Web design & Coding

Well, only in part. I often find myself scratching my head when shopping: I stand in front of a bookshelf or a DVD shelf and can’t for the life of me remember if I’ve bought a specific book or a specific movie.

B.N. (Before N73) I used to carry a small note where I’d listed all the King books I have and, more recently, all King movies I have. Nowadays it’s easier for me to remember which King books I don’t have (that is, only Cycle of the Werewolf and any recently released — currently Blaze), so the book list is pretty much unnecessary. I haven’t listed other books I have because books are things I remember more easily. A.N. (Anno N73) I’ve surfed to my Stephen King site, to the Bookshelf page and waited, waited, waited for the pretty pictures to load. I don’t have to worry about moving too many bits because I’ve never come close to the 25 Mb per month I pay for, but it’s the wait that bothers me.

My “Achilles heel” in the remembering department are movies. Although my movie collection is small by movie-buff standards, I often buy a DVD and put it on the shelf without watching it right away. I also record quite a bit from TV. And I don’t usually have my sister with me (she remembers my movie purchases better because she usually watches all additions as soon as I bring them home; movie-deprived, that one).

Therefore, I decided to create a mobile-friendly version of my movie and King book collections. Possibly in the future I’ll make the different pages modular so I only have to update one or two files but for now the mobi site is plain and simple HTML. I set the font size to 60% so that I don’t have to zoom out on the phone. (I view pages at 50% zoom.)

Without further ado, I present:mobi.all-things-me.net. Pretty much for my viewing pleasure only. The movie collection isn’t complete because I haven’t listed all my VHSs (bought and taped) or all movies I’ve recorded from TV.

Here’s a snapshot of it on my mobile:

For a long while I’ve been wanting to re-do my site — the blog, more specifically. I try and sketch, find colour schemes, and start coming up with the basic structure. The problem is, I have no graphic design talent.

Finding nice colours is quite easy, there are lots of tools to make it even easier, too. I have collected hundreds of fonts through the years and there are the selected few that I really like. But after those are taken care of, I should start making my site pretty. That’s when I hit the wall.

I can’t draw (seriously), I possibly can doodle but doodling doesn’t make pretty. Of course, I could make my site with only coloured boxes, but that’s quite dull.

I took a look at my past designs and I may just resort to using one of the old ones (coded better, of course). However, I’d really really like to create something new. Maybe I’ll finally continue with the design which was in the “final polishings” stage two years ago(!!!) — if I can find the files, that is.

How do you do it? Are you one of the lucky ones who have an artistic bone in their body? Do you use some sort of resources to help with the design?

[Edit May 18] And where do you get an idea for the design?! I’ve only managed to think of the main colour so far. Argh! [/Edit]

I had received the following spam comment which was sort of refreshing after the “Hi Jane! I like your site!”, “Best site I ever seen!”, “May we exchange links” comments that come in the dozens.

HiHi
I’m really stupid
Yestarday I’ve got married and
today Im going make money online
So stupid
O-O-_ohh Mein Gott really you can see

Mein Gott, I’m so glad to have spam blocks.

I don’t really understand what this means:

Your site is very cognitive. I think you will have good future.:)

What is a ‘cognitive’ site?

But this is the most idiotic of all:

I just don’t have anything to say right now.

HTML comments show up in the source, so what if you want to remove text from the page without actually deleting it from the files?

<?php if (false) {?>
  (content to be removed…)
<?php } ?>

Nowadays I can’t help but feel like a procrastinator in everything else but work. The infamous magazine article is still waiting for a final glance which shouldn’t be such a big hurdle but in reality I’m terrified. An ontology is waiting to be built, an article waiting to be read, and I haven’t played in ages (except Minesweeper)!

Yesterday I did manage to finish something: a website for a relative, an entrepreneur. Usually I hate taking the smaller screens and Internet Explorers in consideration but this time I had to because of the target audience. It wasn’t so bad after all — no mysterious spaces after I put a doctype on the page. I even left the font size to default and it scales to humongous proportions (on Mozilla and Firefox). Then again, having the doctype in place, I couldn’t do trickery in order to get the smallish boxish page center vertically. Oh well, usability over looks — that’s the way to go. It’s valid XHTML and looks alright even when you remove all the images. No fancy-schmancy JavaScript either. I even made a special stylesheet for printing! Ah, gotta pat myself on the shoulder for once.

Here’s a little tasting. Nothing fancy.

Today I read the strangest definition for ‘blog’: a website, which is regularly updated. Which means this — currently — isn’t a blog.

I clicked on to Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes from Blogging Pro. An interesting read but I’ve raged about item 2 in the past: using a photo. I understand that people want to see faces, but who wants to see my mug? I don’t! How shocking would it be if I posted my photo and you’d see that I’m actually male?

