ambertaylor69

Live Journal needs a Like Button

thesexualsideeffects@gmail.com — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:13:25 GMT

Live Journal needs a Like Button.

Sexual Side Effects Show Saturday @ 5pm: FROGS Midtown!!!!!!!!!!

thesexualsideeffects@gmail.com — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:09:25 GMT

The Sexual Side Effects

Hosted by:

Don't Label It! Magazine

When:

Saturday, October 17, 2009 2:00 PM - 7:00 PM EDT

Description

Join us for Don't Label It's first event, The Ides of Pride!
Live music by The Sexual Side Effects and Johnny Rockbridge & The High Chairs. Also mayoral candidate Kyle Keyser.

The Sexual Side Effects play at 5pm.

Free Admission / All Ages / $10 Bottomless Beer Bust / Full Menu Available
Plenty of free parking.
F.R.O.G.S. is located in the Midtown Promenade next to Trader Joe's on Monroe Drive.

Benefiting Girls Rock Camp, ATL

960 grid-system Zen sub theme for Drupal 6

thesexualsideeffects@gmail.com — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:58:57 GMT

Yes! I have found a Zen sub-theme for Drupal based on the 960 grid system. I have not checked it out quite yet, but I am going to give it a whirl soon.

Here is the link: http://duvien.com/blog/960-grid-system-zen-sub-theme-drupal-6

For those of you not familiar with grids here is a link to the 960 css grid system. This one is my favorite, I have tried other like Google’s Blueprint and have even created my own. 960 looks the best from a design standpoint giving 20px gutters as the default. Designs as well as HTML build will shine with this grid added in, and make it a whole lot easier when a client wants to change something in the build/after launch phase.

960 Grid System: http://960.gs/

Google’s Blueprint Grid System: http://www.blueprintcss.org/

Originally published at Amber Taylor's SharpBlog. You can comment here or there.

Dragon Who?

thesexualsideeffects@gmail.com — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 19:33:21 GMT

Why is everyone talking about dragons today?

Funny Comic About Standards

thesexualsideeffects@gmail.com — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 14:03:33 GMT

Saw this cartoon on http://www.cssquirrel.com/. I guess the monster is Microsoft… well actually I don’t guess I am sure it is.

Originally published at Amber Taylor's SharpBlog. You can comment here or there.

Tonight: Terminator Salvation

thesexualsideeffects@gmail.com — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:38:29 GMT

Oh yeah!

Sissy Boy Slap Party

thesexualsideeffects@gmail.com — Thu, 07 May 2009 18:05:12 GMT

Lucida is the new Arial

thesexualsideeffects@gmail.com — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 13:53:45 GMT

Here at Sharpdot we sometimes work with another web shop in New York called Blenderbox. One of the designers at Blenderbox named Jacks passed on this article about how Lucida Grande has steadily been becoming a standard font for the web-scape. I noticed over about a year ago, that it was being used on Apple’s website, and have been using it in a recent project. Anyhow here is a link to the article from the “Ezzy Enough” blog.

http://qelix.com/blog/tag/lucida-grande/

Originally published at Amber Taylor's SharpBlog. You can comment here or there.

Looking To Hire A Freelance Web Developer :)

thesexualsideeffects@gmail.com — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:31:38 GMT

We have been looking for a freelance web developer where I work at a web shop named "Sharpdot". We have over booked our time and need someone to come in and help. We are looking for someone for Object-Oriented Programming in C# mainly. The project could will fill up 2 months and could become more.

Sharpdot is very diverse and spreads the gamut of web technologies. Our standard projects usually include: PHP, .NET/ASP, JavaScript/AJAX (Prototype, Scriptaculous, JQuery frameworks). We do alot of Flash projects with Actionscript 3, and 2. Also utilize open-source solutions such as WordPress, Drupal, Magento (E-Commerce). In the CSS area (my area) we utilize frameworks such as Blueprint, and my new favorite 960.

.Net programming is what we are mainly looking for, but I just wanted to give a bigger picture of what we do, and other knowledge is helpful. Sharpdot is 3 people now, but we have spawned a boom in business. We put quality above all else, and work with some other well known shops. If your interested send me a message and I will pass your info along to the Owner (Jeremy Dost). Working here is awesome, very laid back, a kill-the-corporate-robo-drone vibe is alive, and we have really cool projects.

