The Dashboard interface changes look nice, though everything is really fat. I’m talking crazy padding on buttons and tabs, causing more vertical stretch than I’d prefer, but it’s okay. I’m thinking I still want to use the tag plugin I had been using because Wordpress doesn’t show me all my tags in a big list on the post page, which I find useful. We’ll see if I have any problems. I did have one earlier, but it was my own fault. I kept getting the message “No input file specified” whenever I visited an admin page, and it turned out to be because I had my upgrade.php file chmodded to 000, so it wasn’t accessible by anybody, haha.

I make use of Prototype, Script.aculo.us, and Twotone icons for the main navigation in the sidebar. The nifty Javascript stuff won’t function without Javascript enabled, of course, but the navigation still works just fine. I used the Street Light Fashion palette, slightly edited to dim the red, from Colour Lovers. For use in implementing CSS pseudo classes that many browsers do not support, such as :nth-child-even, I use Offspring.

There was an open-house IBM meeting today on campus to which I went. They catered Moe’s for us and students got to talk with IBM employees (managers and programmers alike) about their mentoring program, which I signed up for. I talked to several people about the idea of a summer internship, and it turns out my friend Mark works for IBM currently, doing Javascript and web stuff, and he’s going to put in a good word for me with his manager. I think it’d be hella cool to work for IBM because they seem very pro-open source and pro-Linux, which of course excites me. They gave us little tote bags filled with all kinds of neat IBM swag, too, including a beer cozy (I guess it could be used for non-alcoholic drinks as well, but no one calls them ‘Diet Rite cozies’ or the like), little notepads with ‘THINK’ on one side and the IBM logo on the other, a transparent watch that clips onto your keys and has a light, a digital clock about 1"x3.5"x1", some kind of light-up wand thingy that looks like it should be used for waving in jets, and a tape measure that goes on a keyring. I tell you, I love the little gidgets companies pass out in career fairs and similar events; they make great idle toys.

I got my first pedicure ever today; if I remember later, I’ll post photos. All you feet haters run screaming now; you’ve been warned! I’m hopelessly ticklish on my feet, I think because as a child I got glass in them after stepping on a broken light bulb. I remember laying (lying?) on my stomach on the couch, my dad holding my feet still and warning me not to move as he dug the fragments out with his pocketknife. How’s that for a pleasant picture? Yeah, so that left me with extremely sensitive feet, or so goes my theory. Anyway, when the tiny Vietnamese man (I had to ask; I can kind of tell Chinese and Koreans by appearance, but I’m unfamiliar with Vietnamese looks) was buffing the bottom of my feet, I had Jessica’s hand in a death grip as I struggled not to kick him in the face; I laughed the entire time, to the amusement of the other employees.

On a side note, I just smashed a good-sized roach crawling across the wall with my bare hand. Does that make me brave or just incredibly gross? Ssh, don’t tell Todd, or he might not find me attractive anymore.

The inspiration for this layout is my love of math. :) I tried to use formulas from the three math classes I’m taking this semester: Calculus IV, numerical methods, and statistics. Here’s a brief description of the formulas:

• I(f) = h/3[f(a)… in the top left is the composite Simpson’s 1/3 rule for approximating an integral. Class: numerical methods.
• Delta x = -f1(x1, y1) * df2/dy… in the top right is used in Newton’s method of finding the roots of a system of nonlinear equations. Class: numerical methods.
• (2x+3) + (2y-2)y’… and on down through the rest of the header is part of the solution to a differential equation. Class: Calculus IV.
• For all z belonging to Z… behind the 3till7.net logo is a logical proposition about the set of all negative and positive integers. Class: this is actually from my logic and theory of computing class, which is more computer science than math, but that’s a thin line anyway.
• V(X) = the sum of (x-mu)… in the bottom of the header image (it’s barely visible because of the main links in that rectangle) is the variance of a probability distribution. Class: statistics.
• h times the sum from i=1 to N… in the bottom right corner of the header image is the equation for the composite midpoint method of approximating an integral. Class: numerical methods.

If you’re not seeing the new layout, you can force it to show up or if you dislike this layout, you can still use the previous one for a while.

Edit: on November 17, 2007, I edited the theme to make use of one of Rika’s patterns in the body background.

