I grabbed some plugins and made some small changes. I installed a random quote plugin so that I could do something with all the random quotes I have in various text files all over my computers. So far I have only put in one quote so that would be why it doesn’t change.

I also installed the Wordpress Ultimate Gamer’s Pack, which is suppose to render the site nicely for the PSP, Wii and DS.

Finally, I used the Mii editor over at Joystiq to create a nice icon for my about page.

I found a host, learned CSS, fell in love with MODx and built my perfect site. Except not. As I said before that didn’t quite happen. I couldn’t get MODx to do exactly what I wanted. At this point I just wanted to launch the site, started looking at what other blogs use. It seems that if you are not using Blogger then, you are using Wordpress. As it turns out Dreamhost has Wordpress as a ‘one-click’ install. I clicked it and installed Wordpress and decided to ignore inperfections. It would work.

I ported my CSS design from my MODx setup and created a custom theme for Wordpress fairly easily. In fact everything was fairly easy and ‘just worked.’ I feel lame for not sticking with MODx and one day I hope to go back to it, but for now I will stick with Wordpress and thus the site was born.

Alright I will try to get start posting some much more interesting items soon.

Oh and APPLE your iPhone kills me!!! I didn’t flinch at the price. The Cingular exclusive bugged me, but I understand why. But I can’t ever go back to a phone with a camera on it!! I suppose come June I will go to the Apple Store and cry over beautiful technology containing an unforgivable flaw.

I have seen CSS used all over the place, but have never bothered to even glance at it. It was just always there. Unfortunately it is an integral part of a website now so I had to learn it. I began my journey where I begin every journey…the Internet. Typically I learn new languages entirely on the Internet. I love my books though so after I learn what I need to know I spend a bunch of money on books about the language…without learning anything new. I just have to have the books though. It is also nicer to grab a book, turn it to the page you need, and use that as a reference, rather than switch to a web browser and try to remember which website has the best writeup of x feature that you don’t exactly remember the specifics of. One of these days I’ll get a dual LCD setup.

Luckily CSS has great Internet references, the most useful is at W3Schools. However, to figure out exactly what I can do with CSS and how to do it I read some articles at A list apart and Eric Meyer’s css/edge. Eric Meyer is where I got the idea for the & symbol in the background throughout the site. I visited the the css zen garden and thought to myself, “I guess this is a pretty page.” Then I looked elsewhere, completely missing the point of the site. That is until I was rummaging around at Barnes & Nobles and came across The Zen of CSS Design.

I didn’t really know how I wanted my site to look and reading The Zen of CSS Design was amazing. It doesn’t exactly teach you CSS, but it shows tons of examples of how to use it. The way it presented the information was perfect and I ended up learning most of what I know about CSS from it. It also explains a lot of aspects of web design beyond CSS: contrast, minimalism, how to make a good user interface, browser hacks, etc. Most importantly it is full of ideas and inspiration. After you read it it makes a beautiful coffee table book.

Now I am no artist, in fact I am horrible at pretty much anything artistic (this includes writing). The art on this site basically consisted of typing the & symbol into Photoshop and changing the colors. This was something my limited artistic talent could do and I think it turned out well. It is a little busier than most blogs that I like to read. I am definitely prone to read an extremely simply looking blogs. White page, black text over a plain unobtrusive background and a busy side bar that I usually ignore, but I like the way & symbol looks. Most people read blogs through RSS now anyways.

There are still a lot of things I don’t like about the site, but most of it has to do with the way the pages interact with each other, not the design. This site is also entirely geared towards Opera/Firefox. I have barely glanced at it in IE. Unless I decide that I can somehow make a profit on this site or the information here is so interesting and useful everyone should have access to it, I probably won’t worry about how it looks in IE, people shouldn’t be using it anyways. I may even put a redirection page at the beginning that says the site won’t work in IE and you should download Opera, regardless of whether it works in IE or not. Sort of revenge for all the Firefox/IE sites that don’t support Opera (even though Opera works fine in most of them).

I’m sure I will fiddle with the css and design more. Especially as I start learning more about Wordpress. The beauty of CSS is I can leave the page the same and them simply add new style sheets to give it a completely different look, so at some point I may create alternate CSS designs (perhaps a ’simpler’ design for people to use). I am definitely a fan of CSS now.