Create a Fancy Blockquote…Without the Mess

thesexualsideeffects@gmail.com — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:44:52 GMT

One design/css trend that is popular among many blogs, is “fancy Quotes” or should I say giant talk bubble comment-like creatures. You know the kind every blog and it’s mother have in the comment area. We have implemented this design style on our new site re-design under the “Testimonial” section, of course in a sleek Sharpdot fashion, with a drop shadow, small file size and even smaller mark up.

Well to start off here is the image and html we will use:

(Note the white background of the image. We will be overlaying this image over the blue color talk-bubble background to cancel the blue out. Then blend in to the white page background.)

HTML:

    <blockquote>
        "We've worked with Sharpdot for years and are consistently amazed
        with the quality of work and response time that they have provided."
        <span>
            <strong>Rob Dietz</strong><br />
            Principal and Creative Director - <a href="http://www.picadesign.com/">Pica Design, LLC</a>
        </span>
    </blockquote>

The first thing you should notice is there is not a lot of mark up here, no div’s and no id’s or classes junking it up. Just a good old <blockquote> tag, a <span> and <strong> tag to boot. (Note: If you view the source code of our live site you will see a div with a class added, for styling the link arrows with in the quote.) This is one for the semantics crowd. Now let’s take a look at the css for the quotes.

CSS:

	blockquote {
            background-color:#e1e8f2;
            border:1px solid #a6a6a6;
            width:258px;
            padding:10px;
            margin-bottom:20px;
       }
	blockquote span {
            background:#fff url(images/bkg_talkBubble-bot.jpg) no-repeat;
            display:block;
            width:220px;
            padding:12px 0 0 60px;
           margin:10px 0 -11px -11px;
        }
	blockquote span strong { font:bold 1.4em 'Tahoma', Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; }

OK, first off in our blockquote style we have styled a generic type of box with a light blue background, light Grey border, some padding for breathing room, a width for the image to line up with, and some margin on the bottom so the next quote doesn’t get caught up in it’s knickers.

Now the fun part…the span tag. We set the background image, set it to be a block element. Then the magical part. In order for this “cap” to display properly we use negative margin to “pull” it in to place. Kind of like Google’s css grid system “Blueprint” uses the .push and .pull classes to make things do your bidding, regardless of the structural bindings. The width and padding values are all set to add up properly.

This tequnique can be used in making content boxes as well. Sometimes I set the container element to display: relative; and set the inner caps to position: absolute; then use top and left negitive values to postion them into place. It really comes down to how all the different browsers display your mark up…meaning does Internet Explorer 6 (evil, bad, go away) display it properly..or can a hack be acheived period.

Originally published at Amber Taylor's SharpBlog. You can comment here or there.

Banned Ikea Video

thesexualsideeffects@gmail.com — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 17:56:32 GMT

New Website For a New Year

thesexualsideeffects@gmail.com — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:16:29 GMT

I'm proud to announce that we've launched a totally revamped and redesigned Sharpdot website. It has been online for a little over a week now and we have finally filled out content enough to start spreading the word. There's some flash and ajaxy stuff, it's all built using WordPress MU, and we're even trying our hand at blogging on a regular basis. So when you get a little time, click around check it out and add us to your rss reader:

http://www.sharpdotinc.com/

OR

Check out my blog on the site:
http://www.sharpdotinc.com/ataylor

...and if your fed up with some idiot web company that has botched your site, hire us, we rock, and we do stuff the right way.

Another Republican Secretly Likes Penis

thesexualsideeffects@gmail.com — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 23:53:38 GMT

Well Charlie Crist has been rumored to be gay for quite a while and Obama accidentally makes quite a funny reference.

Obama Makes Unfortunate Reference To Charlie Crist Grabbing A Hose

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/10/obama-charlie-christ-is-g_n_165636.html

iStock’s 503 Error Page

thesexualsideeffects@gmail.com — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 22:19:44 GMT

So I was on iStock photo today and came accross this page after thier site was unresponsive. They have my vote for the funniest 503 error page to date. The funniest 404 page I have seen is a little to shocking to share with you on this blog, but I am sure there is another one wait for us out there.

Originally published at Amber Taylor's SharpBlog. You can comment here or there.

