Making Life with Facebook Connect Easier
February 11, 2010 by Eric Richardson
I implemented Facebook Connect on blogdowntown in December of 2008 and have pretty much had a love-hate relationship with it ever since. The functionality is great, but the facebook Javascript has consistently been the slowest loading piece of the site.
Today I deployed a code update that moves the site over to Facebook's new open-source connect-js library. It's alpha, it's incomplete, but boy does it feel better to use. — Continue Reading...
Untangling that stylish mess
February 09, 2010 by Eric Richardson
It's amazing how crufty a CSS file can get over time.
I went through blogdowntown main CSS file this evening looking for code that was no longer used on the site. I ended up cutting the file down roughly 250 lines, or 14%.
At the same time I ported the stylesheet over to LESS, a CSS processor that allows you to use fun things like variables and nesting that really should be in the CSS spec itself. — Continue Reading...
pretending to still be a geek
January 03, 2010 by Eric Richardson
Eric Richardson
If you look back through the archives here, you'll find a lot of intense geekery. I ran Linux as a desktop OS for nearly a decade, administered servers, etc. I enjoyed it.
These days, though, I just tend to do less of it. Needs and situations change, and I don't end up doing as much geeky stuff as I once did.
Today, though, was an exception. Today I had to rebuild a home Linux server, migrating 350gb of data over to new drives before adding those same old drives into a logical volume. — Continue Reading...
Back in the Cold
December 28, 2009 by Eric Richardson
Eric Richardson
Kathy and I are back in Michigan for the holidays, which means we're getting our annual dose of cold and snowy weather. Christmas Eve brought freezing rain, which turned the roads into sheets of ice. Saturday and yesterday it was snow, and today's weather is characterized by 40 mile per hour wind gusts that are whistling around the house.
People complain about not having seasons in Los Angeles, but I just don't get it. I'm perfectly happy with 70 and sunny.
Joe Purdy at the Hotel Cafe
December 15, 2009 by Eric Richardson
A friend and I took a trip up to Hollywood last night to see Joe Purdy at the Hotel Cafe and, for once, no one fell asleep.
It's a long story.
The night marked at least the fifth time I've seen Joe play, four times now at the Hotel Cafe and once at an event at the old Conga Room on Wilshire. Combine that with the fact that I own three of his CDs, and you can get a general sense of my impression of his music.
It was my first time out to the Hotel Cafe in a long while, and it got me thinking about the venue that really defined my taste in L.A. music. Way back when the Hotel Cafe was half its current size and still just an all-ages coffee shop, I used to say that if the venue offered a monthly pass, I would have been there two or three times a week.
Looking through the artists on my iTunes, Eric Hutchinson, Erik Penny, Jay Nash (though I had met him before, actually at that Joe Purdy Conga Room show), Jim Bianco, Joe Purdy, Pedestrian, Quincy Coleman and Steve Reynolds were all acts I first heard at the Hotel Cafe. That's a nice little chunk of my music collection to have come out of a then-40-seat venue.