thats APUWI, pronouced “ah, phooey”

I’m quitting. These templates are the death of me. I think I can hear evil laughter coming from some bastard developers all the way from Hawaii.

After mocking up versions using the static files sent to me on a cd from Hawaii, today I at last decide on a template to customize, and begin the process of using the crappy web interface to screw with a live website. I knew this could only end in tears.

So, I upload my images.. tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak… sort through the five overlapping style sheets to see what supercedes what to change my colors and still one little spot has a red link on a red background and won’t for the life of me allow me to change either color to something legible even though it DOES work on the versions sent to me on disk. As it turns out… it’s a glitch in the default of that template, set to red on red, but not JUST in the stylesheets… but also hardcoded by the developers that way BECAUSE it was wrong in the stylesheet they were sent.

See… to me hardcoding anything to prevent their alteration via stylesheet, especially when you are going to write up five separate stylesheets and label every item on the page suitably, yatta yatta, is fucking retarded. And yet, when these 24 template designs were finished by the designer in Hawaii, he zipped it all, sent it to the developers, and they at random, it seems chose items to hardcode, overriding the stylesheets. They do this for the sole reason to fuck with me, I’m certain.

And thus… I go back to the beginning, searching templates which have their hardcoded items set to something I can live with. I find one… ONE that works. The quicksearch background color is hardcoded to be a navy blue, which is relatively close to the blue I need. I create new graphics fit to this template, edit style sheets, get everything looking pretty snazzy and think I’ve got it whipped!

At this point I send my yippee I did it, take a look at it, give me praise email to everyone, bitch about what I had to work with, and spell out all the nifty options they can still customize even on this custom template.

The catch is that none of their agent sites are really live, thus we have no real agent photos up to show in the layout. The guinea pig agent site I chose has one of our celebrity-stand-in photos up, just to demo. The template I’ve chosen to modify, however, stretches the photo out, so I figure, I’ll just go upload a bigger photo.

By design, the template must have a 140 pixel wide agent photo to fit. It resizes to force the fit, thus pixelation occurs. The Agent-Photo-Uploading Web Interface, or APUWI, however, restricts the size image that can be uploaded to 109 pixels wide. Thus, by intentional design we have a template that will stretch your mugshot to a pixelated crappy version of you. Again… this is the developers just fucking with me.

Must go bang head on something now… only way to drown out the sound of their laughter.