Sankho Mallik's Web Log.

I use a few different browsers during my working day. To do my simple browsing, email checking, etc etc, I use Google’s chrome – because it’s fast. To do any web development; I use Firefox – because of the plugins. I can’t work without Firebug, the w3c Validator, and the Web Developer tool bar.

But near the end of a project, there comes that time to check the… other… browsers. Internet Explorers 6-8. I don’t use IE for even accidental surfing – strictly for cross browser checking. So I haven’t changed it’s settings or anything, and I’m forced to view it’s default home page.

Yeap. MSN.com.

Somehow, whenever I’m in the middle of debugging a site under IE6, I always manage to learn some new facts courtesy of Microsoft’s top notch web editors.

Bill Gates(‘ company) drops some knowledge on you:

1. The average annual salary of an janitor… in 1958. ($3,455)
2. The ever pressing issue of “Who looked hot” at the People’s Choice Awards
3. Fruit bats get kinky, just like us
4. Miley Cyrus! Not Hannah Montana Anymore!??
5. Old people get married at Whole Foods. Good old fashioned, hard hitting online journalism.
6. Does this city make my butt look big?
7. Puppy CPR

More to come!

So in my previous post, I’ve brought light to the fact that I shifted servers for my site, resulting in unexpected down time.

Why unexpected? My brash, unwitting decision to jump on the Rackspace Cloud Server service. Not to say anything poor or negative about it – being on the Cloud Servers has been a fun (wait for the keyword) learning experience. And with a little work, I got my site back up.

To do so, I installed some Plesk control panel software to manage my server, just like so many shared hosting sites I’ve been on! This time though; I have complete control over the server – full root access and the ability to do whatever I want. However, I don’t really wanna do too much besides get my site up and manage my domain!

So I’ll go over the steps and point you in the right direction to get your site setup on Rackspace Cloud servers as well, and give you the ability to easily manage your site using Plesk. I’m not gonna write things out for you though, so be warned – I’ll just go over the steps and point you in the right direction to the appropriate tutorials.

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Just read the latest article at Fuel your Interface entitled “Three Big Mistakes that Can Make or Break your Design Career.” Super informative; one of the three tips were to never sit around waiting for work to come – go find it! In this day of social media, personal branding, and transparency, there’s no reason to wait for anything. Go out and get it!

The third tip was to not stretch yourself thin. I’ve personally committed this foul many a time. And everytime, it results in me stressing out, having a lesser quality of life (dramatic, but serious), and most importantly, my work suffers in one of two ways: It’s either terribly late or not as good as it can be. And both of those are unacceptable flaws; so don’t ever take more work than you personally can handle! Try to find someone who you can outsource work to; they may come back to you with work just when you need and don’t expect it.

But the second tip really interested me. Jokingly, it’s referred to as the “Garmon principle” – Garmon being some friend of the author (sorry to belittle your existence, dude named Garmon). From the article:

The first thing you should do is close your laptop, put away your cool bag of tricks, and think. Think, “What would be the perfect site for this? What would it look like? If there were no boundaries, what is the coolest thing, or the most functional way, to make this happen?” Also think, “What will make this worth existing as much or more than the next guy’s interface?” Once you have decided what the best possible solution would be, figure out how to do it. If there is something in your original idea that just simply isn’t possible, then amend it. “Re-idea,” if you will. But never, ever, EVER sit down and start doing things simply because you know how to do them. Because the truth is, no one really cares how much you know about coding or development. The people who are looking at this site aren’t thinking about what it took to make it, or how many advanced lines of code you wrote. They’re thinking about how it is now, as a whole.

So much sense! My feedback after the jump.

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I spend most of my working hours on the front-end side of web development, so I tend to be pretty anal about… everything. Work related, that is.

So my buddy Neil Sarkar recently wrote about being lazier when it comes to programming. Though there’s some wavering of topic, the main idea is that as programmers, it’s not so important to know everything all the time – it’s more important to know what you need, when you need it.

This is all based on the premise that everything you don’t know – or used to know – is only a Google search away.

While reading, I found myself agreeing and disagreeing all at the same time. Or maybe separate times. Anyways, more past the break!

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Skip reading me, and read Brad Frost’s review of the book to your left.

Magento is a beast. While it continues to pickup accolades for it’s robust e commerce feature set, developers round the world can’t help but find it difficult to work with.

