heisel.org

Value of going public?

Thursday | December 19, 2002 | 11:23 am  

Courtesy of GMSV, comes a good reason not to put your company in the hands of the masses.

A recent paper I did for my ethics class showed how publicly-traded newspaper companies generally take a short term approach and cut newsroom staffs to the bone. This new study shows that folks bought back into companies after they ditched the “.com” from their name.

I know going public can bring capital and reduce debt, but given the effects it has on the structure and focus of your company, I wonder more and more everyday it it’s a good idea.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Management

Smart quotes are a good idea

Thursday | December 19, 2002 | 10:50 am  

My site now has smart quotes thanks to SmartyPants.

It’s a plugin for Moveable Type, that takes the standard straight quotes and apostrophes and makes them the curly type.

I think this not only looks really nice, but helps readers more easily (read subconciously) move into and out of quotes.

Reader’s eyes have been trained by print to expect the shape of the quote mark to indicate whether they’re beginning or ending a quote.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Web design

That’s a wrap

Monday | December 16, 2002 | 2:36 pm  

Just a few short hours ago I turned in my last three term papers for the semester, which means…

It’s Christmas break.

And it couldn’t have come sooner. Now all I have to do is get my graduate committee together and start planning my research…

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: College life

Eureka!

Friday | December 13, 2002 | 4:14 pm  

The site has gone from a custom PHP blogging system I was writing to Moveable Type.

It’s survived a server change to Dreamhost, and an upgrade of Moveable Type.

Now, I’ve finally gotten my CSS design to work.

I wanted a liquid design that would shrink well, yet would also feature those neato intersecting lines you see.

I tried absolute positioning, relative positioning, and just about every combination of them you could imagine.

I was getting tired of trying to make it work at just about any resolution and was going to give it one more try before I gave up and fixed it at something presentable at 640×480.

But then I looked around on the Web some more and found Blue Robot. His layout reservoir had the perfect code to use as the foundation for my design (two column, right menu in case you couldn’t tell).

I just set up percentage margins on the left, right, and bottom on the BODY tag and I compromised a little and fixed the size of the words “heisel.org” at the top so that I could absolutely position the sidebar.

So now it works (at least in IE5 Mac, IE5 and 6 PC, and Mozilla Mac and PC).

Now it’s time to get my resume up…

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Web design