I am definitely interested in what other people think about it though, so send me your critism.

I couldn’t very well host a site on my puny cable connection with my dual PIII 450 Linux box. I love my little box and I’m sure it had the power to host the limited views the site would get, but I couldn’t spare the upload bandwidth. I found that most sites offering cheap webhosting were just that. Cheap web hosting. You had to pay a lot extra to get any additional features. What I really wanted was shell access. Shell access costs money, lots of it. Any place that even offered shell access was insanely expensive for the amount of bandwidth and disk space that was available. Then there was CPU usage restrictions….

Then I found DreamHost. They offered more disk space, more bandwidth, and more features than I could ever ask for. Dreamhost lets me host an unlimited number of websites and I can use it for all my programming projects. I just log in and write some Perl scripts, compile some C code, etc. I can write some code on my computer and use their SQL databases so I can test my programs from any computer without setting up MySQL on everything. It’s great.

Shameless plug: If you are interested in hosting, I don’t have a bad thing to say about these guys nor have I read anything bad about their hosting service. Use the promo code ANDAMP40 and get $40 off your purchase and I’ll be able to get some money off my hosting costs as well. They even offer a 97 day full refund if you don’t like it.

Choosing the name was hard, choosing a software package to use was nearly impossible. I decided that I wanted to run a full fledge CMS/Portal. I didn’t know what I wanted to put on the page, but I wanted to be able to expand it easily. Perhaps that is why I like open source software, I know there are no artificial limitation in what I can do. I searched and installed random packages on my poor little Linux box in my house. Finally I found OpenCMS.org. They have tons of open sources packages running on their server. You can log in and play with all the different software packages they have, as well as read reviews by other users. It is one of the best resources for deciding what to use.

I spent a long time setting up different packages and playing with them, but couldn’t find anything I liked. Everything was cluttered and too ‘user friendly.’ I didn’t want to click and point to make things happen, I wanted to get my hands dirty in code. Everything claimed to be so customizable and that may be true for someone who just wants to point and click, but I found most interfaces restricting.

Then I found MODx. I installed it and all it had was a welcome page, clean and simple. Anything I wanted to do I would have to add and integrate myself, exactly what I wanted.

There was one problem…I couldn’t log in. I could tell it was set up properly, but there was some error with my password. I had a suspicion of what the problem was - my password had the php variable symbol ($) in it. I almost uninstalled it right there because I didn’t want to use a product which such a clumsy bug in it, but up until this point I hadn’t found anything half as promising. It also gave me an excuse to go through the source code. I took 2 minutes looking through the code, found the problem and fixed it. At this point I was in love. There ended up being something about going into the code and fixing a bug myself that gave me much more satisfaction than using a bug free program.

MODx’s logo is ‘take control’ and it seems completely true. They built a nice interface that allows you to edit the code and write pages and basically do whatever you want in their framework. Its beautiful, except it doesn’t work well in Opera, my browser of choice. Not a huge deal. A lot of things don’t work in Opera, so its rare that I browse the web without opening both Opera and Firefox. I would be logged into my MODx site editing items with Firefox and viewing the changes with Opera.

I started going through the source code and reading everything I could. I thought I was done with my software search, so I took a break to learn CSS and plan a design. When I got back to using MODx I was ready with a design and began implementing it, but I couldn’t make it ‘perfect.’

Barry Schwartz author of “The Paradox of Choice,” talks about this problem. When we have so many choices we aren’t satisfied with anything but perfection. I suppose it is even harder as a programmer working with open source software, because I know if I work hard enough at it I can get it ‘perfect.’ There aren’t any limitation except my own time and skill. It became clear that using Modx to get my site perfect would take more time than I was willing to use.

The main problem came down to documentation and examples. They have documentation, tutorials, forums, a wiki, and walkthrough sites setup by users. Its just all over the place and the best documentation is in the forums, the worse possible place for it. Learning how to use it is easy, setting up a standard blog is simple, doing anything complex and finding out how others have used MODx is near impossible. Ajaxian wrote a short review of it and John Vilsack made the comment that, “MODx is the Othello of CMSes: It can take a minute to learn, but a lifetime to master!” I didn’t want to spend my lifetime mastering it. I had spent months looking for a content management system, looking for a web host, learning CSS, and now I was spending forever trying to make my site exactly how I wanted it.

