I’ve also taken over The Partner’s table-top mic stand, which also acts as an excellent hoop holder. This leaves both of my hands free, and I’m much more productive in my stitching.

I’m in the process of learning various stitches, so this is a mish-mash. I do have several projects already in queue, so be on the look-out.

Why is this not a native feature to FF?

• Adblock Plus

It makes me supremely happy to surf the web without being advertised to and extremely angry when I visit a site with a sidebar (or often, a second sidebar) crammed full of ads. Everyone likes to get paid, son, but shit. Ads are the second reason as to why I refuse to use Internet Explorer (the first being that it sucks at standards-compliance).

• ColorfulTabs

I usually have at least four open tabs and being able to easily distinguish them is a bonus. That you can select the fade on non-focused tabs is awesome.

• Greasemonkey

What is the Internet like without this? I cannot remember. Greasemonkey is a beast and has a fantastic community of folks who are just as anal as I am when it comes to being able to customize your experience. I haven’t had to click the Next Page button on Flickr or a Google search in FOREVER.

• Undo Closed Tabs Button

Why oh why did I just close that tab?! With this addon it doesn’t matter if it was the most recently closed tab or if I closed it 60 tabs ago, it’s in the history.

• BetterSearch

This works well in tandem with some of my Greasemonkey scripts; it shows small screenshots of each search result.

• ColorZilla

I love you, ColorZilla. Allows you to identify any color, anywhere on a website.

• Image Zoom

Hate it when folks only post small sizes of images? Me too. Zoom in!

• MeasureIt

Good for web development; find the size right on the screen.

• Mouse Gestures Redoux

There’s something about being able to go back a page just by right-clicking and dragging left.

• PDF Download

I get to decide how to deal with PDFs: open, save, or view in another tab.

• Web Developer

The best addon in my collection. Could not live without it, I think.

• Delicious Bookmarks

How I save everything I find, quickly.

• DownThemAll!

A mass downloader. Great for visiting mp3 blogs.

• Fetch Text URL

I hate it when web addresses aren’t hyperlinked. Select the URL, right-click, open in new tab.

• Screengrab

Creates an image of the entire website.

• TwitterBar/Twitterfox

TwitterBar lets you post to Twitter via the address bar. Twitterfox let’s you post to Twitter and receive updates.

educeme.com is running without CSS for the next 48 hours.

The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words.

As long as I’ve done my job as a coder/designer, you should find Educe Me to be readable, legible, and still navigable. Things will have degraded nicely if you see every section of my site in a logical manner–a header at top (and the usually-hidden skip to content link), navigation, then the posts, with all the extra stuff at the bottom.

Web standards are important!

Work is super-crazy. Not in a ‘I’m always so busy my head isn’t on straight’ way, just that it’s totally insane the stuff we deal with at work. It’s like the underbelly of education and I had no idea it was this fucked-up.

Two

George isn’t doing so well. He’s developed some sort of skin infection and we had to rush him to the vet yesterday. We noticed his skin on his back was red and had a visit scheduled for later today, but when The Partner came home yesterday for lunch he sent me a message that we had to get George to the vet ASAP. They shaved part of his neck and back and holy fuck is it awful—red, puffy, open wounds, puss. I’ll spare y’all the photos of that. Instead, here are some from earlier in the week, after he had been to the groomers but before it got too bad. He’s wearing the cone because by this time he had started scratching his ears like crazy, often to bleeding. We’re not sure what’s wrong, but the vet did use the word “gnarly” at least five times, mentioned hospitalization, and something about health authorities. I don’t know.

You’ll notice (kind of) that we had the groomer leave some head hair. When I asked her to give him his regular cut but leave some head hair, she was all, “Leave the head hair?” And I was all, “Yeah, his head hair. We’d like for him to have some longer hair on his head.” It’s the cutest thing ever. Although George Harrison was a Beatle, we call him Ringo.

We’re hoping he pulls through okay. I’m home with him today—he’s on a lot of meds and pain killers and we have to keep him from scratching himself. A few times a day we have to put him in the bathtub and rinse his neck and back with cool water (“hydrotherapy” the vet called it). He’s seriously so pitiful right now, passed out in a Tramadol coma with socks on his back feet so he won’t hurt himself if he does get a few scratches in before we get to him. Oh, dogchildren.

Three

I’ve been messing around with Tumblr more. My opinion on it is somewhere between afraid and ambivalent. Afraid because this shit isn’t on my own server (they don’t even have native comments) and ambivalent because it is really easy to share what you find online and there’s a good community around it.

Four

Drag Show photos. Oh my god fuck I know. You have no idea the photo backlog on my computer right now. I’ll try to get to them today and this weekend. Don’t feel too bad: there’s a Christlessmas gift I knit for my aunt that I STILL haven’t mailed to her.

Five

The economy. What the fuck is up, y’all? Every day the news reports on something or another that scares the shit out of me. I hope you’re floating.

This new design (theme dubbed ‘Awesome’, semi-tongue-in-cheekily) continues to maintain a single column but features a full-width dark header and footer, within which resides site internals such as navigation and search. Hovering the mouse over the header reveals the navigation, something I’ve been wanting to use since seeing it quite some time ago at Pierce’s Distorte. I utilized the Blueprint CSS framework to provide a clean foundation for typography and have switched to Verdana (Helvetica on Mac) for the typeface.

I chose not to set a specific font size, which lets your browser show you the default size or allows your personal settings to take over. It might seem a bit large at first, but isn’t it easy to read? This decision was based in part upon Sarven Capadisli’s article on typography for the screen and my belief that we shouldn’t have to squint or get closer to the monitor just to read something.

I am also coming away from XHTML and leaning towards HTML(5), after reading many articles on the subject of XHTML vs HTML. This theme’s code is set to easily switch to HTML5 (e.g., change <div class="article"> to <article>), which, although it is in the early stages of development, is currently handled well by the major (modern) browsers (even that bastard IE). My markup is still along XHTML’s vein of strict syntax, as my anal tendencies prefer order in code, and things should degrade gracefully. If not, trial and error.

I’m attempting to adhere to web accessibility guidelines, although not everything (such as access keys or a mobile device style option) has been implemented, yet. I have a to-do list and this is all one giant exercise.

If you come across anything wonky, let me know. I welcome your comments and suggestions.

Click here to read the results of 2007′s survey.

I don’t know about y’all, but I always vote all angry.

My needs and aesthetics have changed and morphed; recently my eyes have been catching on minimalist themes. I started thinking about what I really wanted and how it should look. So I learned some PHP and WordPress template tags are now among my list of friends. I wouldn’t call myself an expert, but I think I’m a few feet over the novice line.

I call this theme Educed, mostly because it’s taken the kindness and sharing of others in the WP community to make it happen. WPDesigner’s tutorial, So you want to create a WordPress theme, huh?, really helped explain the code.

It’s a good foundation for me as I’ll be able to add any features I may come to want and, at the very least, makes for a fun playground.

The Partner: I can use whatever I want.

Me: No you can’t, not if you want your site to be accessible in the year thirty-one hundred.

The Partner: Did you just hear what you said?