Max Riffner

The Parlor

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Tech Blues and Elation

Uhn! Quick Step is up! Step up and read the first page! Be back next Thursday for a new page. I’d like to thank soul brothers Shawn and Kenneth for linking to Quick Step and getting the word out there.

So that’s good.

What was bad was actually getting the first page done. I do all of my comic and illustration work in Adobe Illustrator CS, and well, Illustrator has not been playing nice with Mac OS X Tiger, putting it mildly. I’ve had issues with the program creating temp files all over the place for awhile, but of course, when it came to crunch time, my computer locked up and I had to Restart. That’s bad. Mac’s OS is built so that if an application is giving you a hard time, it isn’t interdependent on the operating system. You can switch over to the Finder app and Force Quit the application that is giving you a hard time, thus making it so you really should never have to restart from a crash. In theory, you should never crash.

So after confirming my worst fears in several forums, that there is no solution to this yet, I just muddled through it all as best I could. Every time I drew a garbage can, I saved. Every lamp post, I saved. Every window, I saved.

As you can imagine, this sucked.

Once I had completed the page, I had a folder full of temp files to discard, but at least I didn’t have any more machine lock-ups after I started constantly saving and turning on Version Cue. Version Cue is some Adobe app that comes with CS, and I’m not even sure what it does. Some people in the forums suggested turning that on.

After that, you would think I would be a little technology weary. Yesterday however, after Kenneth’s suggestion and help, I upgraded this site to the latest version of Textpattern. This is something I normally dread. Textpattern in the past has been wonderful to work with once it has been set up. Getting it up and running though has always been a complete pain in my ass, specifically with getting clean URLs working.

Wow. This new version rocks!

I got rid of all of my weird hacks and duct tape code I used to get it working how I wanted before. This thing works out of the box exactly how I’ve always wanted it to. Huge improvement. The Textpattern team has really outdone themselves and solidified my decision for going with Textpattern for my site management over a year ago now. It just works great.

I love it when a tool works so well like this. I wish all of my tools worked this well.

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