We also had some bad refereeing, in my opinion. Some of the calls against us, like a holding, didn’t look accurate, but Brooks (our coach) didn’t challenge them. Then there were other missed opportunities for calls, such as pass interference when a Florida player grabbed at one of our guys who was trying to catch a pass. However, this happened on the side of the field where Florida’s team and coach were lined up; you could see them clapping when their refs failed to throw a flag on this. I hate unfair sports.

Our guys missed sooo many tackles against Florida, too. Kelly’s living room was filled with a bunch of angry, yelling UK fans every time Florida’s quarterback, Tim Tebow, would run the ball and our guys would just kind of run toward him or dive partially at his legs, both of which were insufficient to stop him. Our offense is pretty good at scoring, but our defense could definitely use some work.

I don’t know what this will do to our ranking (we’re currently #7) because Florida had a lower rank than us (#14). We’ve got games against Mississippi State, Vanderbilt, Georgia, and Tennessee (a big rival of ours) coming up, and, from all I hear from hardcore fans, we could pull off wins against all of those. That would leave us with only two losses in the season, which is much better than our football team has done since the 70’s or 80’s.

I’ve been working on a new layout for 3till7 that shows off my geeky side to the extreme. The body background looks like grid paper, the header is filled with mathematical symbols, and I’m trying to incorporate various math and Greek characters throughout the site. For example, unordered list bullets have a pi sign as their bullet, then when you hover on them, the symbol changes to a lowercase sigma. I think it’s going to be cute when I get it finished, because it’s already looking pretty cool if I do say so myself.

I’ve got to run to the grocery today, and I apparently need to buy a full gallon of milk instead of my usual half gallon, because Oreos will use up the milk to no end. I bought some Halloween Oreos the other day that had orange filling, and man, everyone wanted some of those when they would come to visit me. And who eats plain, dry Oreos? No one! We all have to have milk! I ran out of milk halfway through the week, so no cereal for my breakfast, which made me quite sad.

Edit: Upgrade complete at 11:18 a.m. EST (darn class lectures get it in the way of upgrading your blog platform, I tell ya). If you find any problems now, please comment and let me know.

Layout

Looks

Colors — They’re fine. Your color choice is atypical, but being different isn’t bad. My eyes don’t scream when I look at your page. I like the brown in your navigation menu and its pink rollover. I also like the soft pink/peach hues present in other aspects of this layout—I’m not crazy about anything else. The oranges and purples remind me a bit of Halloween, but it’s October… :) Everything is readable, and that’s what really matters.

General Positioning — Everything is well-positioned. The navigation menu is easy to locate; there’s a pretty header image at the top; the site’s name is elegantly displayed; blog entries are easy to find. :)

Sidebar — I love that you have a search box and site updates on your sidebar. I don’t like the justified text.

Huge gaps between words (rivers) were created when your sidebar text was justified. I tried to mark some of them with blue lines in the image above. Text aligned to the left may produce a ragged right edge, but I think that it would look better than justified text with odd spacing. Think about not using justified text, at all, in this layout.

I also dislike justified text in general but thought it was useful in the narrow columns featured here. However, the screenshots you gave do look bad, so I’ll probably switch the columns to left alignment.

Footer — The right stuff is in your footer! I like the photos, off-site links, and category links. I love that you also have a link to your site map and to “What Are You Here For?” Some sort of separator (i.e. a | or a —) would be nice between the links under “Special Links” and “Categories” because some of them are two words long. Also, a top-border would be nice above the last line. Consider clearly separating it from the rest of your footer as everything else is divided into three columns.

Also a good suggestion; can do!

—Style Nazi — What I’m about to say is in no way objective. But I feel compelled to say it. :( I would like your links more if they were bold instead of underlined. I feel like the underlined links somehow disrupt the flow of your page (not so much in the sidebar, but everywhere else—especially in the blog). They really stand out.

Haha, exactly! I want links to stand out and be easily differentiated from regular text.

