Brilliant “V for Vendetta” parody… with Sesame Street.

Also loving the fact that YouTube makes it so easy to embed this video in my blog. Everyone knows it came from YouTube, but I can use their content to enhance my own blog without having to link out.

 Wow – opening the centered file in Dreamweaver 8 gives a near WSYIWYG view.  The CSS panel on the right also helps a lot, since you can see all the elements without having to code from scratch.

Looking forward to taking this for a test drive; think this was a worthwhile investment.

This morning I decided to upgrade my copies of Dreamweaver and Flash to the latest version, and reflected on how they got me to spend $400 on an upgrade.  Here’s how:

I’d like to change the front page of my site to have a “centered” design (see image at right), where the content is centered in the middle of the page.  If you look at it now you can see my attempt to do so with HTML tables – the box is off-center from the vertical and the tables don’t quite line up.  I’ve seen pages that use CSS styles to center and manipulate content, so I decided to Google around and try to learn a bit more about how it worked.

Google led me to http://www.wpdfd.com/editorial/thebox/deadcentre4.html, which shows an example of “dead centered” text.  Awesome – I uploaded it to http://jobriga.com/sandbox/test_centered.php and it worked.  When I was starting out as a webmaster I often downloaded a page and opened it in Dreamweaver to see how the HTML worked.  So I opened up this page in Dreamweaver, and saw that the page didn’t look like it did in the browser (click on the image at right to see how it looked).

I went to the Macromedia site for an upgrade to Dreamweaver 8 (the latest version).  The page promised to “Take CSS-based design to the next level”:

The new, unified CSS panel makes complex CSS simple. Learn CSS by reviewing the consolidated view and visual representation of the cascade as it applies to content for quick access and power. Know exactly where to make a change, select and go—no more hunting through text files. For working with CSS for content position, the new CSS layout visualization provides design-time visual aids to quickly and easily review page structure. The styles rendering toolbar previews how pages work with different CSS media types.

Before buying the product I checked the online library at lynda.com, which has a training video on the new features of Dreamweaver 8, including improvements to the CSS panel.  Sold – working in WYSIWYG mode is way easier than coding and refreshing the browser.

Returning to the Dreamweaver 8 upgrade page, I noticed a link to a combined update for Dreamweaver and Flash, for $399.  It sounded good to me – eventually I’d like to incorporate Flash into the page so I may as well use both at the same time.  Put in the credit card number and chose to download my copy.

The one odd thing is that Dreamweaver doesn’t let you immediately download your product – they “review” the order and apparently send you an e-mail within 1 business day.  I assume this is to prevent piracy but I was expecting to be recoding the front page by now.

Still, all in all I’m excited about the possibilities of learning more complex CSS.  I feel like I did when I switched from Notepad + Netscape to Dreamweaver – I was able to take a quantum leap forward in my design skills and my web sites ended up looking much better.  Looking forward to the new stuff!

Here’s a Livejournal entry explaining how books make (or lose) money in the mass market, written by an employee of Tor publishing. 

Somewhat sobering to see the financial (and non-creative) reality of writing a book, though I like being able to know this up front.  Writers today have a real advantage in being able to check the Internet to see how the business works before they plunge in.

Found via BoingBoing , via Copyfight, via “Emma Bull’s LJ/blog.”  I am 3 blogs removed.

Found via Metafilter: Wikitruth.info has an expose at the drawbacks of Wikipedia, including an examination of how users game the system and how owners like Jimbo Wales affect the larger community.  Also, the life cycle of a “Wikipedian.”

Interesting to see the hazards of wiki, though it’s also nice to see that wikis are becoming popular enough to invite this kind of criticism. 

Also, the definition of an “Ideal Wikipedian” (not safe for work) linked to this page, which is somehow one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.