mekosh.org

I didn’t have much to do at work today because one of my projects is on hold for right now. I was able to work on some web design for this site, but I didn’t quite finish. That would explain why the site looked terrible for much of the afternoon. I’m sure that upset the [...]

I completed a major site update today, but many people would not notice if I didn’t say anything about it. Besides adjusting the width of certain columns and modifying the header size slightly, I also scrapped the previous design’s table layout in favor of an XHTML-styled div and CSS layout. Certain aspects, such as the [...]

In chronological order, I’ve been sick, working on the Scranton Student, and wrapped up in class registration for next semester. It’s been about a week since I started feeling ill, but I am actually feeling much better today. Over the weekend, I worked on the Scranton Student for long hours. The result is that I’ve [...]

On the seventh week, I rested. I saw what I had created and said, “It is good.” Yeah, I’m being a tad melodramatic, but the Scranton Student has been a long time in the works. This morning, at precisely 2:07 AM, EST, the Scranton Student went live for the public. I first developed the idea [...]

I can’t believe that it has been almost a month since I last posted. Quite a bit has happened since then, which makes me regret not having much time to write down my thoughts and observations during that period. As you probably guessed from my last post, the Scranton Student has been taking up a [...]

I’m proud of the work I’ve done in the past twenty-four hours. I updated the Scranton Student, updated this rinky-dink blog, posted a whole slew of new side links that have been clogging up my Favorites, helped name a chameleon, unpacked all of my suitcases, and did some online shopping. Granted, my work’s been mostly [...]

These past two weeks have been hectic and the next two weeks are going to be worse. I’ve been involved in 30 different things and haven’t had any time to write here, despite the fact that I have a lot that I want to write. In fact, I shouldn’t be writing now, but I’m procrastinating [...]

In the past few months, favelets (or bookmarklets) and I have become good friends when exploring this World Wide Web. I like a lot of the favelets found here and here, but I have not found one that looks up Alexa information for the page you are viewing. I now present my Alexa Favelet: Alexa.
Just [...]

I wanted to add a little John Kerry button to this site, but I didn’t like the downloads at the official site. And what kind of web designer recommends using an iframe for an image anyway? So I made my own John Kerry button!
I used the flag from the official Kerry/Edwards images and added it [...]

Yesterday, I noticed that Gmail has upped the number of invitations for my account to 50. Looks like they’re getting closer to completing their beta period and interested in how their servers will hold up under increased demands. Would you like to help them? Send me an email if you would like one of my [...]

I must be getting popular: another person has stolen one of my designs. Mohammed Khan of Nashville, Tennessee stole the entire “Request a Proposal” form from my site and slapped it up on his site, Computer Technologies Inc., sans the style sheet. I’m surprised he’s not hotlinking the section heading images. Judging by the Whois [...]

Within the past week, Turkish hackers losers decided to hack the Northumberland.us Forums using a simple exploit of phpBB’s session handling twice. Why? I have no idea. There are only three forum members and hardly any activity, so why anyone would go to the trouble is beyond my understanding. Were they tired of popping zits [...]

Am I becoming popular? Considering that I was a victim of design theft and forum hacking last month and bandwidth theft this month, I think I am gaining popularity (on a small scale). I noticed in my referral logs—aka: my best online friend—that someone was requesting one of my images many times from another URL. [...]

I finished the newest version of Speed Web Design on Wednesday, but I have not had the time to mention it here. There are still a few minor quirks I need to work out of the code and I’d like to make complete project pages for each project I’ve completed, but the site is basically [...]

This site is now running on TextDrive’s servers. I made the switch because they were running a special “Hosting for Life” promotion that will save me a lot of money in the long run; I’ve also heard a lot of good things about TextDrive and their focus on great hosting service for people who “get [...]

The new version of Mekosh.org is now officially live! I’ve taken to calling this site design the Dune Grass edition in deference to the Dune Grass tool I used in Photoshop to make the banner image. Dune Grass has been in the works for about two months, but as with all things on this site, [...]

My landlord is selling my apartment building, so I wasn’t sure how much longer I’d be living at my current location. However, I found out the other day that the new owner plans to continue renting the apartment to Kevin and I for the same amount of rent! In celebration, I finally uploaded some pictures [...]

I completely missed the Spring CSS Reboot and I wasn’t really interested in redesigning this site as the design was only three months old at the time. However, I do think that the design could use a realignment for the summer. Mostly, I just tweaked the banner and brightened up the page with some new [...]

A little over two weeks ago, I began working for the BaltimoreSun.com as a Jr. Web Designer. Obviously, it will take some time to adapt to my new position, but everyone I work with has been very friendly and helpful. I think that this job with this company is the best possible career step for [...]

I was working on an XSL template to parse an XML feed at work this week when I discovered a strange error. Everything worked perfectly in Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox locally, but when I uploaded, Firefox stated that I had a “mime type declaration error” in my XSL file.
After an hour of experimenting with [...]

I don’t really believe in New Year’s resolutions; if it’s important enough to me, I don’t need a calendar switch to get started. That being said, some articles I’ve read recently have me feeling motivated to stop thinking and start doing things.
Work Out
My friend Joe recently blogged that he has been going to the gym [...]

The Baltimore Homicide Map I built in June at baltimoresun.com landed on Fark.com today. There was a significant boost in traffic to the map (ten times the daily average in the two hours after Fark posted the link) and some interesting/funny comments about the state of crime in Baltimore.
Update: The map also appeared on MetaFilter [...]