Fool's April: the blog by kwugirl

...where nothing is sufficiently foolproof for the sufficiently talented fool

Content

About fool's april

This website is my personal blog. Feel free to link me, at http://www.kwugirl.com/blog/. The index file may change so that's what you should set the link to. I'd also like to link to this Blogger's Disclaimer which sums up everything. I try to post at least a few times a week, but it ebbs and flows, as you can tell by scrolling quickly through the master archives list. The quotes in the sidebar are generally snippets of conversation between my friends and me that I find to be really funny. Mostly they showcase our dorkiness. I hope they make you laugh at least a little bit. Should you be so inclined, the archives for the funny blog are here. I may organize it into its own blog someday with beautiful categories and whatnot, or include in the archives here somehow, but that's probably not happening very soon.

view

Best viewed using a monitor resolution of at least 1024x768, although it should be fine at lower resolutions too (just need to scroll sideways a bit, that's all). I'm not sure about compatibility among different web browsers yet, but it should be good to go in browsers that are any good because this site is Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional! The CSS in the stylesheet used is also completely valid CSS.

creation

This version, titled "Lovely Lady" was created the weekend of 2/12/05. The previous design, circles are happy, had been up for over a year. I had tried many times to create something new--I wanted it to be retro and cute yet also stylish and clean--but it took awhile.

The lady drawing is from the lovely ladiez notecard set by hemline stationery. Using Photoshop, I deleted the white space along the outline through to a transparent background and then created layer filled with solid pink over it. Then I changed the 2nd layer to have the "Lighten" effect, which made the originally blue and yellow lines all pink.

Tip for making random striped background: select all the colors that you want to use. Make little boxes of color (just make a new img, maybe 100px by 100px, and fill with the color) for handy reference. Get a strip of blank canvas (height doesn't matter that much; width should be as long as you want the pattern to be). Set the rectangular selection too to a fixed width and height, where the width is about the widest stripe you want to have and the height is the height of your blank canvas. Now random select parts of the canvas and fill in selections of the canvas with the first color, then the second color, etc. until you've used all your colors and filled up the canvas. Voila! To use it in Photoshop, select the canvas and go to Edit--Define pattern. Whenever you need an area to filled by this pattern, select the area and go to Edit--Fill--Contents--Use--Pattern and select your custom pattern from the thumbnails.

Fonts: Edwardian Script ITC for the 'F' in the title, FontDinerDotCom Sparkly for the rest of the title. The sparkles above the letters were used to create the dividers in the sidebar. I used the non-sparkly version, FontDinerDotCom, for the tagline. Banner created in Photoshop 8.0.

For the coding of this site I used SubEthaEdit which was very convenient with the color coding. I highly recommend the program Araneae (ah-RAN-ee-ay) for those people who use Windows. The nifty tabs on the bottom and the previews are the best. Not to mention the insertion of images and the click and drag to move parts. Much easier than notepad, but still simple. I can no longer use it myself because I switched over to a Mac, but Araneae is one of the few regrets I have from the switch. Also, this site (and pretty much all the ones on this domain) is powered by Movable Type 3.14. The thumbnail on the side is of the weekly photo over at the photolog. The funny snippets of conversation is also a separate blog. These two separate blogs are incorporated here through the use of SSIs (Server Side Includes).

name

While I was in Boston in summer of 2002 for PROMYS, all around there were these orange stickers with "fooled by april" printed on them (white). At that time I was trying to plan kwugirl.com because I was itching for that satisfied feeling that comes from a good code. Anyway, I needed a name because I didn't really like "sunny days" from old ithaca-child.net anymore. And you say "april fools!" but this is flipped. It's stuck for a long time now and I still don't hate it, so it stays.