Code

You write neat and well-documented code.. There’s nothing wrong with your style sheet. You also use heading tags properly, and your site doesn’t go to hell when CSS is turned off. :)

There are a couple things, though. Consider using div tags in your footer instead of tables. And if you care to be anal, add a hidden <h1> site name </h1> to the tops of your pages for all of those anti-CSS accessibility nuts. :) Sadly, 3till7.net is not free of coding errors:

Oh man, I did try to get three columns via div layers first, but the CSS was very tricky to make them all float with the left-most column flush against the left side, the right-most column flush against the right side, and the middle column floating equally between the outer columns. It ended up not working right in IE when it worked in Firefox, and so finally I gave up and switched to a table. :(

Coding Errors

About Me

<p><a href="..." style="text-decoration: none;">

<div style=”background-color: white; display:inline;”><img src=”…” alt=”My top 10 artists”/></div>

<p></a></p>

The code quoted above isn’t neat (or valid). It’s coming from where you incorporate Last.fm widgets into your “Favorites” section. You’re a computer programmer, so I’m blaming Last.fm for this interesting smattering of code. If you change it to what I suggest below, everything should be fine.

<div style="background-color: white; display:inline;"><p><a href="..." style="text-decoration: none;"><img src="..." alt="My top 10 artists"/></a></p></div>

Fixed!

Contact Me — There’s a missing </tr> after Email a copy to yourself.

About 3till7.net — In the second paragraph, there’s an error in your link to wordpress.org. The final quotation mark at the end of that link has been forgotten. You have href="http://www.wordpress.org instead of href="http://www.wordpress.org".

Fixed! It’s noticing little details like this that make this review stand out.

Reviews Received —
In the blockquote in which Review from _______ is quoted, there’s a lone </p>. A <p> is missing at the beginning of the blockquote. It’s like this in most if not all of the blockquotes on the page. There’s a similar problem with blockquote and p tags on your “Writing,” “Dream Journal,” “Geeky Stuff,” “Don’t Deal with These Companies,” &c. pages. :(

That’s due to me parsing PHP within a WordPress page and WordPress wanting to insert paragraph tags everywhere. I fixed it by editing my PHP to add an opening p tag but not a closing one, since that’s what WP likes to stick in.

Content

Mine

About Me — Your introduction to this long page is cute and colloquial.

To further describe myself, I’m taking the easy way out with a bunch of lists:

Because your about me page is so long, consider adding a short list of links (linking your interests, hobbies, faults, pet peeves, and favorites) immediately after the sentence quoted above.

Now the sidebar on that page has links to other sections of the page.

Interests — Until a few moments ago, I’d never heard of Ruby. I doubt that many people are familiar with the programming language, so think about adding a link to a site like ruby-lang.org.

Good idea! I added the link.

On specific issues, my beliefs include: gun supporter, abortion supporter, pro-capital punishment, pro-separation of church and state, supporter of the teaching of evolution but not intelligent design, and pro-using open source standards in government, as opposed to closed, proprietary alternatives.

Your paragraph on politics contains a sentence 40 words long. Break it up. It’s confusing because:

1. It’s long.
2. You use different words for the same thing. You’re a ____ supporter and pro-other things. Use one term. Be pro-everything you’re pro or a supporter of everything that you support. If the list of things that you’re for wasn’t crammed into one sentence or one short paragraph, I’d say use different words. But because it is, be consistent.
3. There are little asides (i.e. as opposed to closed). Instead of using “but” or “as opposed to,” to set up things in opposition, just say that you’re anti-_____.

Fixed! I broke it up into an unordered list and reworded things.

You write in a friendly manner. On this page, you come across as being down-to-earth and just very sweet. The downside to this (and this isn’t really a downside) is that you write as though someone’s talking. You use a lot of commas.

Um, I think I’m a pretty easy-going person, easy to get along with.

I was born in the Chinese year of the rabbit, and that fits me, because loud noises, sudden noises, and sudden appearances of things startle me.

Your comma usage doesn’t bother me. I can understand most of what you’re saying without having to re-read things. But just beware of commas and long sentences.

I don’t have any content suggestions for this page because you cover a lot of ground. I’ve learned a lot about you, and that’s cool.

—Grammar Nazi — In “Interests,” you only capitalize the titles that are proper nouns (yay?). In “Hobbies,” you don’t capitalize anything (also yay?), but in “Faults” and “Pet Peeves,” you capitalize every title. I don’t understand—consider capitalizing everything or only the titles that are proper nouns.

