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· Tech: Improved post thumbnail capture
· Tech: We now have a label cloud!
· Culture Notes: Election 2008
· Just Notes: This that and the other
· Tech: Label reorganization
· Tech: New post preview feature part 3
· Beauty Notes: Our own video!
· Tech: New post preview feature part 2
· Tech: New post preview feature
· Some notes on the origin of this site.
· We've pimped our MySpace profile.
· New feature on our front page
· MySpace, man...
· The Lipstick Page Forums on MySpace!
· Save The Lipstick Page Forums Beauty & Fashion Blog posts to del.icio.us!
Comments
· March 5, 2008 4:41 PM by
Dain
· March 5, 2008 8:53 PM by
Colleen Shirazi
· March 5, 2008 9:08 PM by
Dain
· March 5, 2008 9:30 PM by
Colleen Shirazi
· February 12, 2008 6:22 AM by
Kenny Surtani
· February 12, 2008 12:27 PM by
Colleen Shirazi
· February 12, 2008 6:38 PM by
Dain
· February 12, 2008 11:10 PM by
Colleen Shirazi
· January 22, 2008 9:33 AM by
Dain
· January 25, 2008 9:04 PM by
Colleen Shirazi
· January 9, 2008 1:57 AM by
Dain
· January 9, 2008 2:28 AM by
Colleen Shirazi
· January 9, 2008 2:33 AM by
Dain
· December 31, 2007 6:40 PM by
Dain
· January 1, 2008 12:39 AM by
Colleen Shirazi
· December 28, 2007 10:47 PM by
Dain
· December 28, 2007 11:30 PM by
Colleen Shirazi
· December 28, 2007 11:52 PM by
Dain
· December 29, 2007 12:02 AM by
TheBroadroom.Net
· December 29, 2007 12:06 AM by
Dain
· December 29, 2007 12:19 AM by
Colleen Shirazi
· December 29, 2007 12:36 AM by
Dain
· November 10, 2007 7:41 PM by
Dain
· November 10, 2007 8:43 PM by
Colleen Shirazi
· November 5, 2007 5:10 PM by
Dain
· November 5, 2007 10:38 PM by
Colleen Shirazi
· October 4, 2007 3:37 AM by
Dain
· October 4, 2007 12:46 PM by
Colleen Shirazi
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Tech: Improved post thumbnail capture
Posted by Colleen Shirazi, Monday, March 17, 2008 8:29 PM (Eastern)
It looks as if our friends at artViper have improved their screenshot script. In exchange for a modicum of branding, they now capture screenshots of posts with videos in them.
At least I hope that's what's going on. I manually recaptured the thumbnails that would recapture, and queued the rest, so it's going to be a while (likely a few days) before I'll be able to see if the new script works consistently, but it looks promising.
Labels: tech
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Tech: We now have a label cloud!
Posted by Colleen Shirazi, Monday, March 10, 2008 8:42 PM (Eastern)
It's on the front page: The Lipstick Page Forums
Labels: tech
Culture Notes: Election 2008
Posted by Colleen Shirazi, Wednesday, March 05, 2008 4:30 PM (Eastern)
rotfl! You've got to love New York.
I signed us up for a RedLasso account. It isn't the veritable Youtube I thought it would be, but it's not bad. You get feeds from some of the bigger news stations, plus Comedy Central and, of all things, E!. You may then make your own clips.
Labels: culture notes, tech
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March 5, 2008 4:41 PM, Dain said...
Eh, the major networks trawl Youtube. You can't find a stitch of anything from Comedy Central on there for long. March 5, 2008 8:53 PM, Colleen Shirazi said...
Eh...well I don't know, I suppose she could have "had some work done." It's become quite common, to the point I don't notice as much. March 5, 2008 9:08 PM, Dain said...
Hahaha... March 5, 2008 9:30 PM, Colleen Shirazi said...
Weeellll...Hollywood. In Northern Cal, it's not as prevalent, but I'd say getting procedures done is pretty common in Southern Cal. |
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Just Notes: This that and the other
Posted by Colleen Shirazi, Monday, February 11, 2008 9:09 PM (Eastern)
Wearing this necklace:
Though I photographed it with the earrings, no way would I wear them together. One of my (infinite) future projects is to design a pair of 14KT gold earrings, without paying 14KT gold prices. Thinking of covering goldfilled wire hoops with karat gold beads, which are relatively inexpensive. For the hoops pictured, I now use a double loop design at the top (keeps the little end from popping out, without massive hammering).
Listening to this:
So far so good. It's time-consuming of course, since the only real way to test it out is to listen to it from a certain point forward (some of the songs "stick" too much for my taste). And you're limited to the songs you can find. Early U2, for example, is in short supply. I had to laugh when I heard the Peaches collaboration version of "Kiss Kiss Kiss"--it was so tame compared to the original. Yet spare and catchy, and ultimately likable.
Labels: indie, jewelry, just notes, music, tech
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February 12, 2008 6:22 AM, Kenny Surtani said...
