For those of you who were asking me for one, here is an RSS2 feed for Skyzyx: Downloads.

As the first public step towards unveiling my upcoming website, I’m unveiling Skyzyx: Downloads. This is a collection of Flash animations, sound clips, video clips, and various freeware/trialware software downloads I’ve collected over the last couple of years. It’s not yet exhaustive, but I want to see what the bandwidth transfer is going to be on these files before I add more stuff I’ve been collecting. This has actually been up for about a year, but was never made public. This is where the Standalone Internet Explorers, latest Firefox releases, and other bits of software will live too.

Nobody freak out! My primary domain, Skyzyx.com, is temporarily down while I switch webhosts. Service should only be down for a few days at most, so if there’s something hosted on that domain that you’re looking for, it should all be back up shortly. Update: It’s back up again. Move along. There’s nothing to see here.

If you’re seeing this in your feed reader, it means that the feed switchover worked without a hitch. I got all of the redirection worked out for both my weblog, as well as my sidebar links. Glad to still have you all around. While doing this, I utilized two services: FeedBurner and del.icio.us. I think that at this point, most bloggers know what del.icio.us is. It’s a way to bookmark things, and share them around. I’ve begun using this service in place of my normal bookmark functionality and it makes it infinitely easier to keep my bookmarks synced between multiple computers.

Welcome to Wordpress! This is my first posting on my new system, and it feels good to know that most of the hard part is over. I’ve decided to rename my blog “Flailing Wildly” because I think it fits me pretty well, and it sounds better than “Skyzyx.com”. I’m also wanting to move to something more professional sounding that covers any domain name I may want to have, so “Skyzyx.com” is now officially “Skyzyx Technologies”. For those who don’t know, I started working on my website’s redesign about a year and a half ago.

Sometime last night, while I was sleeping, my website reached the 500,000 visitor mark. This is very exciting for me. It’s good to know that I have a site that people would bother going to visit 500,000 times in a year-and-a-half. I’ve come quite a long ways since version 1.0 of this website was released back in October 1997. One thing that I’ve learned is that your site will be much more successful if it’s about something. I spent the first 5 years coming up with better and better designs and really working to sharpen my coding skills (“chicks like guys who have good skills” — Napoleon Dynamite), but I never had any real content.

Hmmm… very interesting. Here are my stats as of, well, now. Internet Explorer 6.0 - 39% Gecko browsers - 22% Internet Explorer 5.x (Win & Mac) - 19% Crawlers/Search Engines - 12% Netscape 4.x - 3% Safari - 3% Opera 7.x - 2% Gecko browsers are gaining on IE 6.0 here at Skyzyx.com. It’s good to know.

By the way, if anyone came here looking for a WML/WAP feed for their cell phone or PDA, I’ve got one now.

Well, my upgrade to Movable Type 3.0 went well. I’ve decided to stick with MT for now. I’m still considering Wordpress for my “big redesign” since it’s written in PHP, and therefore easier for me to hack at. We’ll see how it all actually turns out though. For the time being, I’m still accepting all comments from everyone. However, provided that I’m still using MT a few months from now, I’m planning on requiring a TypeKey account for unmoderated comments. Users without a TypeKey account (a few months from now, mind you) will still be able to post comments, but I will moderate them before they actually get displayed on my site.

Thank goodness for Andy Budd and his mentioning the scam that is the Domain Name Registry of America. I’ve got all of my web stuff consolidated within a single company, and I know it’s up every summer. I just call them up, and inform them that I want to renew. I got a letter from them today trying to get me to renew my domain with them. The name sounded familiar from something Andy had said, so I went to work and looked it up.

I’ve been reading Paul Scriven’s Whitespace for quite some time now. I’ve always enjoyed the content, but while the interface as always been usable, it hasn’t always been terrific. Nowadays, Whitespace is looking much better these days. I think that Paul has gotten much better at displaying lots of information in a usable — yet minimalistically beautiful ways at the same time. There are many features that I’ve been wanting to add to my website. Most of these aren’t big, new fancy features, but they mostly involve the intelligently elegant integration and layout of metadata and information in general.

Paul emailed me today with an invitation to check out his new Web/Design/Music/Apple/etc forum. Granted any new forum is always wanting new visitors, but it’s been cool seeing other webloggers like Paul, Andy Mac, Darice, Sken, and others. This will definitely be a new stop on the internet for me!

I’ve done a smidge of tweaking out my CSS file, and I’ve tweaked the behavior of my stylesheet switcher widget. If you’re getting plain text, you need to manually choose either the “default” or “classic” style. After you kill the cookie, close your browser and re-open it, and you shouldn’t have a problem. Contact me if you do.

