A serious hooray for stickies

What a great way to get everything in front of me.

I've fiddled with all sorts of productivity tools and systems. My favorite hope which I've since mostly abandoned is Getting Things Done by David Allen.

I've now downloaded Stickies, free software, available at http://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk. It's completely disorganized organization, but that's exactly what I was looking for.

I want to start disorganized. I want to enter notes in the absolute most basic and messy way possible. Then I can put the pieces together how I want to afterward.

Getting organized. By starting with disorganization. I love it.

Another feature that I'm super jazzed about is the ability to add images to the notes. I found out quickly however that you can't have both images and notes in the same sticky.

Oh. The sticky that does have the image pasted into it? You can quickly crop the image by selecting a portion and pressing enter, make notations on the graphic itself and save it if you choose to (as PNG or BMP). That will make for quick documentation, I think, when working on web projects. A quick screen shot, and even faster crop, then a quick note to go with it and save. Sweet.

Creating an animated diagram of the drupal hook system.

I have some new insight into the hook system. I've read through Drupal Pro development, watched dozens of videos, and tried sample projects.

My issue the past few days has been how to present these new insights in a way that someone can 'get it' more quickly. I spent months studying the hook system (from the standpoint of a beginner php developer) and while I could make sense of some things the hook system itself evaded me.

What I was thinking of initially was making a Flash presentation, using one of the limited-functionality versions of the software to make an instructional diagram, one that had some basic animation to demonstrate what's going on the in the back end of drupal when a hook is called.

I think it's important to know the correlation. As a beginner php developer thrown at drupal due to necessity, time to gather the understandings behind the massive beast of code wasn't available to me when I needed it.

The question comes down to this: is there something that I can make an animated diagram with that isn't as expensive and convoluted as Flash is?

I'm going to check into open office. I'm not that familiar with Impress. Maybe it has the simple animation features that I'm looking for.

Links and CSS layers used with absolute positioning.

Are you having trouble with links simply not offering you the chance to click on them?

After adding a padding value to a couple of links on a wordpress blog I found that I was no longer able to click the links. The same held true after adding a margin to the same block.

The problem occurred with two elements that were position(ed): absolute(ly);. Since my renewed interest in web design and development I've primarily only worked with relative positioning I got stuck very quickly.

The problem was only in firefox. IE seems to natively support clicking links that are hidden below layers. Checking different versions of IE all worked. Have you tried out IETester? If not, you should.

Luckily because it was in firefox I was able to see clearly when using the firebug plugin that where my links became inoperable was exactly where another padded layer started. If you don't have firebug, please grab that too. It's great for design as well as debugging.

I had a hunch that simply reordering the layers by changing the position of the < div > tags in my html would fix the issue. It did, thankfully. A good note to keep for myself in the never-ending road to implementing more features for web sites.

Maybe I should have tried setting the z-index value too?