Square Leaf Designs: web and print design

Saving Energy

squareleaf — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 02:58:57 +0000

I’m a big fan of saving energy, living simply and living below my means as a way to increased happiness. With that in mind, I’m always interested in simple ways to incorporate energy savings into everyday life without making into an inconvenient slog. Apartment Therapy’s blog has an article on easy ways to save energy (and money) around the house, each easy to implement when replacing an appliance or looking to spend some money upgrading your house. Many of these wouldn’t be useful for renters, but the biggest energy savings (50% more energy saved than your old TV!) is in transitioning to an LED-backlit LCD television, which does move from apartment to apartment.

Some SSL magic

squareleaf — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:18:49 +0000

My field is primarily web design and development, but my main employment also includes some end user support duties. Aside from day-to-day tasks like adding users or restoring files from backup, I primarily have left the administration of the server to a network consulting agency. We recently purchased a new server and began migrating from our old server, which was a task I left largely to the agency. I wanted someone with more experience to handle it, since downtime while I muddled through a task I’d never tried would squash my co-workers’ ability to do their jobs, and I didn’t have the resources to do practice runs. But, after some hiccups with the consulting agency, I found myself needing to move our SSL certificate from the new server back to the old server so that Outlook Web Access could continue to run on the old server while some delays with the new server deployment were worked out. I’m pleased to say that after some careful research and some really great phone support from GoDaddy, I managed to move our certificate back to the old server, and got our OWA working again for our remote staff. While I’m not going to try tackling the migration of the Exchange mailboxes, I have decided that my success with this experience was good enough that I’m now going to try installing our anti-virus remote server and our printers onto the new server. My strengths are definitely in web design and programming, but I think that having some level of confidence in networking matters (and knowing when I’m out of my depth) bring a richness to my understanding of the issues involved in keeping a web server running. While I’m not going to pursue networking as a passion as a result of this experience, I do think it will make me a better developer, since I’ll understand issues on the networking side of the fence.

Learning from mistakes

squareleaf — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 21:52:35 +0000

I just read a really good essay on Lifehacker about identifying and learning from mistakes. Honestly, I’m blogging about it so that I can find the link later, but I thought others might benefit from it as well. So often, when navigating our career and life paths, we can abandon a particular path because of a mistake, rather than using that mistake to improve how we walk on that particular road. The key is striking the delicate balance between learning from mistakes and punishing yourself for them. In both programming and design, mistakes are inevitable and learning won’t happen without them.

PHP book review

squareleaf — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 22:35:40 +0000

I recently completed a PHP refresher course titled PHP Essentials. The instructor, editor of php|architect, was looking for someone to run through the course to work out any kinks, and I was looking for a PHP refresher. While taking the class via Skype over the course of several months (it is hard to align the schedules of two busy women!), I decided that having a book to work through at the same time would complement the course and provide another way of looking at the same material. The first book available through interlibrary loan was PHP 5 / MySQL Programming for the Absolute Beginner, so I checked that out. I worked through the first few chapters, but I ended up returning it unfinished. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend the title. It presented the information in a way that didn’t seem to build logically. For instance, it presented the $_POST concept before discussing arrays. It also advised the use of the print function instead of echo or print_r. I seldom run into the use of print in PHP projects, so I found it odd that echo and print_r were not even mentioned. It’s back to the library and the next book in the queue for me.

New site launched for APA Editor

squareleaf — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 16:36:23 +0000

I recently completed a new site, built in WordPress. The site is for APA Editor, Ardell Broadbent. She previously had a site built in GoDaddy’s Website Tonight product that was no longer serving her needs. Despite the fact that Website Tonight does not have an easy export function, I saved all the content for the site, converted and updated it, and optimizing it by stripping out extraneous html and spacing along the way. We redid the color scheme to match some color research she had done and added some downloads. The client was very happy with the site, and we will soon be working on another site for her vacation rental property.

End of Stagnancy

squareleaf — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 02:46:47 +0000

A couple of months ago, I noticed a dramatic and pronounced upswing in my interests and motivation. For various reasons I won’t go into here, the previous 18 months or so had been a rather stagnant stretch in my life. I don’t think that stagnant periods are necessarily periods of inactivity. After a series of changes or a flood of growth, it is sometimes necessary for a system to move into a period of seeming stillness while the lessons and changes of the period of growth have time to sink in and percolate through the system. Once that process completes, a new period of growth, learning and expansion can begin. Now that a new period of growth has begun, I find that my desire to learn as fast and as thoroughly as possible is really invigorating and refreshing. As far as technology goes, this has manifested in an interest in brushing up on skills, and on teaching myself new skills, specifically mobile app development. Stay tuned!

Always learning

squareleaf — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 14:30:27 +0000

I’ve been taking a PHP refresher class through a friend who edits a PHP magazine, trying to keep my skills current in an often-changing field. I found a couple other good online, “casual” courses that I’d recommend as well. Codecademy does a brief intro course in JavaScript that could be a good refresher or introduction. And Method of Action is putting together a series of courses for teaching programmers how to design. I took their kerning quiz and got 85 out of 100. What can I say – I’m a sucker for quizzes! Both of these online courses are free, as far as I can tell, and they’re actually kind of fun. They’re certainly not going to make you into an expert, but they’re a good way to brush up or delve into something you don’t know.

Fur balls

squareleaf — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 19:45:09 +0000

We’ve got a couple cats, and we’ll soon be adding a dog to the menagerie. I struggled for some time with a way to keep my cat off my desk. He’s a grumpy fellow and, while my desk is designed such that he can’t actually sit on my keyboard, he took great joy in biting my mouse hand. I got him a cat bed that bolts to my desk, and he thinks that’s the best thing since sliced tuna. I did have to add a fleece blanket, because the brown pad that’s included is apparently not quite luxurious enough for his refined tastes. So, now that we’re adding a dog, I’m considering tasking the other half with creating the dog bed that’s featured on unplggd. The article includes the cat bed that I use too.

Chalk Dust

squareleaf — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 01:31:51 +0000

I used to have a large amount of scratch paper on my desk to take notes while I’m on the phone, keep track of billable hours, etc. But, with cats who just view scraps of paper as toys, I moved to a small notebook. At least if it’s knocked on the floor by an errant cat swipe, I can find it more easily. But, lifehacker posted a couple really great ideas – chalkboard paint on the surface of the desk and, in the first comment, using dry erase markers on the glass surface of the desk. Since I have a glass portion of my desk, I’ll have to try that out. Now, to move the cat off the glass…

Writing

squareleaf — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 20:25:07 +0000

I like to write. And, I’ve been told that I’m passably good at it. I realize that this makes me about as unique as weeds. I published a couple of articles online: one on the reasons to select an eco-friendly wedding ring, an idea of my own, and one on paying off student loans, an article I received by assignment. Both of these were published online via those portals where you make money off people clicking on the ads running alongside the articles. They haven’t been particularly lucrative, but I suspect that has more to do with my difficulty in effectively marketing them than anything else.

I have a series of articles on green weddings that I’d like to see published, but I’m reluctant to publish the remainder via the method I described above. I originally had a publisher interested in publishing an entire book of mine on this topic, but his situation has changed, making that no longer an option. So, that leaves me deciding whether to try to submit the chapters individually as articles to bridal magazines or whether to finish up the book and try to find a publisher on my own. Anyone have any helpful thoughts they’d like to share on this?