I stumbled across a link for a CMS called WordPress today. With all of the rebuilding problems I’ve been having with Movable Type lately, I figured I’d at least take a look. From what I can tell, it’s a pretty solid system. There are a few blogs who use it, and I like the idea of not having to rebuild static files. Other than that, I really don’t know much about it. Has anyone had any experience with WordPress? Should I jump ship from MT to WP?

I recently posted that I was going to begin redesigning my site. Beyond just a change of colors and images, I wanted to create a more powerful underlying system. Movable Type offers a lot of options and features that are built-in to the CMS, but I get a few too many 500 errors to stay happy. In that vein, I’m wanting to extend the functionality of my website using PHP, MySQL, XML, and other related technologies that I’m learning as we speak.

I’m sick of it. Some people really like the design of this site. I do too, really, but I want something more. I want to be a LION TAMER! I’ve been significantly inspired by a variety of designs lately, and I think I’m going to attempt to take my favorite elements of a few different designs, play with them, and make them my own. Maybe once I’m done this site will be Vault-worthy. Some of the designs I’ve been looking at are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

After doing some thinking and such, I’ve made some decisions about my syndication feeds. From now on, RSS 0.91 and RSS 1.0 feeds will contain summary posts, and the RSS 2.0 feed will contain full posts. That way, people can pick and choose which they want. My Atom feed contains both. It’s pretty simple, I think. Those of you who subscribe to the Atom feed have the best of both worlds. I’m not sure if there is a news aggregator out there yet that can switch between summaries and full posts in Atom feeds, but I’ve filed a request with Nick Bradbury to add this functionality to Feed Demon.

I spent about five hours last night playing with my RSS Reader. I think I’m beginning to get the hang of some of this PHP stuff. Anyways, I’ve made some tweaks here and there to make it a bit more friendly. The first thing I did was make it more error-friendly. If someone mistypes a feed URL, instead of seeing nonsense errors that have no value to the user, you get a simple error page that suggests that there was a problem with the feed, and to try a new feed URL.

I rewrote parts of Paul Sowden’s Stylesheet Switcher about a year ago to support media types, and to utilize my own cookie functions instead. At one point, this site had multiple styles. Now, it does again. You can switch between the Winter style (the one that’s been here since the beginning of December), or you can use the Default one (the one in place before that). I’m working on another style or two, even still. There are still a couple of quirks, though.

2003 seems to have been a big year for the web design community… or, at least it seems that way to me. Many of the websites that I read regularly, as well as learn the most from have all come about in 2003. All-in-all, I’d say that this was a good year. Now, I don’t know if all of these websites came about in 2003, but I’d like to list some of the best ones I’ve come across in this last year (in alphabetical order):

Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m back up again! For those who aren’t aware, my Movable Type installation wouldn’t rebuild at all, therefore making updates nearly impossible. After an all-out fight with my web host (who wouldn’t check anything for me, and then outright deleted my support request), and several emails from helpful readers, I’ve finally got MT back up and running. This morning, I checked my email, and received an email from Andy McCulloch that read the following: “… I say this because I had a similar problem back in the summer, caused by a dodgy MT plugin that was tanking up to much processing time.

My Movable Type installation seems to have broken. I can’t rebuild anything without getting a 500 error, and nobody can post any comments either. I’ve posted for help on the MT support forums, but to no avail. Has anyone else had a problem like this? Has anybody got the answer? I won’t be able to post anymore until I get this fixed. =( If anyone has any ideas, please contact me!

Last summer, I posted about a strange problem I was having in Internet Explorer. The browser wasn’t properly drawing certain elements to the screen, namely <hn> tags with background images, colors, or borders. It was all very frustrating. In the end, I just chalked it up to Internet Explorer sucking, and left it alone. Recently, however, my question was answered. For elements that act as though they were relatively positioned, then go ahead and use position:relative; on it. It seems to fix it without a hitch.

A couple of people have asked me how I’m able to list the recent posts for nearly all of the blogs I read. The answer is simple. PHP, RSS, and the Magpie RSS Parser. At one point, I made available the PHP code that I use to do it, once Magpie is already installed. If you do a search on this site, you can probably find it. I’ve been very happy with Magpie since I first began using it last summer.

I just wanted to say hello to those of you who are visiting me from The Web Standards Project, and a big “thank you” to Dave Shea for being kind enough to mention me in the latest WaSP blog post, “Browser Testing”. If you’re just visiting for the first time, I’d like to point out that I’m currently looking for full-time employment as a web designer in Silicon Valley, Fresno, or San Diego. If all you’ve got is some contract work, I’d be interested in that too.

