Blog

24/08/06

With another burst of energy I've been able to learn PHP and MySQL. This has been useful as it has allowed me to start building a shopping cart for E.S.Photography.

I'm very happy to have learnt PHP as I have been wanting to learn a more powerful programming language for a while. I had tried C++ before but that proved too tiring at the time, as it turned out though the time with C++ helped me to learn PHP. There are many similarities between programming languages, variables, loops, general logical structure, etc, because of that I had a nice head start.

My energy has also been generally a bit higher. I've even made a website advertising my web design business as I think I will have the energy to make the odd site for customers. The site is called Baldock Web Development. With all this going on I don't think I'll have the time to keep up this blog, not that I have been particularly good at posting anyway, so goodbye and may your pursuits be fruitful!

27/05/06

After finishing the update I was having a think about methods to stop people saving the large images on their site (as they are copyrighted). The javascript methods that I found to disable right click didn't appeal as they have negative side effects (like not being able to right click and open a link in a new page). I started thinking about doing something with CSS and I worked out a simple technique that worked like a charm.

The method involves setting the image you want people to see as a background-image of an element, I used <p>, then putting a 1 pixel transparent gif <img> element inside that with the same width and height. e.g.

This is an example of the technique, try saving the image.

19/05/06

I have just finished redesigning the main pages of E.S.Photography. I removed the table based layout, tidied up the code and added CSS to it.

One thing that surprised me was how easy it was to make the About us page using CSS rather then a table based layout. The page is structured in such a way that it needs to conform to a grid, with a table this is often easy and I was a little aprehensive of how hard it might be to make with CSS. As it happens I think it was even faster to make using CSS then it was using tables.

Another thing I am pleased with are the new link buttons. The old ones were just images, which I have learned is very bad form as it creates accessibility issues. The new ones are made from two images and a background colour, this means I can have a nice image styled border but also make the middle change colour when you do things like hover the mouse over them.

I also spent some time making the new footer. The trouble I was having was how to make it stay on the bottom of the page even if there is very little content, like the Contact us page. I found a solution in this article and it has worked like a charm on all the browsers I have managed to test it with, though as usual it needed a hack (included in the article) to make it work with IE.

07/05/06

I got a great book yesterday, The Zen of CSS Design. It is another example of a well written and very engaging book, it is colourful light and yet has tonnes of great info inside. The concept of the book is from the css Zen Garden which is a web site that shows the power of using CSS as a method for designing web sites. The book covers things that I really need to learn now, such as colour theory, typography, layout, etc. It doesn't have a great deal of code, but you can learn that elsewhere. All in all it is a big thumbs up!

Yesterday I also found a site that showed how to make explosions in Photoshop, so I had a little mess about and added one of my Soopa-Zzap Wagonz and a home made explosion to my site's header. Whether it will be there when you read this or not is another matter, I continue to mess about with this site to learn different design/CSS techniques on a regular basis.

Energy wise I seem to be doing very well. I continue to be able to study CSS and design on an informal basis and I don't feel like I am about to crash. I've even been able to exercise a little (I must clarify, exercise for me is walking a bit in the garden not going to the gym and pumping iron), whether this is one of the first steps on the road to recovery I do not know. But if I am able to do these little bits more both physically and mentally my stamina and overall energy might improve, fingers crossed.

04/05/06

As I am getting into more in depth CSS coding things are becoming a bit complicated, I am also learning to truly loath IE. As soon as I finish getting some fancy layout working in a standards compliant browser I open it up in IE and chances are it's broken and needs to be fixed with hacks that I am trying to get my head around. If everyone used a standards compliant browser the internet would be a much richer and less bug ridden place. Opera and Firefox (see the bottom of the adds to the left to get Firefox) are great examples of free standards compliant browsers.

02/05/06

For my first entry I'll start off where I finished on my About me page.

Things have been very interesting lately. From being a rather unknowledgeable amateur in HTML and having no knowledge of CSS 3 months ago I have now finished two web sites, E.S.Photography & www.pleasureprints.co.uk, and have learnt XHTML and CSS to a good level. But by far the best bit is that this has not tired me out (I have M.E./CFS (chronic fatigue)), I'm not sure why it hasn't as I have tried studying before only to become exhausted in short order, but I'm certainly not complaining!

There is a book that has probably been key to this process, Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML, I can't emphasise enough how good this book is. It was easy to read, not the dreaded reams of text and technical jargon style, and when I had learned something it seemed to stay learned without much effort. Another book, CSS Pocket Reference, is really coming into it's own now that I have learned the basics of CSS.

I have been testing out my new knowledge on this web site, playing around with links, positioning, menus, rounded corners, etc. What I haven't done yet but really should is to put some time into making the site look good as opposed to just learning CSS techniques. Still I'm sure I'll get around to it.