Ace In The Whole

Being injured has forced me back to the drawing boards as I realize most of my income earning eggs are in one basket. That basket is dance. I recently wanted to completely re-design and code my joshventura.com site and now has been the perfect opportunity.

When I first started revamping the site, I had to drive some negative thoughts out of my head such as: “What’s the point of making a website about me dancing if I can’t dance,” or “Damn what if I can’t use my arm for breakin again?,” what’s the point of doing the site when i have a #$%&ing separated shoulder” I decided to alter the perspective on these thoughts and instead I said to myself, “OK, I’ll redo this site as a means of motivation!! This time I’ll have the site ONLY focus on my dance and entertainment experience and not my new media skills.” It will motivate me to be the person I portray on the site therefore motivating me to GET BETTER. Well it made sense at the time!? In other words, I will have this site where it’s showing me doing all these fancy dance moves so it will motivate me to stop bitching and HEAL. Ain’t like I haven’t been injured before.

So the new site is up and running at joshventura.com. On the services page, I have a javascript image gallery that I found here. I was having some spacing issues with the css and then I noticed it wasn’t cross-browser compatible. Issues were present with older firefox versions and possibly ie6. My homie Victor (my personal pocket web genius who’s destiny is to be the first asian male on the cover of men’s health) reworked the javascript a bit and now it’s working great across all browsers. Feel free to grab the script from my site if you run into the same issues with the orginal gallery.

I stuck with the always popular slimbox for photo viewing on my media page. I also implemented videobox for the first time for overlaying vids of me “in action.” I used one stylesheet for both scripts. The one thing I would like to figure out is how to use the new HQ youtube extension with videobox. When I add the &fmt=6 or &fmt=18 to the youtube url it does not pull in the HQ version of the video. I am guessing this is a javascript fix for the video id, which of course I don’t know yet so if anyone has a fix for this holla holla holla holla. I am also considering implementing an all in one version of a media overlay script such as Lightview and or LightWindow which looks really diverse and powerful. What I needs to jew is learn some javascript!!!

The old site is here if you wanna peep it for comparisons. I felt the old site was way too busy, all over the place, cluttered is a better word. Like I was trying to hard. And I was. I was really really trying to learn some new coding techniques at the time and play with all kinds of Photoshop brushes but of course simple can be way more effective and efficient. What do you think of the new site?

As you can see this is my new blog. I haven’t written very much yet as that is at least the intention. So I upgraded to Wordpress 2.6. It was a relatively painful process AFTER I discovered the fix for a login issue. So using Firefox 3.0.1 my specific issue was that after I upgraded the database and tried to login again, it would not let me login. I cleared the cache and no workey. I had wordpress send me a new password and that was a no workey. I then went to the database to figure out my password and realized I didn’t know how. is a great little post on how to reset your password in Mysql phpMyAdmin.

After resetting the password in phpmyadmin STILL no workey. Wanna know what fixes it!! Ridiculously easy. You A) clear your cache. and then B) restart the browser! OMG folk it’s a miracle…. Truly it is. I’m out.

check it out! simple and sweet but i don’t know if considered a hack. let me know if you find any others….