Code for corners

By the way, here's the code for the rounded corners I'm using:

.outer {display:block;}
.outer *{
display:block;
height:1px;
overflow:hidden;
font-size:.01em;
background:#DDDDDD;
}
.outer1 {
margin-left: 3px;
margin-right: 3px;
padding-right: 1px;
padding-left: 1px;
border-left: 1px solid #686868;
border-right: 1px solid #686868;
background:#aaaaaa;
}
.outer2 {
margin-left: 1px;
margin-right: 1px;
padding-right: 1px;
padding-left: 1px;
border-left: 1px solid #252525;
border-right: 1px solid #252525;
background:#b6b6b6;
}
.outer3 {
margin-left:1px;
margin-right:1px;
border-left:1px solid #b6b6b6;
border-right:1px solid #b6b6b6;;
}
.outer4 {
border-left: 1px solid #686868;
border-right: 1px solid #686868;
}
.outer5 {
border-left: 1px solid #aaaaaa;
border-right: 1px solid #aaaaaa;
}
.outerfg {background-color: #DDDDDD;}



.inner {display:block}
.inner *{
display:block;
height:1px;
overflow:hidden;
font-size:.01em;
background:#111111;
}
.inner1 {
margin-left:3px;
margin-right:3px;
padding-left:1px;
padding-right:1px;
border-left:1px solid #8e8e8e;
border-right:1px solid #8e8e8e;
background:#484848;
}
.inner2 {
margin-left:1px;
margin-right:1px;
padding-right:1px;
padding-left:1px;
border-left:1px solid #d7d7d7;
border-right:1px solid #d7d7d7;
background:#3a3a3a;
}
.inner3{
margin-left:1px;
margin-right:1px;
border-left:1px solid #3a3a3a;
border-right:1px solid #3a3a3a;
}
.inner4{
border-left:1px solid #8e8e8e;
border-right:1px solid #8e8e8e;
}
.inner5{
border-left:1px solid #484848;
border-right:1px solid #484848;
}
.innerfg{background:#111111;}

Thanks alot to the guys who created Nifty and Spiffy corners. Alessandro Fulciniti & Greg Johnson and everyone else who shares code and ideas. That's what it's all about.

Site design

I'm working on a site for one-shore, and have wasted a few days on design, but I don't know if I like it. I started with the idea of using a picture of a "shore." Here is my concept drawing:

I wasted a lot of time looking through photos on stock photo sights, flickr, and google images, but couldn't find anything quite right. I looked through a bunch of my travel photos and settled on one -- a sunset somewhere in Fiji:



It's not perfect but it'll have to do for now. Alternately I'd like a wave rolling from right to left or a smooth rock beach. Maybe have a series of images rotate like banner ads.

Getting rounded corners was a nice web 2.0 touch, and I found a cool trick with CSS on SpiffyCorners.



I decided a black background works better for the image:



Putting one rounded corner div inside another gave me the outline effect here:



I discovered with relative position -2 I could get it thinner on one side, but then it'd be thicker on the other:



Finally I figured out how to get it only 3 pixels wide, by interleaving the first 2 elements of the inner rounded box with the latter:



That took a full day. Now I'm working on the layout of the rest of the page. I was so proud of my rounded corners that I wanted to use them everywhere:



But now I'm thinking less is more. Too many corners is too "cute" and I want to look more "serious."




I'm still not sure about the black background, especially since the wiki and other tools will be a major part of the site, and it will be jarring to change. Next I'll try to turn this into a wordpress theme.

One Shore in Ecuador

We've managed to move to Ecuador and are settling in. I have an iffy internet connection which works about 75% of the time. It's usually fine except can have problems using Skype or large downloads. When it doesn't work, there's usually plenty to do, though it gets frustrating if you need to look something up or send an email.

I've managed to set up a demo install of the Mantis bug tracker at http://mantis.tools.one-shore.com or http://one-shore.com/tools/mantis. I plan to set up demos of several open source tools including bugzilla (3.0 and 2.x) and Scarab (if I can get a stable JVM on a VPS account.) As well as some test authoring and project management stuff, like dotProject and phProjekt.

Eventually I will provide hosting and what I call in my notes, for lack of a better term, a QA ASP (as in Application Service Provider.) I think that term is out of vogue nowadays. The big trick for me will be setting up reliable email. My number one employee or partner I'm looking for will be a good sysadmin with good experience handling email servers, backups, and security. I need a solid base to build on.

My number two wish (probably just a consultant) is for good graphic design. I know I'm not a designer, but hopefully no one will be scared away by my website's appearance. Maybe the product will speak for itself.