One Gigantic Brain-Fart Later, and the Archive Gizmotron is Done!

As I pointed out on Friday, the installation of Autodesk AutoCAD Inventor LT was a dismal failure, so I went about finishing up my Archive Gizmotron.

Then it happened. A brain fart. Not your average, normal brain fart….this one was a doosey.

It took me quite a few hours to get the POS working the way I wanted…..before the brain-fart. Melding WordPress plug-ins with a website that is less than blogesqe in its structure can be daunting……but in the end, I had a perfectly functioning hack of a WordPress plug-in up & running …..at about 1:00 in the morning.

So the next morning I got back at it to finish things up and go live with the gizmo. I started by adding all of the elements (2) that make up the Gizmo into the website’s CSS Sprite (a conglomerate image that dramatically speeds up website response times by reducing HTTP requests by using one image to represent most or all of the graphics for a website). The image below shows what it looks like …

This is a CSS Sprite

… and it appeared as though things would work just fine, as is normal. But that wasn’t how it went down. Not by a long shot. It just did not work! I tried everything I could think of, yet the test page continued to only display a chunk of the upper left corner of the image (the chunk shown at the top of this page). It took almost eight hours of trying this, that and the other thing —-to no avail. I even looked to see if Google changed their “do no evil” policy, and was now in fact doing evil by screwing with the way my pages display (the jury is still out on that).

So……..after eight hours of getting absolutely nowhere, I finally compared the CSS for this new gizmo with previous stuff that was working, and there it was. It looked too easy. I had the non-working code: background-position: -263 -144; —-and all of the other code explicitly called out units, in this case pixels i.e. -263px -144px;. So I added the px suffix to the numbers …and it worked! Almost half a day wasted, but in the end, I guess it was worth it.

But all of this website work has built up, and I am now a bit backed up in my writing andmodeling …. and for at least this week, things will likely remain so. I am a chaperon for two field trips at my daughter’s school this week –both being all-day events. But in spite of that I will be getting into the configuration of the iDrawer starting tomorrow evening —-after the Zoo trip. Lions and Tigers and Bears, oh my! With seven year-olds!