IE Hack - Hide Text on your Submit Buttons

thesexualsideeffects@gmail.com — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 17:15:48 GMT

Recently, I designed a website and I decided to do a unique style on the search field. I added a background image to the input field and then a background image to the submit button. Everything looked great until I viewed it in Internet Destroyer (Internet Explorer). That’s when the sky fell on my head…as usual.

The Issue:

I was not able to hide the text from the button, letting the underlying image to show it’s text. Normally my preferred image replacement technique is to have text in the background image and then use a negative text-indent at a high number like this:

background-image: url('my-picture-with-text.jpg');
text-indent: -9999px;

This works fine with submit buttons on most browsers, except IE.

The fix:

Add 2 extra lines to your css file:

color: transparent;
text-transform: capitalize;

For some reason the text indent dosn’t work by itself in IE, so after adding these 2 lines it works. It is a hack within a hack though, the color:transparent property should work by itself, but it doesn’t. For some odd reason setting the text-transform to anything (in this case I chose capitalize because I don’t use it very often) makes it magicly work. Anyhow if anyone finds this useful please leave a comment below.

Originally published at Amber Taylor's SharpBlog. You can comment here or there.

The Phantom Dreamweaver Bug

thesexualsideeffects@gmail.com — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 15:38:22 GMT

Well last Friday I was coding out a site (a css file to be exact), and as usual, I save and save often. Well, I saved my file and Dreamweaver crashed on me (Yes I have been using D.W., I liked the code completion). After D.W. crashed it wouldn’t open at all!?? The program would start to initialize then crash, strange? Well what were my options? Re-install, wipe everything? Switch?

I came back to work the following Monday and told my fellow Sharpdoters what happened. Then demonstrated this odd occurrence. Well first off I decided to download Eclipse and just use that, finally ditching silly Dreamweaver, but the powers that be insisted I get the bottom of this. Well after Googling “dreamweaver won’t start” I came upon a quite disturbing discovery.

Apparently in D.W. if you save a file and it’s file size is a multiple of 8,192 bytes, it will crash and be unable to restart!!! This is the strangest behavior I have ever witnessed, I could expect so much from anything having to do with Microsoft, but Dreamweaver? hmm…

Well this was the case in this situation! I opened the file in another editor, added a line of code, and saved it. Then low and behold D.W. opend and was working just fine! Needless to say I will be using Eclipse on PC and Textmate or Coda on my Mac from now on. This is just silly.

Here is the article I fould on this:

http://www.mikepadgett.com/technology/technical/dreamweaver-cs3-crashes-and-wont-start-up-again/

Originally published at Amber Taylor's SharpBlog. You can comment here or there.

FREE PARROT!!!

thesexualsideeffects@gmail.com — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 15:40:40 GMT

Hello people, my partner Robin and I have decided to give away our parrot for FREE!!! That's right she is a Sun Conure named "Chicken", and she is a lot of fun. However she is a loud bird and we cannot keep her anymore where we live.

If anybody is interested please contact me, we have 2 cages, food, and toys that will come with her. I will try to post a picture of her tomorrow.

-Amber

US supports criminalizing homosexuality

thesexualsideeffects@gmail.com — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 23:28:01 GMT

The US refused to sign a UN charter condemning the criminalization of homosexuality in several countries around the world. The US was the only western nation to refuse. Instead they stood with Muslim extremist nations whose laws are so strict that they kill convicted gays and lesbians.

66 nations supported the nonbinding resolution. The US tried to excuse their behavior by claiming, "some parts of the declaration might be problematic in committing the federal government on matters that fall under state jurisdiction. In numerous states, landlords and private employers are allowed to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation; on the federal level, gays are not allowed to serve openly in the military."

Gay rights supporters were angered by the decision. "Also denouncing the U.S. stance was Richard Grenell, who until two months ago had been the chief spokesman for the U.S. mission to the U.N.

"It is ridiculous to suggest that there are legal reasons why we can't support this resolution - common sense says we should be the leader in making sure other governments are granting more freedoms for their people, not less," said Grenell, who described himself as a gay Republican. "The U.S. lack of support on this issue only dims our once bright beacon of hope and freedom for those who are persecuted and oppressed."

http://current.com/items/89638450/us_supports_criminalizing_homosexuality.htm

Use Type-Casting and Arrays in Place of Conditional Statements

thesexualsideeffects@gmail.com — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 15:44:56 GMT

I found a neat JavaScript tutorial about how to use type-casting and arrays instead of conditional statements.