After being envious of Todd Dominey’s “Enjoying” sidebar for quite some time, I decided to do some messing around to get my own as well. I find that I often come across cool things on the ’Net, but they aren’t worth actually writing about. This will solve that problem. You can pull the RSS feed into your news reader, if you’d like.

I’ve introduced a new section of my website called “Resources”, where I will keep track of excellent articles on XHTML, CSS, web standards, accessibility, and other articles that are important for web designers/developers to keep handy. This section began as part of the “Articles” section, then branched off into it’s own “Propaganda” section, before becoming “Resources”. The most usable part of this section (in my opinion) is the CSS Methods, Techniques, and Hacks area. Many of these are very popularly used Hacks/Methods/etc.

I’m down to my last week-and-a-half of college. I’ve got seven more class days, including today. If my posts are few and far between for the next two weeks, this is why.

I’ve discovered a nifty little MT plug-in called “Acronym”. It takes many of the common acronyms and abbreviations and gives them a keen little description that is visible on mouseover. Some of the more common ones are CSS, XHTML, W3C, IE, NS7, IE5/Mac, and US 508. Actually, it’s just my way of testing out what this plug-in can do, and what it can’t…

After looking at my “Blogs I Read” section and my “RSS Feeds” section, it dawned on me that maybe I should combine the two. They share much of the same content, except that one is geared more towards RSS feeds (I’ll let you guess which one), and the other is more for what I read on a regular basis. However, the two could definitely be better suited working together, so now they are. I’ve gotten rid of the “RSS Feeds” section but created an enhanced version of the “Blogs I Read” section.

When I initially set up this site, I wanted to make it as good as I possibly could. I wanted it to in-depth, thorough, and a great source of information for the users. To help make it better, I’ve opened myself up to user comments. Specifically in the JavaScript section of my site (which is where I get roughly 85% of my hits), I’ve had a long-time feature called the “Suck-O-Meter”. In some cases, it’s been great to have. I’ve been able to get a sense of what my users think about my scripts and the documentation that I provide, and have been able to apply suggested improvements in an effort to make this site as good as it can be.

I’ve finally put together my Portfolio. It includes some of my better work over the last two years, and covers web, print, and 3D design. I plan to add some graphic stuff sooner or later. I haven’t done alot of work, but there’s enough to justify a portfolio. If you are a web professional or HR guy, take a look and let me know how to make it better. I’m always open to suggestions on how to improve, especially for potential employers… =)

I went ahead and created a new blog last week called “Luposlipaphobia”. For those who are not aware, “Luposlipaphobia” is in reference to an old comic strip called “The Far Side” by Gary Larson. Luposlipaphobia: The fear of being pursued by timber wolves around a kitchen table while wearing socks on a newly waxed floor. Although I don’t actually have this fear, it’s rather entertaining to pretend that I do. On the other hand, how many of us don’t have Luposlipaphobia?

I’ve been thinking about creating another blog. I want to keep the same exteroceptive, web-related blog I have, but I’m thinking about also keeping an introspective blog as well. That could be pretty dangerous though. One that involves my personal life could be okay, but one that exposes my inner thoughts and feelings could be very dangerous… like cooking with Hydrogen. It’s been a while since I’ve updated or commented on my daughter’s website, JuliannaGrace.com. I suppose more commenting about her could be fine.

For the last few days, I’ve received gibberish emails from… myself. Well, not my actual account, but from the Skyzyx.com domain, with subject headings listing the URL of my formmail.cgi script. If anyone out there is receiving spam from me, I apologize, it’s not me. I use PHP to have messages sent to me, so I don’t even use Formmail. I’m going to delete it just to be safe, as I don’t want this to continue. Zeldman had the same problem recently, and although I can’t find it, I remember reading that someone else was having the same problem.

As I completed my recent website redesign, I came across a strange CSS bug in IE6/Win. I see similar bugs in IE5 and 5.5 all the time, but this is a first for me in IE6. The background color for my <h2> tag disappears on the first visible instance of it. The text is there, as well as the padding and margins. Only the background disappears. As far as it being visible, I had hoped to apply an invisible <h2> tag right above the first, but to no avail.

We are experiencing what is called a “redesign in progress”. I’m in the process of getting the new design up on all pages, but it’s not done yet. Give me a few more days, and please excuse the disgustingness of my webpages until then.

