Jared Atchison

Most web designers know that Internet Explorer - specifically IE6 - is the bane of our existence. Recently one web designer even contemplated making some highly effective, errr- I mean offensive, IE6 spash pages to display to visitors who are still stuck in the past.

Recently Microsoft brought us the IE8 beta. It’s the first browser they have released in over a decade that - dare I might say - might give them some good street cred. It has 100% CSS 2.1 support. While that might sound like much since CSS2 is ancient in internet years, currently no other browser has 100% CSS2 support.

Just a a few notes for those of you itching to download IE8 and start testing.

• IE8 will overwrite your IE7 install. To view a page in “IE7″,  switch the page to compatibility mode in IE8. This will use the IE7 rendering engine instead of the new IE8 one. Just make sure and turn it off when you want to go back to viewing websites with IE8 goodness.
• If you are using multipleIEs to test IE6 (and hopefully you are), installing IE8 will nuke the install. IE6 will still work but for some fucked up reason it won’t read IE6 conditional comments along with some other strange anomalies. Reinstalling multipleIEs after IE8 will fix the issue and you will be surfing sites with IE6’s crappy rendering engine in no time.

One week from now I will be in Austin meeting up with fellow designers and developers from around the country talking about the internets, geeking out, and enjoying tasty beverages.

Today I finished planning out most of my SXSWi schedule. There are a handful of panel’s I am still up in the air about, but overall I have most of my conference planned out. I am really excited about some of the panels. The topics and the speakers are top notch this year. You can see my tenative SXSWi schedule here.

If you are going to be in ATX for SXSWi (or would just like to meet up regardless) hit me up on twitter (@jaredatch) or shoot an e-mail to jared at jaredatchison d0t com. I have one goal for this conference: work hard, play hard. I plan on attending as many sessions as possible during the day and then partying networking as much as possible every night.

Above is what I have planned so far. It’s sure to be one hell of a conference.

Just and FYI here. If you happen to be on MediaTemple’s Grid Service and certain scripts give you an error that says “URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration” - don’t worry, the fix is simple.

Open up the the .htaccess file in the root directory for your domain.

Now add this to the bottom:

php_flag allow_url_fopen on

Things should return to normal.

Recently I had this conversation with some friends in IRC. It resulted in a firm *facepalm*.

Icrontic’s 2nd annual St. Patty’s day bash is around the corner and I am getting my registration and flight finalized this week.

For those of  you who don’t know, Icrontic is a technology enthusiast website (it’s a nerd hang out) that’s been around for almost a decade. I joined the community around 2002 and have been an active participant ever since. I regularly post on the forums, contributing news posts from time to time, and even helped design v11 of the site among other things. Needless to say it’s a great place on the web and I’m really good friends with many (most?) in the community. A couple times a year we all get together to shoot the shit, drink beers, and occasionally geek out.

Icrontic’s St. Patty’s day bash is one of three official Icrontic events held every year (the other two being IC Ocktoberfest and the IC Summer Expo).

Website: Icrontic’s Annual St. Patty’s Day bash
Dates: March 19-2, 2009 (Thurs-Sun)
More about Icrontic, from the About section (abridged)

We cover PC hardware, gaming, and the tech industry in general, but lots of sites do that. What’s different here is the people. If you think all Internet conversation is rude and stupid, you don’t know Icrontic. While the term “community” is casually thrown around by bloggers and “Web 2.0″ folks, here it actually means something.

Icrontic is a close-knit group of friends who welcome newcomers. No, not “Internet friends.” We’re “fly across the country to Icrontic HQ for the weekend” friends. We help each other with tech problems, play games like Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2 together (imagine a game server without insults and slurs, if you can), share our lives, cheer each other on, and support each other when life goes sour.

One of the things we hear most frequently from new members is “Why couldn’t I have found this place years ago?” Some of us have been lucky enough to have been here for most of the ride, and what a strange and fun journey it’s been.

Yeah, we’re a bunch of geeks. We love analyzing tech trends, publishing technical guides, and reviewing hardware and games. But if all you’re doing is reading the RSS feed, you’re totally missing out on what makes this place awesome. We’re Living the Icrontic Life.

