Currently, it is the nineteenth day of August, and I have been unemployed for about a month. I thought that by this point I might start to feel a bit stir-crazy, but I feel great. I was working no less than eight hours a day (on the easy days, other days were more like ten to eleven hours) six days a week. I felt it was time to move on before ennui settled in. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed my job, but I’d been doing it since I was sixteen. I’ll be twenty-five tomorrow.
Now my sights are set on the future, and I’ve been hard at work figuring out what direction I want my life to take. That, however, is a topic for another day. Meanwhile, I’ve been taking time to work on a few projects that have been ignored for far too long. I have a couple of web-related projects in the works, and I’ve been able to pay some much-needed attention to the site. The most recent change is a rather hefty revision of the stylesheet to fix a couple of bugs and alter the way several things are handled, the most important of which is typography.
Originally, I used Palatino Linotype (Wikipedia entry) and while I still like it, I don’t feel it’s a great font for a web site. So, I’ve switched to Verdana, which is a better sans-serif font that’s much more readable on-screen.
Font selection isn’t the only change, however, as I’ve also revised the way I define font sizing. General web geekery follows, so if you’re not particularly inclined, feel free to skip the next paragraph or two. The original stylesheet was done using a unit called the em. An em refers to the default (or inherited) “font-size” of a particular font. Here’s a sample CSS rule:
body {
font: 1em Arial;
}
That means the font is Arial, and 1em means one times the default size. If nothing above the <body> element has a font definition, the system’s (or browser’s) default size for Arial will be used (12 point, or whatever it may be). This is good because it makes the font scalable, so any user who wants it larger or smaller is free to adjust it. The downside is that different systems and user agents (browsers) have different default sizes, so your pages likely won’t look uniform across different platforms. To achieve a uniform look, you could define your fonts in pixels, but in some browsers that restricts scalability. I considered ems to be the lesser of two evils, but my new method is quite a bit better.
Here’s another example:
body {
font: 10px sans-serif;
}
p {
font: 1.4em Verdana;
}
This, in short, is how the new method works. The <body> element is one of the highest level HTML elements in a typical web page. All of the real content goes inside the body, so I’ve set its font as the system’s default sans-serif at ten pixels. This makes the default font for the entire site a ten pixel sans-serif font. Why ten pixels? Powers of ten are easy to work with, and you’ll see why that matters shortly. The p refers to the paragraph tag (<p>), which will always reside inside the <body>. Without a declaration, it would default to ten pixels as well, but that’s a bit small. I could just set the p to fourteen pixels, but I don’t want my font so set in stone. Like I said earlier, 1em is one multiplied by the default, which is ten in this case. Therefore, 1.4em is 1.4 multiplied by the default, which gets us 14. Here’s the equation: 1.4(em) * 10(px) = 14(px). That’s why I set the default at 10, so multiplying is a snap. You could really use any default you want, 1px, 3px, 20px; it doesn’t matter, but ten’s the easiest.
The rest of the site-related work thus far has been tweaks and little bug-fixes. Several pages are getting updates, since I’ve let them fall to the wayside. The “Mods I Use” page has been updated to reflect my Oblivion recommendations (see: Oblivion mod roundup), and there’s more to come. The links page will be getting an overhaul, as will the hardware section.
The rest of my time has been spent on Oblivion (still haven’t gotten around to finishing the main quest), and I still don’t see what everyone’s upset about. It’s not Morrowind, but no one ever said it was supposed to be, or even close. Leaving comparative judgement aside, it’s a damn good game. I’ve also been playing Z: Steel Soldiers, a fine real-time strategy offering, and Gothic since I recently (finally) got Gothic 2 and its expansion, all in preparation for the impending Gothic 3.
More to come on other projects, but for now I’m off to pursue other things.