In a nutshell it takes a basic conditional statement and does it in another way.

Same old boring conditional statement:

function doSomethingGreat(myVar) {
    switch(myVar) {
        case 'AmberTaylor':
            alert('Amber is smart as heck!');
            break;
        case 'Sharpdot':
            alert('Amber works for the best company in the world!');
            break;
    }
}

The new way:

function doSomethingGreat(myVar) {     //This Creates the function and passes in the condition to test against
    theEgoFunction = new Array();      //This turns the function into an Array
    theEgoFunction['AmberTaylor'] = theAmberTaylor;     // Selects a function for one choice to run
    theEgoFunction['Sharpdot'] = theSharpdot;      // Selects a function for the other choice to run
    theEgoFunction[myVar]();    //Now finally the fuction to execute
}

function theAmberTaylor() {     //The functions to run
    alert('Amber is smart as heck!');
}

function theSharpdot() {    //The other function to run
    alert('Amber works for the best company in the world!');
}

This code looks almost identical to Actionscript (except for the built-in JavaScript functions, and some nuances). I have been working more with Actionscript recently, but as a result you can’t help to learn JavaScript along the way.

Anyhow I didn’t write this tidbit originally, however I found it neat enough to share. It originally comes from the Webmonkey blog, check it out:

View it here: http://www.webmonkey.com/tutorial/Free_Yourself_from_Conditions_in_JavaScript?oldid=31505

Originally published at Amber Taylor's SharpBlog. You can comment here or there.

Car 2.0

thesexualsideeffects@gmail.com — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 17:45:02 GMT

Ok I have been a huge electric vehicle enthusiast for a while now, but I just wanted to share this with everybody. A company called "Better Place" is building an electric car infrastructure so far in: Hawaii, The Bay Area, Israel, Denmark, and Australia. Here is the website: http://www.betterplace.com/ please eat it up and share with friend, enemies, and the world.

How it works: They own the battery and get you a car real cheap. Can go 100 miles on a charge, charging stations will be installed every where, home, work, public. When you want to go on a trip battery changing stations (where gas stations are now) are available. You pull in and it automatically changes the battery in 3 minutes and drive off fully charged. Public charging stations will be available to all EV's as well. The idea behind it is not to make a ton of money for one company, but get of oil completely! Anyhow check em out:
http://www.betterplace.com/

Oh and another thing after my gas dinosaur car dies, I plan to convert it to electric.

I waited so long 2 vote

thesexualsideeffects@gmail.com — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 19:14:05 GMT

I was second in line to vote today, was a ghost town. Big difference from the real election. I hope some of you go out and do the dirty job of voting the scum in, and kicking the scummier out. Wow the word scummier seems to be a green light in the spell check. OK got to go back to werk. I have a big project eating my week up. The budget is running out and the end is not in sight. Oh and please help to kick Sexless Chamlis out of the senate, we need more liberals, in the red(neck) state.

I am spying on you all

thesexualsideeffects@gmail.com — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 14:34:03 GMT

OK I am bad with posting, but to let you all know. I have been reading all of your posts with uncanny anticipation of daily updates. Now you know my secrets, please start rumors of my cyber-voyeuristic ways. Gwarp!!!

My New Blog

thesexualsideeffects@gmail.com — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 19:36:00 GMT

Hey folks I have a new blog at my work.. we are working on getting live this is a test cross post to live journal from my work blog.

Originally published at Amber Taylor's SharpBlog. You can comment here or there.

Post Turtle

thesexualsideeffects@gmail.com — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 19:59:28 GMT

I know I have not been LJing in some time, so now I will bombard you with my crazy bleeding heart liberal, commy, socialist, rhetoric. All in time for the election. Oh by the way every country in the world is a socialist society. Take a business class, you'll learn about economic systems.

Anyhow my real point of this message:

This is funny...

http://current.com/items/89459784_sarah_palin_post_turtle

Dress like a burrito get a free burrito @ Chipotle

thesexualsideeffects@gmail.com — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 19:47:55 GMT

Free burritos at Chipotle for Halloween
From 6 pm to closing, if you dress as a burrito, you get a free burrito !!

http://current.com/items/89473714_free_burritos_at_chipotle_for_halloween?xid=PTNiGoog