Have you ever realized that when you buy readymade suits you get a choice of only a few colors & styles, also finding the perfect fit are quite difficult? Wouldn’t it be better to choose from over 2000 different British & Italian fabrics and get a tailor made suit at a similar price that you pay for readymade suits? February 12, 2008 12:27 PM, Colleen Shirazi said...
Normally I'd zap this comment right off the blog; it's pure advertising. SO PLEASE DON'T ADD ANY MORE COMMENTS LIKE IT. February 12, 2008 6:38 PM, Dain said...
Yeah... my friend Cathy, who spent a year in HK, says that women take the fat issue of Vogue, go straight to these tailors, and knock an entire wardrobe off. ; ) February 12, 2008 11:10 PM, Colleen Shirazi said...
Fan-freakin'-tastic. |
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Tech: Label reorganization
Posted by Colleen Shirazi, Tuesday, January 29, 2008 9:36 PM (Eastern)
We are currently reorganizing, and streamlining, our blogger labels. It'll probably take a few days to come up with the final version.
Labels: tech
Tech: New post preview feature part 3
Posted by Colleen Shirazi, Monday, January 21, 2008 7:31 PM (Eastern)
Tech: New post preview feature
Tech: New post preview feature part 2
I've added a new feature to the blogger labels list. From now on, all labels with 10 or more posts will automatically generate a post-preview page. Plus these labels are now colored blue.
Labels: tech
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January 22, 2008 9:33 AM, Dain said...
Another great little feature... Thanks, Colleen, for all your hard work! January 25, 2008 9:04 PM, Colleen Shirazi said...
Always nice to hear. :) |
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Beauty Notes: Our own video!
Posted by Colleen Shirazi, Tuesday, January 08, 2008 3:51 PM (Eastern)
Home hair color stuff
I had to figure out a way of converting analog tape (VHS and mini DV) to digital. I got the device (it's monumentally simple, all you need is either the red, yellow and white cable connection, or S-video) and tried it out on a mini DV camcorder.
The capture is straightforward, but the editing software (Pinnacle) requires more memory than I have on this computer. Not to worry...it has a patch (which you must download, since it doesn't work if you don't)...less memory makes the program slightly slower when you're running it, but as you can see, it does work.
This is what I switched to when L'Oreal discontinued the only light beige shade of the Feria color liquids. It's supposed to lift four levels, not the customary two or three, and these people aren't kidding. The color looks dark when it's still in your hair, but my hair came out lighter than I was planning on. Oh well, live and learn.
I haven't bought color kits in years; not only are the components much cheaper, you can easily mix the exact amount you need.
Labels: beauty notes, hair, l'oreal, tech, tutorial
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January 9, 2008 1:57 AM, Dain said...
Hehehe... Pleased to meet you! January 9, 2008 2:28 AM, Colleen Shirazi said...
lol! Yeah, I think it is kind of weird to see someone on video after all these years. :) January 9, 2008 2:33 AM, Dain said...
I thought the same thing... There might be a lot of possibilities in this. |
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Tech: New post preview feature part 2
Posted by Colleen Shirazi, Monday, December 31, 2007 5:51 PM (Eastern)
(see Tech: New post preview feature)
Okee dokee, looks like our screenshot thumbnail feature has begun to kick in. Above is a screenshot of the screenshots, which will in turn become a screenshot for the tech label, if all goes well. :)
Ideally, we would like to host the script for this ourselves, as well as the screenshot images, but using a remote service for this is currently the fastest way to implement this feature.
Labels: tech
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December 31, 2007 6:40 PM, Dain said...
Fan-fucking-tastic! Great work, Colleen! January 1, 2008 12:39 AM, Colleen Shirazi said...
Always nice to hear. :D |
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Tech: New post preview feature
Posted by Colleen Shirazi, Friday, December 28, 2007 6:06 PM (Eastern)
This blog has been around since April 2005, with us steadfastly throwing posts into it; even without going back and labeling all of the older posts (since we predate Blogger's label feature), you're still talking about what is becoming a massive number of posts.
Today I added a post-preview feature on the label-indexing pages (for example, beauty notes). It's still in the rough stages; as it stands, the feature has been implemented for all of the labels that use indexing to begin with.
Labels: tech
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December 28, 2007 10:47 PM, Dain said...
It looks great (as always), but I think you should separate the posts with plain breaks rather than lines, more in keeping with the aesthetics of the rest of the site. I really like how it shows the title and the date on one side. It's really organized in a very visual way. December 28, 2007 11:30 PM, Colleen Shirazi said...
How about now? It's a good point, about the overall look of the site. December 28, 2007 11:52 PM, Dain said...
Too close, I think. My eye is a little confused as it skips across the break from title/date to preview. But 2 might be too much? Is a 1.5 break possible? December 29, 2007 12:02 AM, TheBroadroom.Net said...
It's by the pixel? (It's me btw, too lazy to log out.) I had it pad 5 pixels, now it's 7. Lmk what you think... December 29, 2007 12:06 AM, Dain said...
Pixels are even better. Ah, the wondrous and infinitely customizable internet! December 29, 2007 12:19 AM, Colleen Shirazi said...
Now it is 9... December 29, 2007 12:36 AM, Dain said...