Fixed! I lowercased headers in Faults and Pet Peeves.

About 3till7.net — This page is informative. I love seeing past layouts. I’m glad that you’re showing off some of yours. Once again, you’ve got all of the bases covered. I can’t think of anything to suggest content wise.

I agree with what you say about having valid code. If one has to choose between validity and accessibility, accessibility is more important. But I don’t quite get the way in which you’ve set that paragraph up. It’s a little misleading. You make it sound as though having valid code is at odds with having colors that contrast sufficiently, relative font sizes…, and proper alt attributes. Most of the time, it isn’t. Valid code goes hand-in-hand with accessibility (most of the time). Running a site through a validator is a fabulous way to check for unclosed tags and all sorts of other little coding errors. Validators are like spell-checkers: they’re not always right; sometimes they suggest wonky things, but it’s good to use them anyway.

I added another sentence to this paragraph to clarify what I meant.

What Are You Here For? — This is great. It’s sweet of you to have RSS feeds for all of your categories.

Photo Gallery — So many pictures! Wow. Everything is well organized too. I love it. I like what you have in your “Best Gallery” best. :) I also think that it would be great if you posted stories along with some of them (i.e. the “Fuck You Matt” cake).

Writing — Your newest writings are from 2005. :( Write more. I hardly read anything here, but I was amused to see a line about cosines in one of your poems (”Fitting In“). All of your essays are at least two years old; some of them are dry school assignments. I don’t like the first two because they’re short, school-like, and random—without the context of a class or more information, they’re just kind of weird. :( But “The History of Santa Claus” and “UK Honors Program Essay #1″ are lovely. On your “Writing” page, less would be more. Think about removing some of the essays, because the dull ones are obscuring the others.

I actually have a couple of haikus I need to publish that I’ve written in the past month. Also, I prefer to keep my old work on there, so long as it’s still good in my opinion, because some folks do read it. I get search hits from people searching for Antigone, Celsus, and other topics mentioned in my essays.

Graphic Design — This page would benefit from explanations. You say and I can tell that some of the images are from past layouts, but with things like orb.jpg—I just have no idea. What was that for? Why did you make it? Also, it’d be nice if the images opened in fitted pop-up windows instead of just opening in blank pages.

Ooh, you’re not going to sell me on pop-ups for any reason because I hate the things. I find it annoying when a site starts opening new windows or changing around the dimensions of my current windows.

Dream Journal — Oh—This is interesting. I’m sad to see that you haven’t added any recently. Have you not been dreaming? You’ve only been having nightmares? :(

—Style Nazi — On your “About Me” page, the spacing between the items that you list as your favorites is a little strange, especially under “Books.” It’s the same on “About 3till7.net” under “Referrers” and on “Links” under “Memberships.”

I looked in Safari but I’m not seeing any weird spacing.

Yours

Geeky Stuff — There’s a lot here. I’m not a programmer, so I’m not going to comment on the content of your articles. Anyway, it’d be helpful if you listed article categories at the top of this page. Doing that would give your visitors a nice overview and keep them from having to scroll to see what you have.

I added a list of in-page links to the sidebar for this section.

Don’t Deal with These Companies — This section is a little unnecessary. If you have blog categories devoted to ranting, consider merging these articles with them because there are only three articles here (two on Fed-Ex & one that you didn’t write)—they’re basically rants.

This is a new section so I’m still waiting for content. I like the idea of it because I haven’t seen such a section on other sites.

Commando Awards — This is a fabulous thing, and I can’t wait for you to begin handing out awards. :)

Free WordPress Themes — How nice of you! These are pretty.

Quotes — There are more than 400 quotes. I’m impressed—How did you compile all of these? How long did it take? The search box is nice. But because you have so many, consider separating your quotes into categories too.

Pfhew, organizing that monster into categories would take a while, but it could be done. If I get an urge to, that’s a good idea. I’ve just collected them over the years by copying down any quote I saw that I liked.

Book Reviews — Nice. I only wish that you had more reviews and extended (longer) versions of the ones that you do have. Make them more like your game reviews.