The final straw was that I had a hard time finding sites that used MODx the way I wanted to use it. After searching through the forums and other documentation I could usually find things that I thought would work, but to test them I had to code them up and implement them myself only to find out it didn’t do what I wanted it to do. This just got too time consuming.

Finally, I decided to stop and took a break from working on the site all together. After a break I decided to go with Wordpress and got this blog up and running so I could began writing.

I still hope to use MODx, but I’ll wait until they get a 1.0 release out and have a more central place for their documentation. I’ll probably also wait until I have something I want to do with the site that requires more than a simple blog framework.

As a side note Albuqueque, NM has just been dumped with snow. Nothing like Dever, but more than I have ever seen in the 15 years I have lived here. I setup a page with pictures if anyone is interested.

Part of the reason I started this blog was to get into the whole web thing again. I have played with PHP and MySQL a lot, but my last website was made more than a decade ago. Back when frames were all the craze and few sites had even started chopping up tables to create layouts. Thankfully I skipped that era of web history. I have been spared the eternal misery and suffering of designing a webpage with tables or worse, having to use Frontpage or a similar program written by Satan to create pain and misery on earth.

Now we have CSS and Ajax and other items I am not familiar with. A lot of applications at my work seem like they would have a lot of potential in the Web 2.0 world surrounded by a ton of buzz words and acronyms - that may or may not mean anything.

Thus was born the desire to create this site. I wanted to learn CSS and see what all this AJAX talk was about. I also needed a place to share my projects, write about random crap, etc. Since this has been a long project I figure it should be the first project I write about here, assuming I can keep myself from being distracted by Wii e-mail hacks, running homebrew on my DS and the other little projects I have been working on.

What is in a name?

One of the hardest parts was choosing a name. I wanted one that represented both the randomness that one would expect in a blog written by me as well as some hidden meaning, somehow programming related. After struggling for a while with choosing a domain name I went to the Text to Speech engine in Windows XP. I had been working on some text to speech items and thought it would be fun to hear a robotic voice say special characters. The default text to speech engine reads symbols inconsistently. The ‘&’ symbol is read as ‘and’ rather than ampersand. Yet the ^ symbol is read as its unicode name, ‘circumflex accent’ rather than its common name, ‘caret.’

After listening to a couple symbols I wanted to see if I could type in an ampersand based escape character and get it to read the symbol it represents (i.e. copyright or registered). The first one I tossed in was & and it read it, “and amp.” As soon as I heard it I knew I had my name. It stuck. It was short, sweet and to the point. It hit three very nice spots:

1. And Amp is the escape character to create the ampersand sign in the *ML languages, a nice little geeky allusion that wouldn’t be obvious to everyone.
2. & - and – the extender, used to combine things. I tend to combine things a lot (History and Programming, History and Politics, Gaming and History, Gaming and History and Programming). Its what I do. And I tend to run on and on about a certain idea making the same point over and over again in different ways without actually saying anything new or interesting in my long run on sentences that should be split up and broken into multiple paragraphs and they talk about different ideas, but I tend to not even break up the sentence into multiple points, but I will work on that to try and provide an easier reading enviorment that people may be able to understand and comment on instead of being completely lost in my long winded ramblings.
3. Finally, perhaps the most important reason, its redundant and random. Andamp simply boils down to and. I basically named by site ‘and’ (which is lame) in a completely round about way. That conveys this site though, redundant and random. Hopefully there will also be some content which is amusing, mildly insightful, and creative as well.

As a side note any time I want to type & I actually have to type & so actually writing the name of the site like this is a bit annoying. (To type & I had to type &amp and to type &amp I had to type….).

More later, thats enough ramblings for today.

Welcome to AndAmp.org or &. The about section has some general information about me and this site. Basically AndAmp is about the random ideas and code that are ever present in my software engineering brain. It has taken me about 4 months to make this site, but that is also after spending a lot of time not doing anything on it (weeks and weeks at a time). My first several posts will probably be about designing this site and then I will move onto other projects.

So as such I have finally decided to put my work up for public criticism or worse, to be completely ignored by the world. This site will likely change quite a bit as I play with the CSS and formatting of the site, experiment with Word Press plugins, and completely change my mind on aspects of design.