As someone who’s been working with the system for some 6 or so months now, I’m nowhere near an expert. But one thing I know, is that unlike other CMS’, you can’t just jump right into it… not easily at least.

With wordpress, I started learning how to make custom themes + plugins before I really embraced blogging with it myelf; and for the most part this was fine. By the time I started blogging myself, I already knew the ins + outs of the whole system via development.

This just isn’t true with Magento. Even after I had figured out the difficult things like how to customize a theme, or how to make a extensible module, I was still learning about how the system did what it’s supposed to: manage products.

Packt publishing recently put out a new book on Magento, giving it the title of “Beginner’s guide.” If you’re just getting into Magento, or considering making the jump, this might be agreat read for you.

But don’t take my words for it. Read Part 1 of Brad Frost’s review here.

Whenever I see pictures like the one to the left, I wonder how long it took the designer to do.

But that’s because I’m stupid, and often forget that I’m something of a computer programmer.

Check out this site Wordle. It’s f*ckin awesome. Just enter in your own text, or choose a url to read text from – the image I made off of their site is in fact generated from text off of my blog.

It takes seconds, and there are a bunch of font / color / styling options. And all of them = awesome.

Oh yes - There will be lawsuits.

This has to be one of the more absurd (internet related) schemes for profit that I’ve heard. But it does bring me one step closer to a real life version of that scene in hackers when the feds bust into my apartment to arrest me. Or maybe a different, more lawerly, subpoena-eee version of that story. Keep reading.

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UPDATE c/o of Brad Frost – Doing this will invalidate your CSS! However, this is appropriate because 1.) We know exactly what is keeping our CSS from validating and 2.) We did it anyways to get something we want to work in another browser.

This is one of the few situations where it’s ok to ignore the ! in your web developer bar.

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So I made a slight joke about progressive enhancement in a previous post, but let’s be real for a second: If you could easily get all your site features working the same way in every browser, you would.

Well, as far as IE6 – 8 go, you can get opacity to work. Normally we’d code opacity into our stylesheet like so:

It’s super easy to get this CSS rule to comply in IE6+ – but it does involve the inclusion of another CSS invalidating Microsoft filter effect. However, it’s really short and easy to remember, so there’s no excuse for not having opacity affects / rollovers in IE!

And that’s it! Whatever you wanted to be transparent will also work in IE6+! Obviuosly, instead of “0.6″ you’d type in “60″ for the filter rule.

There are actually a bevy of cool features available via Microsoft’s filter rule… too bad it only applies to their browsers, selfish bastards. Here’s a great post containing a lot of CSS2+ matching rules to Microsoft’s filters.

So, until Microsoft buckles under the ease of Webkit, at least get your opacities to be cross browser compliant, people!

Skip the boring stuff, and figure out how to make ringtones here.

A few years ago when my friend got some fancy smart phone, I was immediately jealous of the fact that he could easily use his MP3’s as ringtones. As a (barely) post adolescent with a need for musically identification, the ringtone market for phones sucked. I was lucky enough to have M.O.P.’s “Ante up” as my ringtone for a few years. It generated a lot of dirty looks, but I was never able to find another ringtone that was quite as obnoxious. The jealousy incurred upon hearing my friend’s phone play 2Pac’s “I aint mad at ya” was depressing to say the least.

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So I was walking out of the locker room of the Coles gym @ NYU the other day, and I saw a girl who worked for the gym, as made obvious by her wearing a purple shirt no one would wear unless they had to.

She was loading a vending machine with Gatorade, something my dehydrated body craved at the time. But that’s not all I wanted.

I wanted revenge.

My “education,” while yes, partially made more expensive by my lack of effort in class, has cost WAY more than it’s worth. Yes, NYU’s a fine university, but everytime I see an ad on the subway for the school, all I can think is:

“This ad cost millions of dollars. Somehow, my money went to a subway ad for a university which is already extremely competitive and world renowned.”

I mean, what the fuck NYU? What good is that ad really doing for the university? All these flat screens popping up over the university piss me off too.

But the bottom line is, until they make my tuition cheaper, I’ll still be motivated to say things to working college students filling up vending machines such as:

“Look, I don’t know why, but I really get a good feeling out of stealing from the University. Would you mind looking the other way?”

She looks at me, looks down the hall, and then looks the other way while I snatched a free Gatorade Rain, purple rain.

Score one for me, one for my faith in humanity, and take one away from these penny snatching bastards at NYU.

ed note: In the future, most posts will be about the internet and stuff. Promise.