I am, however, going to implement some of the enhancement ideas. When I was designing this site, I didn’t find a good colour for visited links (I did notice that some of the links, in blog content, lose underlining after a visit) so I forgot about it (accidentally!). Also I’m going to try and list some of the “must-read” entries but I’m afraid I might not find any (This is a blog for dog’s sake! Not a magazine. Why do people take blogs so seriously? It’s supposed to be fun, not 2nd or nth job (for most)). I did have a category for these, something like Minna’s picks, but apparently I removed it at some point (or it doesn’t have any posts!).
(There’s a list in the archives now.)

Jafer woke me up from my work-daze. In addition to not having written in over half a month (I honestly don’t know how that’s possible), I haven’t finished a book since July! (I’ll need to check my papery booklog, but the one here says July.)

I had hard time not laughing today. A group of people were talking and roaring with laughter (at work, of course) and I was sitting at my desk. Because I wasn’t in the group I couldn’t laugh along but I kept bursting so I had to leave for a while to cool off. I went and washed my coffee mug. Interesting, innit?

I’m the webmistress of my aunt’s website (for a stable) and I’m currently updating the photo section. There was a new photo to add with their horse and a donkey — and an enormous pile of doo-doo.

Living the last day of my Photoshop trial I decided to use the Healing Brush Tool (don’t know if Adobe Elements has it, I hope so), so I wiped the pile (no pun intended) off the photo. I hope it’s ok with my aunt.

Before:

After:

Quaint, isn’t it?

Ahh, a potentially heated discussion at the WP forums — again (it’s like should you or shouldn’t you target external links to _blank). Table layouts and the importance of CSS.

Well, you know I think people who can’t write HTML by hand are not supposed to make homepages either, but they do (I don’t know about electronics so I don’t go fixing my TV! I know borking your code doesn’t kill you, though). They get into something like WP which, to satisfy their grandiose ideas, requires some knowledge of PHP, CSS, and HTML. If they don’t know about those and are scared to get elbow-deep in them (I think I hadn’t seen any PHP before WP, but because I know a few programming languages, the syntax came naturally), they flock the forums with lots of things they want to achieve and need help to achieve them (“Help!!!!1 this is very important! I need it done today!”).

But I do understand people who are just starting in the wonderful world of web design, who maybe know the basics but not the more “advanced” stuff like CSS. It maybe be too much to them to get an all-CSS layout, especially if it needs to be a bit on the complex side. Layouts with tables are easy! You aren’t supposed to make them, but boy do they scale nicely and you can do all kinds of cool images for the layout and just slice them up and whack ‘em in a table. I know I’m maybe just trying to justify my own table layouts which I have been too lazy to change, but CSS gets frustrating at times. Maybe I should just get a few recipes up my 3/4-length sleeve that I can happily type around without going through the trial and error from scratch every time.

I made a random header image script for Ami’s site today. The purple ball of yarn photo is still my all time favourite, but Ami is always so cute and cuddly that I wanted to put more images there. The script is very simple:

<?php // Random header image
/* there are 3 pictures to choose from, so number is either 0, 1 or 2 */
$i = rand(0,2);
if ( $i == 0 ) { ?>
  <img src=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_directory’); ?>/images/header_01.jpg” alt=”Caramel Ears” />
<?php } else if ( $i == 1 ) { ?>
  <img src=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_directory’); ?>/images/set2/header_01.jpg” alt=”Caramel Ears” />
<?php } else if ( $i == 2 ) { ?>
  <img src=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_directory’); ?>/images/set3/header_01.jpg” alt=”Caramel Ears” />
<?php } ?>

As there is also the horizontal menu that has part of the image as a background, I had to move that bit of CSS from the style sheet file to the index file:

<div id=”nav” style=”background-image:url(<?php bloginfo(‘template_directory’); ?>/images/<?php if ($i == 1) { ?>set2/<?php } else if ($i == 2 ) { ?>set3/<?php } ?>header_02.jpg);”>

That’s a bit crammed but I didn’t want to make it as long and elaborate as for the header image.

Anyway, this post wasn’t about my amazing coding abilities but the pictures: GO SEE!

I’m liking this current layout — which I’ve had for 7 months! — so much that I find myself keeping away from the new layout under development. It’s pretty much done, but there’re some things that bug me, and the final polishings are the most “tiring” of the whole process (type a little, refresh site, type, refresh ad infinitum). If I had another site that I updated as much as this, I could make a layout for it. I’m too pleased with my current layouts (except for the X-Files site, gosh) so I don’t have an urge to change them. The XF site is too much work to change (unbelievable amount of graphics) and it’s not unbearably bad (the header images are bad).

Someone hire me as a web designer!! Kidding!