potluck day
5.27.2004
Green Chili Quinoa
- quinoa (you can get it at Trader Joe's - it comes in an orangey box in the same aisle as couscous and rice)
- canned green chilis
- onions (dried minced onions or fresh)
- minced garlic
- chicken broth
- light sour cream
- shredded cheddar cheese
- black pepper or green onions
Rinse the quinoa really well in cold water and drain it. Then put it in a pot or rice cooker with the chicken broth, onions, and garlic, and cook it just the way you would rice. (The liquid-to-grain ratio should be 2-to-1, so for 2 cups of quinoa, use 4 cups of broth or water.) Transfer the cooked quinoa (it should be nice and fluffy) to an oven-safe dish and mix in the green chilis and a few big dollops of sour cream. Try not to stir it too much. Sprinkle cheese on top, and bake it at 350 for 20 minutes or so. Grind some fresh black pepper or sprinkle chopped green onions on top and serve.
Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia, I salute you
5.21.2004
Whatever the outcome of your trial, you should be recognized as an American hero.
When you went to war for our country, Sergeant Mejia, you didn't turn your eyes and brain off. You remained a man with a working mind and soul. And when the things you witnessed and participated in led you to the conclusion that you could no longer accept the orders being given you, you took a stand for your beliefs, accepting their possible consequences. For refusing to silence the qualms of your conscience, I believe you should be recognized, as an example of what is good in humanity.
a little blogspiration
5.12.2004
Changes, changes...
Seeing the new Blogger templates in all their gorgeousness has prompted me to think about a redesign here, seeing as how I put together the current design in about an hour and half of downtime at work. I think the design I did for Holger is a lot more eye-pleasing than what I've got going on here. Anyway, a girl's got to get some new duds for summer, right?
Comments are missing right now, as I'm trying to install Holger's new blogkomm 1.8, but I'm doing something wrong, obviously. I have a feeling that I'm making a moronically simple mistake. Anyway, it's not like my visitors (you beloved few) are especially chatty anyway. If you have anything you just have to say in the interim, please use my contact form.
There's been some buzz about "rules" in Web design. I'm with Keith on this one. Andrei and Didier have their reasons, and the great thing about being a Web designer and having your own site is being able to say what you like and stir people up. We all have our own pet peeves in design, but mostly they're subjective and individual. There are very few (though I won't say, “no”) absolute and universal rules in design.
Personally, I think the fewer design rules we have, the better. Web designers are already fenced in by all sorts of limitations. Hardware, software, bandwidth, client preferences, and user requirements all impose certain restrictions on the design process. Some restrictions can actually be an aid in the creative process, but mostly I like to have as open a range for play as possible. I don't need the weight of “Never use X color in X manner”, or “X font is crap” sitting on my shoulders while I'm already balancing my client's love of animation with accessibility and page weight concerns.
re: image replacement
5.4.2004
Got into an e-mail discussion with a pal today, and I thought, “Hey, we should be having this discussion on my site.” So here's what we talked about.
Hey amy.
Just looked over your blog, Looks good, the thing about multi-racial actors was especially insightful. Don't you love how marketing strategists use terms like “hot” to describe ethnicities as if it were a pair of jeans (genes?) ? Anyway you gotta tell me how you embedded the font in your headers (see maddenmedia “sample page”).
Good to hear from ya. That header trick is accomplished by an image replacement technique. I'm effectively replacing the text header with an image. You can get the lowdown on various IR techniques here.
Hi Amy!
So I be thinkin'.
What's the benefit of using image replacement?
Ah, you wanna know why you should go through the whole rigamarole in the first place?
Well I be tellin' you.
- Your markup is semantically correct. That is, your headers are in
header tags and not
<img src="">. Which is nice for markup purists, but also relates directly to - Search engines can read it, and give greater weight to keywords in
<h1>,<h2>, etc. Also, - It keeps structure separate from presentation. So, you could give your site a facelift by just changing the CSS and never touching the HTML. Or you can have different stylesheets for different users/media. You know, the whole CSS Zen Garden thing.
Those are the main reasons I can think of. I also think it makes things easier for editing. I mean, you can read the code and tell right away, OK, that's a header. That's why I like it.
oic
<embarrassed>...that's coo....</embarrassed>
I understand the benefits for SEO.
But on the externalized side, is the goal to separate images (that span pages) from the HTML. Greg loved to talk about separating the interface/presentation from the information. Making it possible to re-design or re-format sites without re-entering data. Could one of the goals be dynamically generated CSS files that change sites globally (for some personalized/customized presentation)? Is it (in theory at least) similar to the use of includes?
Don't y'all be embarrassed.
As far as CSS files that change sites globally (for some personalized/customized presentation)
- there are some sites that do that currently. Wired News is the first one that comes to mind. They put a cookie on your machine that will save your preferred font size for the site. Another thing that Wired likes to do is change the primary accent color sitewide. Like today it's hot pink but tomorrow it might be neon green or sky blue. They can change it everyday because it just involves a quick switch of CSS files. Way better than trying to do a global search-and-replace for
everytime we change the header on takemeaway.com (4 times a year).td bgcolor=blahblah
Excuse my rant. In answer to your second question, if your stylesheet is linked to the page via the <link> tag, it's very similar to using server-side includes. The differences are that you're including common styles (presentation) rather than common elements (content & structure), and that it happens client-side.
