Open Mic Night

a.k.a Jam Session, a.k.a Mike Night... or what have you....

I am on a mission to get myself up on a stage at least once a week. I can go to different ones each time as long as I go to one and read something. Here's is why:

1) Writers aren't meant to live in caves anymore, if we were all like Hemingway, well we'd probably all be dead already. (And we wouldn't necessarily know each other at all... one exception of something with a Hemingway complex is Bukowski but that's a different story.)
2) Speak not only makes you comfortable with the world around you, but helps you to relate to it... writers live though experience. If I stay behind and cower in fear all the time, how can I ever actually learn anything?
3) Hearing amazing poets read really help inspire me/others/etc.

I will report back on some of my Open Mic experiences, but for now I hope that you'll take the time to get inspired by the powerful minds around you.

Here are some great poets reading at The Bowery in NYC:

ADA LIMON: A poet who's soothing voice is enough to pull me in a multitude of directions, to escape the confines of building and explore my bond with the natural world.

TALOR MALI: An incredible poet and teacher who speaks with so much truth and humor that I am hoping one day I get to meet him and that being in the vicinity of him and some of his genius will transfer to me.

SARAH KAY: An incredible speaker who also acts as an activist with her brother advocating for the importance of spoken work poetry.

OMAR HOLMON: The speaks simply and with beautiful words. I have just started noticing Omar, and I have to say I am inspired and enlightened by is ordinary magic.

ANDREA GIBSON: An incredible and powerful human being, I am bias and have met her twice at two different readings. I am so inspired for her words no matter how personal or political they end up being.

...I know I am not any of these poets, but I know that these poets, make me strong enough to believe that I will be okay when I get up on a stage like that to speak my mind.

Hope these poets inspire you!

Best,

Sam

Creating a link in Dreamweaver

I mentioned in my first post how I created my own code to connect a website's social media badge to your own personal site. It is really simple and I will provide a quick tutorial on how you can find these badges and code them in Dreamweaver.

First step is to go to the social media site that you want to advertise on your page. I chose one that I know doesn't offer their own coding, goodreads.

For most sites you can find badges (you'll see what I mean in a minute) by clicking through the links at the bottom of the page. Goodreads has the badges listed in the "api" section. 

Next, you're going to scroll down just past the link to print downloadable bookmarks (which are pretty cool) to the different sized and formatted badges. On a mac you should be able to just drag the icon you want onto your desktop. On any other computer you should be able to right click and save the image where ever you'd like. 

Next in your Dream weaver file, go to Insert > Images. 

Then you can find your image on your desktop or where ever you saved it. Then click choose at the bottom of the window and Dreamweaver will insert the image where ever you placed your cursor in the Dreamweaver file. 

You will likely see this window pop up saying it isn't saved in your managed sites file. All it is asking is if it can copy the image into the right file so it will end up appearing on your site. Dreamweaver is being nice here, so click yes.  

If you are in split mode, you should see both the coding, in the top half you can see the image there where the line starts "<p><img src=...", and in bottom design portion, you'll see the image displayed as it will look below the "Main Content" header.

Next, copy the url from your own profile page. 

You can either click on the image or highlight the code to change the gray bar that is blow the design view. The image (what you highlighted) will show up in "src" and below "src" will be a box that says "link". Click inside the link box.  

Paste in your url into the "link" box. Then preview your updated site in a browser (meaning internet explorer, google chrome, firefox, or the like), and test the link. Make sure to save and refresh if it doesn't appear to be working.

There you have it, an easy and fast way to create an image link in Dreamweaver. Hope this was useful for those of you who are just learning Dreamweaver, or would like to in the near future. I know that I learned a much longer way of created an image link when I first started out, so this method is awesome and time saving.  

Best, 

Sam 

Awesome Things

Today I discovered the Snipping Tool on Windows 7, and I sort of went on an adventure on thinkgeek.com while using the tool.

First I found the lovely snipping tool:

I searched for it after finding out it exists from someone else's blog....really it makes taking screen shots a billion times easier/faster. After finding it I went on said adventure finding interesting consumer products online. The following will show you how awesome the snipping tool is, and how many interesting products exist.

1)

I saw someone with these the other day, and I wondered where I could find one. I am not sure how well they work, but it seemed to be more than a temporary fix. At the very least it lasts just as long as a paper clip would when it comes to attaching pages. It is eco-friendly which is a plus, and pretty damn cool in general. Also, for the same price as a stapler, you can have one of these sweet things, and save a ton never having to buy actual staples. 

2)

DIY Guitar Pick Punch?!?!? This would have me attempting to make guitar pics out of everything... but wait, Sam you don't actually play the guitar.... yeah that wouldn't matter.. it seems like too much fun! No more commentary necessary. 

