Celebrating Dreamwidth One Syllable At a Time

I taught myself how to use the x-axis, the y-axis and apparently something (perhaps it's defined as "the result of using the x- and y-axis") called the origin. To the pixel. While using MeasureIt to judge my work like it's being inspected for presentation to a so-far non-existent client. I mean, that only took me all the years I've ever coded in CSS, or all nine of them.

I, uh, understand why it's needed now that I see it in use correctly (long story short, it helps line up the letters used in typography with like, x-ray precision - and my maternal great-grandfather ran his own printing shop back in the 1890s through 1950s or so, I think, which probably gives a genetic spur to my curiosity about all things printing-related). I actually always understood why it was needed and I've read plenty on how to line up coordinates and studied pictures and looked at graphs and so on and for some reason in action I could never get it quite right. There's something about being a reticent and/or sometimes lazy coder mixed up in this somehow but I'm not sure how that all intersects, exactly.

Maybe I would learn a lot faster if someone else was teaching me. I am entirely self-taught, but that doesn't mean the self-teaching process has always - or at all - gone smoothly or all that well.

So tonight I whipped out MeasureIt and got the meeting spot for the letter X to intersect with the middle of the letter M which magically made all the letters line up to the left of themselves (but not to the right, because the widths are not the same, which was where I was constantly going wrong - in assuming they were). Then - just for kicks - I did the same thing with the corresponding images (they don't really have coordinates, being non-font-based images, but I got it about close enough, I guess).

I'm just enough of a geek that this counts as one of the biggest coding thrills I've had in years.

Here are some screen caps of the results:

Also, I've always thought the biggest headache with this layout is the pixel-perfection it requires. But sometimes that same fussiness teaches me new things, or shows me where I was lazy or not thinking something through or taking all use cases into account, and for that I'm almost grateful for how hard it is to keep straight, as opposed to a less design-y, more text-y, and therefore more forgiving layout, which would probably lead me to be about the most lazy and short-sided coder there is (because if there's an easy or more non-thinking way out of something I'll often take it - this is as true in my coding as it's been in any other area of my learning or application of my learning where deep thought is pretty much required - if I can get by with less effort and get more time to do other things, I will choose the "do other things" option almost every time).

Even Google was easier to code, back when I was still furiously updating my script for it, than this layout has ever been. Google's HTML was much harder to untangle and use effectively, which was the one area of coding for it that I always struggled with. But as far as fussiness goes, Google's code is not half as pixel-perfect or in need of pixel-perfection as my own blog. Which is kinda strange, indeed.

I need that icon of the guy with his head in his hands edit: look over there ---> - because srsly what the hell's happened on DW, that it's LJ all over again? Deja voodoo.

The only thing missing in comments made to the latest News post are the GIFs. Apparently Everything's Gone Wrong Life's Ended Civilization Is Done and Over and Denise and Mark are tone-deaf, sightless, and bad-code-breathing fire dragons. Which, to judge by their limited responses and offish attitudes they sort of are.

I mean, I'll give them some credit: I didn't know whining about custom colors on your Reading Page going away soon was A Thing but yes, apparently it is A Thing, folks... *nods slowly and gravely*... so the entire .8% of our custom-color-using DW population has come out to discuss it. Woo-eeee. The discussion grew exactly this intellectual before devolving into pure 'want-colors-not-lists!' tantrum-throwing: "Noooooo".

Discussion of our new tag arrows (a mind-blowing corruption of multi-page article and chapter continuations) follows a similar trajectory by starting off with the spellbinding request, a la dw_suggestions to +1-ing a plea to give an option to disable please (you must put this phrase in bold and repeat it seventy billion times or it's not as effective, which is another trending DWism, like Noooooo). Apparently Nooooo is a catchy new way to spell the word "No" on Dreamwidth, especially when used at the beginning of sentences, and especially when you're throwing a fucking temper tantrum.

So I can see how reactions to parts of the code roll-out this week have probably been nothing but pure *eyeroll* for Mark and Denise - not just for the agony of reading through them, but for the sudden, shared realization they must have had that they're running a preschool. And for that they have my sympathy because, like, OMG. A preschool. But as for bouncing out of all of Microsoft's email servers - at once? For that they get my utmost admiration. Nothing says your social media's arrived like MS deciding it's an extremely persistent and particularly obnoxious Russian spam syndicate.

In other News, our new HTTPS feature initially didn't work while new account creation led you to the root of the website, one of our devs forgot to use any CSS in his code (this will fix him right up, though, if he ever sees it), the post body on the Beta Create Entry page has gotten too wide for a majority of people to bear much longer because Nooooo, and Mark's attitude? Is enough to make me spit actual foot-long corrugated steel nails.