johnfulwider dot com

Here’s what my front-page photographs would look like if I used the free Polaroid-o-nize service to, you guessed it, make the photographs look like old school instant photos.

The service lets you select the angle of tilt and the caption, among other things. I could alternate the tilt for variety so today’s tilts to the left, tomorrow’s (or, at my blogging pace, next month’s) tilts to the right.

The pictures seem pretty blurry and pixellated, which I can completely understand. The server load to accept image uploads of varying sizes and then send a modified image back must be astonishing.

Valued five readers, consider your feedback solicited.

Gentle five readers, you may be looking with trepidation upon johnfulwider dot com sans its gorgeous Orange and Green color scheme. Never fear, it shall make its return in somewhat different, but still shockingly handsome, form once my long-overdue upgrade to WordPress 1.5 is complete.

Loyal seven readers, you may have noticed some appearance ickiness when visiting johnfulwider dot com lately. I blame half of it on Bill Gates and his freakin’ incompatible and insecure Internet Explorer browser, and half of it on my poor understanding of CSS and XHTML.

Anyhoo, your favorite Web site will be displaying a safe layout and style for a while. Hope you find it pleasing to the eye and, more importantly, usable.

Javal took a bunch of great photos on this past weekend’s climbing trip to Golden, Colorado. Check ‘em out.

Bloglines is the best RSS reader out there, and I’m about to tell you why.

1. It’s Web-based so you can keep up with your RSS subscriptions from anywhere. Read a few in the morning from home, and they’re marked as read when you later log on from campus or work. You don’t need to download a reader application.

2. There’s a bookmarklet to auto-discover and subscribe to the feeds on any page you visit.

3. You can e-mail to a friend, “blog this” or clip any article. Clipping an article puts it in your choice of folders for later perusal. It works fast so you need never hesitate to send something off or save it for future reference.

4. It’s free.

I’d change just one thing about Bloglines: When I signed up, at least, the “My Blogs” listing of my subscriptions defaulted to displaying the last month’s worth of entries. This created a long load time for me and must have been a heck of server load for Bloglines, so I’d suggest changing the default to display the last 24 hours or week’s worth of posts.

Bloglines’ creator, Mark Fletcher, deserves a pat on the back.

What in the name of all that is holy is this?

My blog, recording my thoughts both interesting and not so much, displaying my photographs, serving as an outlet for my self-taught and rather lacking Web design skills, and providing links to information elsewhere on the Web I think my loyal seven readers will find interesting and/or helpful.

What is a blog?

Usually, a collection of short posts and links posted in reverse chronological order, so the new stuff’s at the top. See also “navel-gazing.”

Why do you blog?

So I can be as cool as this guy:

I’ve been running a personal website for about six years now. You should see the ladies’ faces light up when I casually drop that little nugget at a kegger or outside the dressing rooms at Old Navy. Their voices get husky, they twist their frosted curls around suggestive fingers, jot their numbers on my bare chest just in case I need someone to do some “freelance QA work,” you know how it is.

Where can I read more about this … umm … fascinating topic?

You could start in my Blogging category.

Do you have any other interests?

Yes.

(Exasperated sigh.) Well, what are they?

Rock Climbing, Food, Photography and Travel.

You’re just trying to suck me in to reading more of your blog by including all those self-referential links, aren’t you?

Yes. It’s all about the traffic.

What’s your favorite color?

#FF9933.

On my to-be-read list is Adsense Tips for Bloggers 1 — and then parts 2-8!

I’m hoping the articles will explain how a blog can overcome this part of the official AdSense FAQ which is, ironically enough, promulgated by the company that bought Blogger:

Place ads on content pages that don’t change frequently.

Or else, Google says, we’ll run public-service ads on your site and you won’t make any money. But have a boring, unchanging site that won’t draw repeat visitors, and you can make all the cash you want!

I’ve made 60 cents from AdSense, by the way. Thanks for clicking on those ads, when they appear.

Update: Whoops, I just found out the Terms of Service forbid discussing how much I make from AdSense. Please forget what you just read.

It’s all about the negative margins. I think I’m almost there in making Adam Polselli’s rounded corner and drop shadow solution work here on johnfulwider dot com.

Adam Polselli kindly told me how he does the rounded corner on his front-page photo:

About the rounded corner… it is achieved quite easily, and without having to do any image work in Photoshop. All it is is a small GIF image on top of the photo. Part of the GIF is transparent, therefore you see the photo through it and get the effect of a rounded corner.

Adam referred me to the page source for more information. You can analyze it, too, just search the source for the filename of whichever photo he has up at the time.

Now I’ll have to see how I can implement this solution. Doing the drop shadow and rounded corner without Photoshop is hugely appealing, because I hope to post a huge number of photos in upcoming years from places other than my home computer — in fact, as far from said computer as possible.

… and high-quality ones, at that, are right here. Right now I’m using Pattern 94.