Drupal and MediaTemple are a great combination there is no denying it. However, for some reason getting Drupal to cooperate with MediaTemple regarding clean URLs is a bit of a mystery. It can be done, just not straight from the admin panel.

After hitting up the Goog for about 20 minutes I was able to get clean URLs up and running. Strangely enough I had to combine about 3 different suggestions to get one that actually that worked.

Go into your domain/html folder in MediaTemple. Either edit the .htaccess file that is there or create one. Paste this code.

< IfModule mod_php5.c>
php_value magic_quotes_gpc 0
php_value register_globals 0
php_value session.auto_start 0
php_value mbstring.http_input pass
php_value mbstring.http_output pass
php_value mbstring.encoding_translation 0
< /IfModule>
< IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /drupal
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
< /IfModule>
AddHandler php5-script .php


Make sure and change the bold line to the appropriate directory. The example above would work if your Drupal install was located at yourdomain.com/drupal.

Now go to the Drupal admin page and see if it gives you the option to turn on clean URLs. Unfortunately it did not give me the option, which brings me to the next step.

If Drupal still cannot recogize the ability to enable clean URLs (and you have done the step above) you can force it. Navigate to sites/default/ and edit settings.php. On the last line add

$conf['clean_url'] = 1;

That should get clean URLs working. This worked with Drupal (6.9) and MediaTemple using PHP5/mysqli. Oh, and make sure to take the spaces out of the mod_rewrite tags.

The SXSW Interactive Festival features five days of exciting panel content and amazing parties. Attracting digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs, the event celebrates the best minds and the brightest personalities of emerging technology. Whether you are a hard-core geek, a dedicated content creator, a new media entrepreneur, or just someone who likes being around an extremely creative community, SXSW Interactive is for you!

That’s the SXSW interactive pitch on their website. I signed up today after going through the list of speakers which was released last week - and is it ever stacked this year!

If you are a web designer, developer, entrepreneur, geek, self-proclaimed nerd, or anything in between - this is the event to attend. Top talent from all over the country will be in attendance. Oh, and of course the endless partying in Austin (6th street maybe?) shouldn’t discourage you either.

At around $450, it might be a little steep but have no fear - with 5 days of partying learning you will no doubt get your money’s worth.

Website: South by Southwest Interactive 2009
Dates: March 13-17, 2009 (Thurs-Tues)
Speakers: Keynotes, panels, core discussion

Taking Austin by storm, no doubt.

After putting things off for entirely too long, I finally got around to upgrading to Wordpress 2.7. It really is a night and day difference - from the admin side anyways.

Additionally, I’ve begun work on JA dot com version 4. Versions 1, 2, and 3 (this right here) have all been short lived due to the fact that I get tired of them a few months after each release.

Version 4 is going to be different. I promise. It’s going to bring a lot to the table. Besides a kickass design I’m putting a lot of time with, it’s going to have a lifestream, many differemt sections, and some other stuff which will be a surprise. For version 4 I’m going to ditch Wordpress and move over to Drupal (v 6.9 it looks like right now).

I love Wordpress to death and will continue to developing sites with it as well as recommending it to others. However, after attending the Do It with Drupal Conference at the end of 2008 I can’t resist the raw power of Drupal any longer. My Drupal skills are a work in progress and I am far from the ninja I am when it comes to dealing with Wordpress, because of this I expect the version 4 release to take good amount of time to develop.

Until that time comes, I’ll try to do a better job posting on v3. 2008 was one for the books and I was busier than ever, with 2009 - well I’m not even going to attempt a prediction.

Now I leave you with a LOLcat.

The people behind Wordpress have been running beta tests for the flashy new look 2.7 is going to bring.

Well the finally decided and finalized  how things are going to look and frankly I’m amazed. I don’t think the current admin design/dashboard is bad, but I wasn’t blown away by it either. This new design is user interfacing at its finest.

Here is a screenshot of what we can expect.

Head over to their latest blog post to see more.

Blog is back up. Eventually will get time to making things look swank. For now, the default will suffice. More soon.