Tag Archives: News

I decided to post a sneak peak of the wordpress theme I’m working on for distribution as it isn’t quite as “quick and easy” as I first thought. Well to be honest I came up with more features I thought should be included by default.

That being said here’s a preview of how the posts will appear on the home page:

If there is no image in the post it will show a question mark. If there is a picture in the post it will scale it down a bit and put it in the gray area instead of the question mark. If there are several pictures in a given post it will grab the first image of the post.

So having an iPod Touch and a Droid Eris tends to spoil me when it comes to my mobile web browsing experience.  I decided I should have a mobile version of my website.

Now this brings up a few issues;

1) I haven’t built a mobile website before

2) I didn’t know how to redirect a phone to a mobile website

This meant some research was required.  I came across several different methods using Javascript, PHP, and writing a .htaccess file.  After looking into each of them and seeing what can affect them functioning properly I decided to go with writing a .htaccess file.

I created m.heckdesigns.com to keep with standards of mobile site naming conventions.  I included my contact info so that I can be contacted as well as a link to the full version of my website for those who are on mobile device that supports a more traditional web look.

I got the pen in the mail today.  Installed the drivers to get the tablet working again and played around a little bit.

Boy am I rusty with a pen tablet but in time I’ll get back into the swing of things with it.  Hopefully I can use it to come up with some website artwork that looks cool.

I’ve started working on CMS (Content Management Systems) websites as that seems to be the popular way to want websites built.  I’ve so far installed Joomla and Drupal and will slowly be figuring out how to customize their respective themes.

They can be found here:

Joomla: http://joomla.heckdesigns.com

Drupal: http://drupal.heckdesigns.com

Between the two Joomla has been the easier to install.  I’ll hold further opinions about both as I haven’t delved into either one deep enough to feel confident to give an opinion I’d feel is valid.

So I’ve been checking my Google Analytic info and noticed it had a section to see how many people viewed my site had java enabled.  I expected to see something like 70% to 90% have it enabled… That wasn’t the case at all I was almost appalled to see only 51% had Java enabled.  Seeing a number that low really bothered me because without all of the cool JavaScripts I have making my site more interesting is not being seen by half of the visitors.  So I’ve decided to go through with a HTML/CSS version of my website that will show all the information and a bit more than the JavaScript heavy version.

Now that isn’t to say I’m going to trash my current design because I honestly thing it is really good, could use a little more time but overall I’m quite happy with it.  So I will be keeping it in a sub folder and add it to my portfolio.

So I finally found where to pick up a replacement pen for my Hanvon Tablet (only took 2 years of off and on searching).  I can’t wait to get back into using a tablet for Photoshop.

If anyone is interested the link is: http://usa.hanvon.com/Hanvon_Store/

One day when I have the spare cash and nothing keeping me from splurging I’ll end up picking up a WACOM tablet.