Most of my ramblings — including topics found on NearlyANerd.com — will now be over at http://wordead.tumblr.com.

– Josh Dippold

PoliticalReps.com — Born: August 2006 – Died: June 28, 2010.

PoliticalReps.com now redirects to AllMilitary.com

[ The original PoliticalReps.com site is archived at http://politicalreps.blogspot.com ]

It was a decent run.

PoliticalReps.com was established with Blogger and FTP hosting. One day Blogger just up and refused to publish anymore. Not long after Blogger decided to scrap FTP hosting. Attempts to migrate to WordPress with a pathetic, cut-rate host proved aggravating beyond all toleration.

Political Reps.com now welcome AllMilitary.com as its redirect. Political Reps.com shifted its focus to the U.S. Military in April 2008 so a transition to AllMilitary.com is only natural.

All that is really lost are any new site updates; several good links to the site — including a coveted link from Wikipedia — and media once hosted on the site, like pictures, images, the occasional video and MP3, etc.  Most of what remains of the original site still resides at http://politicalreps.blogspot.com . . . for now.

So long.

“Old” Diet A & W Root Beer can design

“New” Diet A & W Root Beer can design

I purchase soda for the office so I see several types soda pour down the gullets of thirsty employees.  The diet A&W root beer redesign caught my eye.  Both are particularly ugly, but the “new” even more so.  I think the brown wooden panels are suppose to emulate barrel slats but look more like 1970s era basement panels.

Also, if anyone can tell me why WordPress went and flipped the “new” picture, or how to rotate it within WordPress, please leave a comment explaining.  I took the picture vertically with my iPhone.  It displays vertically on thumbnails and in Mac’s Preview app.  But it turns horizontal when using WordPress’s Upload/Insert button on the visual tab.

A while back I was chatting with some folks about how somebody needs to come up with a program that easily allows you to churn out WordPress templates with little to no programing skills. It seems Artisteer now does just this.

Only I can’t use it now because it is Windows only.  So feel free to relate your experiences with it in the comments.  Is Artisteer a beginners only product or is it robust enough for professionals?  Does it integrate well with WordPress?  What do some of the final results look like?

You can also design Joomla and Drupal templates with Artisteer.

Below, a program screen shot:

Funny stuff.  The Asian characters below are what I get when I try dragging links from Firefox into Open Office (where they look normal) then into Word Press.  And I even tried saving as a Word document then using the “Paste from Word” button in Word Press.

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Update: The Asian characters show up in the WYSIWYG Word Press editor, but, when published, show up as mostly question marks.  Either I’m doing something wrong, or Word Press or Open Office (or both) need a fix.  This is all on a iMac BTW.

Chromium

Slashdot has word of Chromium, a port of the Google Chrome browser for Linux and Mac from Codeweavers.

I’m using it on my Mac as I type this post.  Chromium let me insert images via the “Add media” feature in WordPress, which is more than what Firefox and Safari let me do the other day (i.e., Firefox and Safari were not allowing the inserting of images.  I had to use the Opera browser for this to work.)

Chromium appears to be using X11 and is not Mac native, yet.  A Q and A from the Codeweavers site:

Q. Are there native Linux and Mac versions of Chromium available?

A. Not yet. Google has announced plans to support native Mac and Linux versions of Chromium, but they have yet to be released. CrossOver Chromium, however, runs the Windows version of Chromium natively on both Mac and Linux.

It doesn’t appear to be rock solid either.  It won’t copy URLs out of the address bar for me; when clicking on the top bar of Chromium from another window, the whole window wants to move instead of just selecting Chromium; and it will crash every time I open a new tab, try clicking in the unusable search box, then try typing and going anywhere in the address bar.  And this all happened when I was in the process of typing this post.  If I may be so brash as to use an Internet cliche: epic fail.

But hey, at least it’s a start, right?