SteveCastellano.com

Hooray! Someone at Rogers read my comment form submission!

Dear xxxxxxx@stevecastellano.com,

Thank you for taking the time to write to us, we appreciate your use of
online customer service.

In your recent email, you have informed us that you have included an
attachment.

We do apologize but we are unable to open attachments due to security
reasons. Please reply to this e-mail with the attachment typed in the
body of the e-mail.

Over 2500 questions and answers at your fingertips. Find the answers to
your questions today – visit www.rogers.com/FAQ.

Thank you for choosing Rogers.com.

Regards,
Patty T.,
Rogers Online Customer Service

Original Message Follows:

————————

*** Your Website General Inquiry/Content ***

Subject –> Your Website General Inquiry/Content

Comments –> you’ve got lorem ipsum on your website

http://www.rogers.com/web/link/ptvBrowseThemePacksFlowBegin?forwardTo=landing

If you’ve visited my flickr page you’re already familiar with my sobriquet Steve of the Web, which I use not only for that purpose but as a general catch-all for the various and sundry domains and sub-domains that my web host has foolishly allowed me to devise, under the somewhat indulgent and wholly inaccurate label of the Steve of the Web Web Empire.

And what’s the obvious thing to do in this day and age once you have a catchy new brand name? Keeping in mind that trademarks are tools of the oppressors (and I’m just guessing here but I think they cost real money too), the correct answer is “register yet another domain name.”

SteveoftheWeb.com is a music and photography portfolio site coded in Panic’s excellent Coda application with freely available open-source multimedia scripts and applications. It currently features some of my favourite photographs from the past year, including shots from the Spiegeltent’n'Tavern, the Toronto International Circus Festival, and a variety of portraits and miscellaneous images from locations around Toronto and southern Ontario. The playlist accompanying these slideshows consists of a mix of mp3s currently available from this site as well as a few ambient instrumental compositions that you won’t find anywhere other than SteveoftheWeb.com.

For those of you who are interested in the code side of things, the slideshow is currently running on Lighbox2. I’m planning on migrating over to Lightbox Slideshow, which is based on the same code but has some added features I’d like to incorporate like automation and looping, as soon as I track down the source of some show-stopping JavaScript errors – which may take some time as I’ve already forgotten most of what I ever knew about JavaScript, which was never very much to start out with. Music is running off Franco Zuardi’s Hideout XPSF Music Player.

Best viewed, like all images, in something other than FireFox, which sadly does not understand colour profiles. Go figure.

I gave a mouse a cookie this weekend. The mouse was a new Motorola KRZR K1m, the cookie was Parallels Desktop for Mac with Windows XP Pro. No one who hacks phones uses a Mac, as near as I can tell.* So if you want to hack your phone, or even use the bundled Motorola Phone Tools software, you need a PC or an Intel-based Mac running Windows under either Boot Camp or Parallels. I did consider both, but I’ve been running Vista on a MacBook at work using Parallels without too many complaints, and I couldn’t spare the drive space for a Boot Camp partition.

When I saw XP running in coherence mode though I was more excited about finishing the WordPress theme that I started a few months ago entitled The Foundation Remains (after the picture that I shot this past summer). Without wanting to start a Mac-PC debate, I’ve never been too crazy about how IE 6 makes my web sites look – mostly because of the way pre-Vista Windows handles text aliasing, i.e. doesn’t alias text. I had also run across some well-documented inconsistencies in how IE 6 deals with CSS, particularly in the way it adds padding to containers so that your pixel widths don’t add up, and how it tends to ignore minimum width and height specifications. But as the majority of visitors to this site are still using IE6, with IE7 (which I haven’t tested yet because I don’t have it at home, and from my limited experience it seems to play a little nicer anyway) just edging out Firefox for second place, I can’t just pretend it doesn’t exist. See? I care, sort of.

Once I no longer had to run from one machine to another to reload the beta site it took me less than a weekend to put the finishing touches on the template. It started out as a full-bleed fluid centre, static sidebar “holy grail” template with a minimum width, but shortly after I discovered that it was indeed the “holy grail” I decided that it was more trouble than it was worth (see above) and set my expectations a little lower. And what I had left was still plenty to do.

This template was coded pretty much from the ground up in Coda, tested in IE6, Safari and Firefox. But really, if you’re currently using either of the first two you should switch to something else. Let me know if you run into usability issues in whatever browser you are using.

*Edit – I just saw a VersionTracker update for BitPim 1.0.2.20071001 for OS X, released the day after I posted that. That means someone must be doing it.