Junk Drawer — Consider putting things that have more to do with you than your visitors (i.e. blog memes) in “Mine.”

That’s a good suggestion for content organization.

Links — Under “Personal Sites,” Oipom and Harlequin Girl look lonely without descriptions. That’s all.

Blog Entries

You blog often, almost everyday, and about an amazing variety of things (topics range from your daily life to C++). I read all of your entries from the past three months. Out of those, my favorites are My Take in the Jena 6 Fiasco and Squee Over Numerical Methods. I really like those.. Also, on October 12th or 13th or thereabouts, please update us on Ghost Hunting… :)

I’ll definitely have to do that! Speaking of which, I need to email my cousin now and find out the details…

Sarah, you’re a queen of content. You have tons and tons of it. I know that it must be hard to manage that much, but some of your perfectly good sections have grown a little stale (i.e. Writing & Dream Journal). Update them when you can.

Conclusion

2.3 — 3till7.net’s subjective score is 2.3. It’s all good—your site is good. Sarah, your site has so much content—it’s amazing. But watch out for content going stale, watch out for coding errors on your sub pages, and re-consider your use of tables. Also, stay sweet? I don’t know… You just come across as sweet and southern (yay Kentucky!) on 3till7.net.

Aww shucks, I’m jes actin’ like my mama taught me! ;)

I’m surprised at the low score (2.3 out of 5) because I think my site deserves better than a 46%, especially upon seeing that a site using someone else’s layout received a 48%. However, the review itself was one of the best reviews I’ve received because it was so long and in-depth. She pointed out several problems that I fixed upon reading about them, and gave good suggestions. I appreciate that it was as long as it was and the effort that went into looking at 3till7 in detail.

First Impressions

I’m greeted with a blurred (or some kind of effect) image of a water lily and a poo brown background image - eww. The colors of the image clash with the background, so your site looks really unprofessional and yucky.

Man, that’s two reviewers so far that have disliked my “poo brown” background color! Everyone’s hatin’ on brown. :( I still really like the burnt orange and browns used in this layout.

Splash Page

No splash page.

Layout

If I’m not mistaken, the blurriness of the header image was intentional. Great job. It looks pretty and unique. The peach content area looks great with the layout, but the icky brown background - not so much. It would have looked much better if you used a salmony-pink color, either slightly brighter or darker than the background color for the content area. Firefox: check. Time to check in Internet Explorer, Safari, and Opera.

In IE, your header is kind of screwed. To the right of your layout, there is a small gap. It would be wise to fix this. Your site looks fine in Safari and Opera. Your site looks fine in 800×600 and 1024×768 resolutions.

Content

Mine

Instead of linking to the IMDb pages of your favorite TV shows and movies, why not link to their official sites or fanlistings?

Wow, you are a great photographer. Keep up the good work.

Portfolio is an external link, not reviewing. Writing’s not exactly one of my strong areas, so I won’t be reviewing this either.

Your graphics are really good as well.

I can’t exactly review your dreams and nightmares, so I won’t be reviewing this.

Yours

I’m completely clueless when it comes to Perl, PHP, and the like, so I won’t be reviewing Geeky Stuff.

Don’t Deal with These Companies is unique and helpful. Good job.

Your WordPress themes look great, and so do your avatars.

Is your Quotes page really necessary? To me, it’s just filler content.

Your LiveJournal overrides are very good.

The Junk Drawer just seems like more filler content.

Links

Everything seems fine here, but I’m curious to know why Harlequin Girl and Oipom don’t get captions while the other personal sites do? Keeping with continuity wouldn’t hurt, would it?

Coding

Your main page has 25 XHTML 1.0 Transitional errors. I know that you said that you worry more about accessibility more than validity, but having valid coding will make your site load faster, increase your search engine ranking, and more. But of course, it’s your decision, and you can continue on with the way you’re coding if you choose.

Spelling/Grammar

“author of my favorite book Ender’s Game” should be “author of my favorite book, Ender’s Game”. I didn’t spot anything else.

Summary

Your photography and your graphics are amazing. Keep it up. I know that you can make much better graphics than the header image in your layout, and the brown color was not a good choice with the peach and pink. But overall, I think your site is really good. Keep up the good work.