I’m sitting here looking at my website. I think it’s one of my better “simple” designs, but I started coding it earlier in my web standards days. Although it validates, it’s not semantic. I’ve designed a few sites using semantic XHTML+CSS… particularly Golden Rule Produce and a quick mock-up for Pajaro Valley Fresh. I’d like to rewrite my code to be semantic. I definitely want to keep the same general design and color scheme, but I want to clean up the code a bit, and do something better with the right-hand menu so I can nix the single layout table I have.

I’ve just switched over to the Movable Type publishing system. So far, so good. I can tell that there are many, many, many features available in this system that will make weblogging easier than the hand-rolled way. So far, I like it. I’m still working on configuration stuff and getting my templates set up, but besides that this is definitely a Good Thing™. We’ll see how this all goes…

After getting back from my vacation last night, and checking my referrers, I’ve found that my article “Play By The Rules” has been a moderate success! Besides having a metric ton of hits from Google, apparently Henrik Gemal posted a link to my article on his website… which is very good. Paland.tv, Phaedo.cx, and Deluks Pixelworks all made weblog posts about it. EdgeWalker made a forum post about it, and “deLUKs” added it to his forum signature. I even got very positive feedback from Jeffrey Zeldman, Dave Shea, and Henrik Gemal.

I downloaded Refer 2.01 today. With only minimal tweaking, I was able to get it working mostly how I wanted it to. This software is written in PHP and utilizes a MySQL database. It’s pretty cool. It’s better than one of those ugly little free counters, and it gives you alot more information too. The only quirk that it has is that on my script pages, I’ve got another PHP file that loads a document into an iframe. It seems to be posting these too.

Out of nowhere, I decided to see where I was on the search engines. By typing in “skyzyx” and clicking go, I came across some interesting stuff. First of all, my website that I had in high school (1998) has a higher ranking than my current site does. The spiders have done their job. My posts on Coding Forums, Jesebelle’s Guestbook, BeBits, ZDNet, and CoverCharge.org are all on all of the search engines. Even my submission to “Made with Macintosh supporters” is on there.

I’ve made a simple little 88x31 sized banner for Skyzyx.com. If you think this site is interesting, or just want to promote a fledgling web standards and JavaScript website, feel free to link to me.

After two days of using the Fase4 RDF Parser, I decided to move to the Magpie RSS Parser. This one is much easier to use and implement, and it handles both the simpler RSS 0.9x/2.0 (Really Simple Syndication) format, as well as the RDF-based RSS 1.0 (RDF Site Summary) format. I also messed around with Onyx RSS, ProjectNeo™, and the Aggreg8 parsers. Magpie RSS Parser is just plain better. I’ve also added an RSS/RDF Feed section, so that you can checkout/get other feeds from other sites.

Although there is a bit of personal dreck on this site, I’ve done away with the “Dreck Selector”. All personal comments are still marked « Personal », but there is no longer a way to turn it off. Also, I’ve gotten a hold of a PHP script that parses RSS 0.9x/2.0 feeds. Currently, you can view news from Zeldman.com and C|Net’s News.com right here at Skyzyx.com. We also now have our own RSS feed, in case you’re interested. Interestingly enough, removing the “Dreck Selector” fixed the bug I came across in Opera 7.

I’ve added many, many more articles to the “Articles” section. I have found them all useful, and I think you will too. I’ve also added more scripts (with documentation) to the “Scripts” section. I’ve still got more to go. Skyzyx.com now has what are called “Permalinks” to each post in the news section. This way, you can link directly to any post on this site. Hopefully this will get my site into the limelight of web standards sites.

I’ve erased the Skyzyx.com-formatted versions of the articles that were posted. Now, I’ve linked to them in order to avoid any type of copyright infringement issues. I still think they look better with my formatting though… I’ve added the About Me page, which is basically a resume, except it’s in a story format and is written in more of a conversational style as opposed to a dull resume/interview/say-the-right-thing-if-you-want-this-job style. Realizing that the site really doesn’t look that great at 800x600, I added a button that will toggle the navigation sidebar on/off.

My website has been down for the last year or so. After 2001’s Rhapsody and Rhapsody 2 projects, I decided to re-write the entire site around what I called the Element 3 Kernal, thus producing 2002’s Element 3. Element 3 maintained many of the interface elements from Rhapsody and R2, but was completely re-engineered to be more code-efficient. Element 3 was never officially launched as a Skyzyx.com site, but the interface lives on at Golden Rule Produce. I’ve been studying standards-compliance alot over the last several months, and decided to try it out with The Unknown Jeromes.