One Zombie in a Billion

Here’s the new theme for the site folks.

It’s been in development for a while, so I figured I should just get it out there and bug fix as I go along.

In that regard, watch out for falling code and leaky abstractions.

So as another year closes, it’s time for me to make a list of things to do over the next year.

Main Goals

• Work on my drawing and 3D skills and build a better portfolio (the awesome new A4 wacom intuos tablet my family bought me should help with that!)
• Learn guitar (my new fender is another sweet gift from the family)
• Concentrate on building a better fitness and dietary plan.
• Update my site more often.

Side goals

• Take up at least two sports activities in the next year.
• Read at least one book a month, if not every 2 weeks.
• Experience more diverse books, films and music.
• Create an animated short using flash.

I’ve not set anything too difficult this year, hopefully that should make these easier to keep. Anyway, to all those reading, have a great New Year!

I’ve been playing around with textures in photoshop, and I’m quite pleased with how this artificially aged photo turned out, the original is on my flickr account as “Cabs from Museum Window“.

I’m in the midst of doing a bit of a progressive enhancement upgrade to this site, which essentially means splitting down my stylesheets to typography, layout and colours, then adding a nice layer of css3 goodness.

Anyhoo, part of that exercise involves streamlining my jquery javascript for the pre-population of form fields on this site, so here’s what I’ve put together:

$("form label").each(function(){
		var forminput = "input#" + $(this).attr("for");
		var labelmsg  = $(this).text();
		$(forminput).attr({"value":labelmsg});
		$(this).hide();$(forminput).each(function(){
			$(this).focus(function(){
				$(this).attr({"value":""});
			});
		});
	});

Right, the script looks for <label> fields on the page, then I build a string that lets jquery pick up it’s associated input field. From there the lovely jquery pixies grab each the text of the label, pre-populate the field with that text and finally another function clears the field when you focus on it. It’s nice and low calorie, enjoy.

Self note: need to think about a nice style for the <code> tags…