Today’s rendition of stephenwoicik.com marks version 3.0. This version isn’t completely done but I wanted to launch it live to see how it worked with some of the content I already had on here. I’ll be making minor changes throughout the rest of the week and should have everything finalized by the end of the weekend. If you find any problems on your own don’t hesitate to leave a comment or grab my attention on twitter.
This new theme is a lot cleaner visually (no more splash page) and coding wise. Many of the new functions of WordPress 3.0 are utilized, including feature images, custom menus, and custom post types. I will be using the custom post types for quotes and phots in the future, hopefully bringing better organization to the site. There is also a more dynamic sidebar. All together, it achieves a more custom feel to each page without doing multiple page templates. Simple is better.
I’ve given some thought about releasing the theme as a generic WordPress 3.0 theme. I’ll have to test it, make sure I didn’t leave any custom links in the template files. But if you are interested I can send you what I have for the theme, just shoot me a message.
This app is graphically appealing and pretty rich in information. This would be a great “follow along with the teacher” application. I remember being in middle school and high school when we dissected things in class. We didn’t have the resources for everyone to have something to dissect. It ended up being the teacher doing it at the front of the class, and everyone just watching.
This would be a great place for the Frog Dissection App. The teacher can still only do the real dissection at the front of the class, but now all the students can follow on their iPad. They can graphically see and get information on everything the teacher is doing. Much more informative and interactive way of doing this traditional class lesson (and a lot less messy than giving a frog to every student/group).
Like with all the Apps I review, the app alone isn’t enough to justify iPads in the classroom, but each one adds a little more value, convenience, and reason for having them in your classroom.
Frog Dissection is available in the App Store for $4.99
College and University programs that promote using Kindles or like e-reading devices are being suspended by the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Education.
Recent complaints by the National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind have sparked court settlements between the DOJ and the universities currently involved in programs promoting the use of e-readers in the classroom, specifically the Kindle DX. The Kindle DX has been viewed as discrimatory against blind students and violates the Americans with Disabilities Act. These programs are currently being suspended at 4 schools; Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Pace University in New York City, Reed College in Portland, Oregon and Arizona State University.
Continue reading »
So I got my iPhone 4 today….
I was impressed at how fast it got delivered considering the Apple website says 3 weeks and AT&T says 10 days, the phone came in 3 days. Activation was easy, put in a couple number from the box online, plugged it into my computer and it restored with all the settings from my 3GS. Only annoying part was re-entering all my passwords (email, WordPress, mobile me, dropbox, etc). All just a minor annoyance I was expecting. I wouldn’t want all my passwords to be so easily stored or transferred anyways.
Enough with the boring stuff, on to the actual review.
Software – It doesn’t feel much like an upgrade. It’s a new phone, yes, but most the “cool new stuff” is in the software. If you were already running iOS4 on your 3GS, you won’t notice a big difference in your day to day use. Continue reading »
I’ve been wanting to update the look of this site for quite some time. The three day Memorial Day weekend provided the perfect time.
The Home, About, and Project pages are static HTML. The Blog and Contact pages are WordPress (eventually the entire site needs to be moved to WordPress). The background for each page is a different picture I took. They load somewhat slow at the moment. I’m working on speeding that up.
I also started playing around with @font-face and the Google Font Directory. I’m using the Josefin Sans Std Light font by Santiago Orozco for all the header fonts on the site. It was surprisingly easy to set up and use. One line of code anywhere in the header about the </head>
<link href=’http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Josefin+Sans+Std+Light’ rel=’stylesheet’ type=’text/css’>
Then call the font in your CSS document:
h2 {font-family: ‘Josefin Sans Std Light’, arial, serif; font-size:2.8em; font-weight:700;}
The future of text on the web will be interesting as a result.
The hardest part of the site redesign was the about page. Learned first hand how hard it is to write/design an about page. The one up there now won’t be the final design, but I didn’t want that one page to stop me from updating the entire site.
Cleaning out my hard drive today, I came across some old photoshop projects I did when I was just learning the program. I’m still pretty bad, but it’s funny to see some of the tutorials and half finished projects I worked on while learning. This one is obviously from when I was watching way to much Mad Men. Rivik Media is a design company I am a co-founder of.
One more picture after the jump Continue reading »
I finally got my Ubuntu desktop set up the way I want. Its running on a MacBook unibody (I rarely ever boot into OSX now). In the past I used linux for everything but have fallen out of touch lately. Using it as my main computer for a few months should get be back into the swing of things.
So far I have very few complaint about the newest Ubuntu. It’s fast. It boots up and shuts down as fast, if not faster, than OSX. It is sluggish when coming out of hibernation though (a minor problem since I rarely completely shut more computer down).
The software update and installation is getting better with every version of Ubuntu. When I used Linux in the past, I remember having to go into the terminal to install most things, that is almost completely gone. Anything in the Ubuntu Software Center is a simple one-click install. The software updates work similar to Windows and OSX; it alerts you when updates are available and will download and install with a single click.
I have confidence that the average computer user would not see any difference in using Ubuntu compared to using OSX or Windows. It’s a very polished operating system.
The one downside I have had, is my back-lit keyboard doesn’t seem to work at all with Ubuntu. I haven’t found the driver yet to fix this. Other than that, every other driver has worked right out of the box.
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with netbook remix
Area 0.42 SVG Icon Set
Fordham Keating Hall background