Looks good! |
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Some notes on the origin of this site.
Posted by Colleen Shirazi, Saturday, November 10, 2007 5:36 PM (Eastern)
| Four stages of acceptance: i) this is worthless nonsense; ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view; iii) this is true, but quite unimportant; iv) I always said so. -- J.B.S. Haldane, Journal of Genetics #58, 1963, p.464 |
This is a quote from the first website I ever did, in 1998, when I was taking a Perl class. I put up the original site on the old host of thebroadroom.net; now I can't find it (it was small, a few HTML pages and a script). Okay I could find it, were I willing to dig out the Win95 machine. The jokes page survived, albeit without its smiley-face background (I really can't find that).
I've often thought of that snippet o' wisdom, over the past nine years. If I give it any serious thought, it perfectly sums my interest in the Web to begin with. Perhaps I've always seen it as an escape from mediocrity, much as I saw programming as a similar escape. The day the Internet becomes just another channel for hot air, is the day I lose my interest in it.
It's odd but it's only now I consciously realize what attracted me to The Lipstick Page ("Josephine" is me in the above screenshot; I invented a screen name based on my Java professor's name). At the time, there was Beauty Buzz, and it seemed to me there were other beauty messageboards about, such as iCompact (which I stupidly thought was part of ivillage). Later on, there were Makeupalley and Faceonline.
Why the Lipstick Page then? Part of it was the script. Besides LP, only Makeupalley hosted their own script. Everyone else used remotely-hosted scripts. (iCompact hosts their own, and possibly always did; again I was too dumb to investigate them back then.) Makeupalley surpassed LP in developing an image library and a product reviews script; hence, when thebroadroom took over LP in early 2004, those were the first two features I added.
I suppose my point is that it's easy to look at the surface of something, and less easy to comprehend the engineering behind it. The earlier Internet was dominated by technical people, for obvious reasons. The "new" Net is equally as dominated, but far less obviously so.
Ever wonder where this came from?
A labels list is not a standard feature of ftp blogger.com accounts. It comes with paid blogging, or Blogspot blogs, but the former involves file size limits and expenses, while the latter means your content is owned by Blogger, and whatever extra features you might want are going to cost you.
It's a useful feature; I made it.
Of course if you're going to make it, you should make it better, so I added the feature of indexing some of the label pages. Rather than having to load the label page and then go through it, the user can peruse a list of links:
beauty notebook
beauty notes
In the first example, we present a nice listing of all the Beauty Notebooks. In the second, you're talking about a ginormous label page that would be time-consuming to load and sift through; moreover, the label pages are limited as to how many posts are printed on them, where the script-based listing has no limit.
These are some small examples of the technology, and the ideology, behind the site.
Labels: administrative, tech
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November 10, 2007 7:41 PM, Dain said...
: ) Colleen does amazing and meticulous work on this site. November 10, 2007 8:43 PM, Colleen Shirazi said...
Thanks...I'm, ah, looking for a job. lol Thought it couldn't hurt to summarize some of the technical aspects. |
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We've pimped our MySpace profile.
Posted by Colleen Shirazi, Sunday, November 04, 2007 7:16 PM (Eastern)
The Lipstick Page Forums on MySpace
Once in a while you've got to pimp your profile. Now we have a handy slide show highlighting features of the site:
Labels: administrative, tech
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November 5, 2007 5:10 PM, Dain said...
99 years old! LOL! November 5, 2007 10:38 PM, Colleen Shirazi said...
Aw man, this thing ate my comment! |
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New feature on our front page
Posted by Colleen Shirazi, Friday, November 02, 2007 6:58 PM (Eastern)
If you haven't been entering the site through our front page, I highly recommend it. Not only do you get all of the site features syndicated at a glance, you may now also search all of the features at once using our new Google Custom Search engine.
I put up the overlay one, which doesn't seem particularly amenable to configuration (it's a new feature), but you do get a cool overlay for the initial search results.
Labels: administrative, tech
MySpace, man...
Posted by Colleen Shirazi, Thursday, October 04, 2007 2:42 AM (Eastern)
From The Lipstick Page Forums MySpace.
Generator courtesy FriendsterForum.com
Labels: administrative, tech
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October 4, 2007 3:37 AM, Dain said...
Heh, I haven't even used that perfume pic yet. ; ) October 4, 2007 12:46 PM, Colleen Shirazi said...
Did you notice you can "turn" the cube manually with your mouse? |
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The Lipstick Page Forums on MySpace!
Posted by Colleen Shirazi, Thursday, September 20, 2007 7:07 PM (Eastern)
We have a MySpace! (Also permanently linked to from the left-hand side menu.)
Labels: administrative, tech
Save The Lipstick Page Forums Beauty & Fashion Blog posts to del.icio.us!
Posted by Colleen Shirazi, Thursday, September 13, 2007 2:38 PM (Eastern)
Now you can save your favorite LPF blog posts to del.icio.us! They don't actually have this feature in Blogger.com (at least not for the FTP accounts, not sure about BlogSpot), so I had to slap together a few variables, but it seems to work. :)
Labels: administrative, tech