3)

I suppose normal measuring cups will do, and this isn't necessarily a top of the line, intriguing, and complex invention... but it is still kinda awesome. You basically take the robot apart and each piece is a different measurement. Seems a billion times more interesting than a normal ol' color coded cup...However I am not the most skilled at baking anything other than chocolate chip cookies. AND why not?

4)

I actually own one of these. Funny story: Whenever I would make pasta for myself or for the roommates, I would always make either too much or too little. My roommate bought me one of these so I would always make the correct amount. It is really handy worth while purchase if you're someone like me and aren't as good as you think you are eyeballing it.

5)

I doubt I would ever actually buy this, but having funny stickers on my things sounds like a really fun idea. It may scare some people though.... would still be fun. 

6) 

I am the kind of person who loves going to those restaurants with the paper table cloths just because I get to draw on them. This seems like a pretty pricey investment, and I haven't actually read the reviews on this piece of lovely doodling gold, but I believe it would be worth wild if you kinda wish you could draw on the table every night. Hey, it's washable! I would also really 

7)

Dissolving hand soap sounds like a brilliant idea if you are stuck using a public restroom and the soap dispenser is empty. A friend actually gifted me something like this recently, and I have used it a few times already, and for 4.99, why not have it around?

There you have it, seven nifty products displayed using the nifty Snipping Tool. There is something similar for Macs when you press a combination of buttons. If you hit Command then Shift then the 3 or 4 key you will save the picture to the desktop. 3 will immediately capture the image and 4 will let you select a portion of the screen. Try it out if you'd like, or you can just start exploring Think Geek if that's what got you interested. 

Web Design

Learning How to Design for the Web Using Dreamweaver CS4: 


 For the past few weeks I have been using Dreamweaver (a program that is part of the Adobe suite) to edit and post a web page. Today I experienced that I never fully learned how to use the program, but was merely instructed and shown the way. It is kind of like learning how to drive somewhere when you are in the passenger's seat. Mostly I was just watching how to do things and mindlessly following directions, and it wasn't until a major conflict occurred that I had to stop and actually try and figure out how to get to the final product.

What happened was, somehow, while I was editing and trying to get my links in the footer to line up and not look like they were sloppily thrown across the page I lost the visual of the file. I previewed my work in Firefox, and nothing... I uploaded it, nothing still... I had no idea what to do. I heard that organizing things when you aren't used to a template can be tricky in Dreamweaver, but I had no idea who I lost everything. (I was using a 2 column fluid design with a header and footer, by the way). I called someone over to help, but when he came over he ended up deleting the window I opened for the source code to the version that was working, therefore loosing all the data before the incident. I had to play around with the code for hours trying to figure out what went wrong. I even called an old friend who I thought would know something about coding for a website, but she didn't and we kind of just fidgeted around together through the phone.

Right now I am drinking wine (The Little Penguin's Pinot Noir if you must know) and researching ways to go about fixing this in the morning...
Here are some useful sites/tutorials I have found if you are at all interested in learning some (more/basics) web design:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suMK2pcyqoc
http://css-tricks.com/
http://htmldog.com/

(I probably know of more links if you are at all interested.)

I am going to finish this post in the morning, but here is what I finally got to show up before the computer lab closed:

You may notice that there is no CSS (cascading style sheet(s)) attached and what is displayed only simple HTML... which I thought I fixed before I left, but apparently I didn't. I have no idea how I managed to do that... but I will finish this post after some sleep and I will let you know what happens. 

....

NEXT MORNING AND INTO THE AFTERNOON.....
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED...

for those of you who know, or who are going to start doing some reasearch to find out,  in CSS there is a setting called "display" display can be very useful in some cases (like hiding text that the search engines need to see), but when you have "display: none" listed for the entire document.... nothing will show up. That was my problem. I don't know how or when I did it, but one little line in the beginning of my CSS set to "none" made the entire page invisible. The code was still there, but it was essentially useless with that piece turned on.

So that was my major confusing mistake in Dreamweaver that took me hours and at least three or four other minds to help figure it out. I truly love working around other people particularly for that reason.  Anyway, here is the design I ended up finishing:

I worked on it using a Mac, but right now the view is from a PC (a rather old one). Every time I look at it in Firefox or Chrome the white box around the Facebook like button isn't visible, but on the PC those browsers weren't downloaded so here is the less impressive version of my first completed web page. I also believe the reason I couldn't really get rid of the white box is because I would have had to alter someone else's code, and who knows what I would end up with doing that to Facebook's like button. About half of the links' code were created by the social networking sites, and the other half I coded myself using badges that the site offers on their website and attaching a link to the image. It is really simple to do, and maybe I will make a tutorial for that in the near future.

This experience goes the show the importance of proofreading, (and now watch there are going to be a bunch of sloppy typos in this entry that someone will later point out to me just because I said that..) and how much one learns from mistakes.


Happy Wednesday!

-Sam