For the last several days, I’ve been trying to update my blog to use a layout I created. Each time I sat down to work on changing WordPress’ default template (named Kubrick), my brain would seemingly click off and refuse to concentrate. It was as if looking at CSS and PHP was the same as those crazy anime scenes that gave all those kids seisures. Half the time I would just stare blankly at the screen waiting for something to happen. I kept searching for tutorials with the hope that maybe there was some super easy way to do what I wanted and that, somehow, I’d skipped over it the last time I did the same exact search.

Fast forward a few days, several glasses of iced tea, and a lot of research later and here’s my newly updated blog. Of course once I figured out the bigger picture, like using my own header image or using a custom background for the page element only, the little details started to kick my ass…like, how to make that whole header image a link and why that custom page background didn’t seem to be repeating correctly. I found work arounds to most of the problems I encountered.

Originally published at Screaming Ink. You can comment here or there.

I just spent the last two hours wasting my time trying to install Movable Type. I wanted to give it a try, to see if I preferred it over Word Press and, more generally, just to check it out. I made three different attempts to upload and install the software (20mb unzipped); each try failed for the same reason. The whole process is bloated, the set up and installation is not user friendly for both geeks and non-geeks alike, and the small sampling of online support files Movable Type has available are outdated and flawed, to say the least.

Originally published at Screaming Ink. You can comment here or there.

Being a freelancer can be an amazingly rewarding experience, while being an incredibly stress inducing and mind numbing experience. In addition to juggling clients, being your own IT support and customer service desk, and taking care of those little secondary things like completing projects and finding clients, you have to deal with billing…namely invoices.

I’ve used all sorts of time management and accounting software and from a design standpoint, all of their automated invoices suck. Yep, every single one. The layout of the invoices in those programs are rarely end user friendly: the ability to modify the invoice to match your company’s image and brand, especially fonts, is very limited and, generally speaking, the invoices aren’t nice to look at at all — which sometimes makes the difference between that invoice getting paid in a timely manner or whether it gets forgotten and ignored for weeks. The only real plus in using the invoices provided with software is that the programs do all the nasty calculations for you. Numbers can be evil for those on the arty side of things.

I wanted to find a way to make an invoice that I could customize with graphics, that would allow my choice of fonts, that would do any calculations for me, that could be easily adapted to both billing and quoting, and, most importantly, was as automated as possible.

Originally published at Screaming Ink. You can comment here or there.

Recently I needed to make a map of driving directions from my house to multiple destinations. I knew that an option on the popular online map sites probably existed, but I’d never looked. I checked MapQuest, but it didn’t seem to have anything close to what I was looking for. Beyond that, it seems that lately MapQuest has been a little on the lacking side when it comes to giving accurate directions. I ended up checking Google Maps and found that they had exactly what I neeeded…and a lot more.

Originally published at Screaming Ink. You can comment here or there.