebutton.gif"


There you go. Pixel-precision control over your chicklets!

(if only the rest of my job were this easy)

Wordpress Chicklet Hack!

Gmail Service Down For Hours

At least I wasn't the only one left staring at a blank hole in the middle of my Google homepage yesterday...

Gmail Service Down For Hours

Bye Bye Corner Clutter!

I could see it out of the corner of my eye when I sat at the computer: a fish tank stand/utility shelf brimming with coloring books, art supplies, old greeting cards and boxes of photos. It was the living room catchall, a place where items that either weren't immediately useful or didn't have a place to go ended up.



Finally, I couldn't take it any more. My mother-in-law had given our daughter her 30th set of magic markers and they now spilled out of the cookie tin we had been trying to contain them in. Art supplies were overflowing everywhere and more continued to pour in with every outing to the mall.

So, I did the classic "clutter buster" routine. I took everything off the shelves and took every item that wasn't kids' art stuff upstairs to a closet. All the finished artwork went upstairs too, to be put in a safe place. The only thing left was fish tank maintenance supplies, which went up on the high shelf,and then crayons, paints, chalk and markers which went into either clear plastic bins (Market Basket $3 each) or baskets from A.C Moore ($4-$7). Paper supplies tucked in between the baskets and the tank, and a vintage 45's travel box on top and finally, a little peaceful corner instead of a cluttered mess.



BTW, found a great clutter-buster site this week: Simple Productivity Blog. Good stuff!

Bye Bye Corner Clutter!

Lux Interior: In Memoriam

Lux Interior, born Erick Lee Purkhiser has died at a California hospital at the age of 62 and the world has lost an incredible artist and music legend.

The Cramps always had a great show whenever they played in Boston, or anywhere for that matter. Lux would push himself like Iggy Pop on crystal to give a performance that defied explanation, reason or good taste which is why he will be so sorely missed.

It's strange that just last week, another famous person that I met in a random way died and now another. I didn't actually meet Lux, as in introduce myself shake hands kind of way but when I worked in Newbury Comics back in the early 90's, the Cramps were enjoying an upsurge in popularity. They actually had a local stalker/fan boy that haunted the store, always salivating at the site of another obscure Cramps re-release lurking the the cassettes. He was such a rabid fan that it was amazing that he wasn't two feet behind Poison Ivy and Lux when they came into the store one day before a show.

They were very quiet and polite and came to my register with a few LPs and some other stuff. Ivy handed me a gold Amex card with "Ivy Rorschach" embossed on it. It was weird when I leaned over to get her a bag and saw the current CD cover which featured a photo of Lux full frontal in a thong and then stood back up to see the real Lux standing there looking tired out from being on the road all day.

They asked me where they could find a cool vintage shop in the neighborhood and I was happy to recommend Oona's since I knew the staff there would be thrilled to see the Cramps show up at their store. (Of course, they got there just at closing time and my friend told me later that he actually closed the door right as they walked up and THEN realized who he had just blown off!)

I think it was the first time I actually came face-to-face with a famous person that I really admired, but there was no urge to squeal or demand autographs and photos. They just seemed like they wanted to relax and shop and shake that road-exhaustion and I just wanted to let them be. Of course, they completely tore it up at the show that night, but it was nice to have that real moment with them and see them as people.

Lux Interior: In Memoriam