Decisions Decisions

Just spent the last 7 hours (around 10:30pm-5:30am) working on setting up the blog for my site, and already have run into a couple problems.

1. The code they use for the blog info (Example here) as you can see, is just a mess. There is some order in it which I can decipher but only to the extent as "Ok, this piece prints it out as an H1 tag". I'm able to move things around and whatnot but it just makes me want to pull my hair out.


2. My site uses PHP for part of the layout, and Blogger does not like PHP. Their pages run on XML, which won't allow PHP coding on the page. :(


3. Although painful, moving the style over is doable, though since it's being external, comments would be lost. When defaulted back to blogger, the comments still showed up, but on the external, all comments went away.

All together, I think I can just have a link to the blog on my main website, linking to the blog and opening it in a new window. That way, people don't have to leave my main site, to view the blog and try to find it again. It just seems so much easier to have it hosted on blogger.com than external at the moment.



I think I should probably get some sleep now, seeing as it's close to 6am, by the time of this post. Good night, and hopefully you're not hoping to move your blog also ;)

Overview of Spring 2010

It has been a great trip in the CIT198B class. At the beginning I had a feeling I knew a lot of what was going to be taught. Some I did know, like facebook (even if it is general information, and nothing in depth like making apps for it). Others, I didn't quite know a lot that I thought I did. I had a feeling the Google Docs was just going to be like Microsoft Word / Excel / Powerpoint, but with the multiple contributors aspect. I actually learned quite a lot about those applications and how they can be useful in the real world when it comes to group thinking at work or organizations.

Now that the class is over, I thought I might stop posting, but then I thought, "Hey, I might be able to use some past assignments as part of a portfolio". So, I came up with the idea to move this blog from being hosted on Blogger, to being hosted on my own website. It would have the same style / look as the rest of the site, and would make it simpler to add posts now that I am in the feeling of posting more. This class was a great stepping stone to occasionally posting a blog post here and there, instead of a post once every few months or even years.

We'll see how easy it can be done. Making it redirect to my site was easy enough, but now the joyful task of reading the blogger css code and styling it to match my site, and not a default template.

Google Docs

Microsoft Excel worksheets brought to the collaborative groups to share ideas and content. My worksheet is based of of what type of coding someone has had experience with. Please indicate which type of programming you have done by changing the value in the cell on the table.

Link to spreadsheet

PHP

The following screencast is a little intro to what PHP is. It will discuss some of the common things that PHP can do for web designers and explain a little about how it works when interacting with databases. This will just be a short intro, as PHP can do a lot more when it comes to more advanced features, but these will be slightly more common examples that you are using even while reading this blog post.

Screencast Link

Interesting HTML/CSS Wikis

• Webdesign (Wikicomplete)


• HTML (Wikia)

Listed above are some handy wikis that deal with Web Design. Some contain information about Javascript or Php, but all of them have basic information about HTML. The first site, Webdesign from Wikicomplete, has a nice amount of pages that show some more technical features about certain tags. It shows a couple ways of using certain codes. One of the big dowfalls to this wiki though is that a lot of the pages that contain tags like "strong" or "em" haven't been created. It would be nice if people can come along and create it, but the site limits it to members, mods, or admins. And since there is only 1 person total that is a member of any of the groups, it's highly doubtful he will do it him/herself. It would be nice if it was open to the public, or restricted to certain people that were allowed to make helpful pages.

The second site, HTML from Wikia has a nice layout and updated content. It doesn't contain deprecated tags. Unlike the first site, this one is open to the public. Though there are only about 44 pages, this site looks promising if someone was willing to make a bunch of pages.

MediaWiki book report

Mediawiki, published by O’Reilly Media is a wonderful book to read if you are just starting out and learning how to use the Mediawiki software. In my opinion, it doesn’t seem to help a lot for the more advanced users who already know how to set up a basic wiki. The book covers three main topics. The first part is a general overview of what wikis are, and how to use one. The second is a more in depth reading on how to edit articles, organize pages and use templates. It’s basically more code centered than the last part. The final section is for people who want to make their own wiki, or be the administrator. It talks about installing the wiki on your website, doing maintenance and bug fixes, and overall controlling users and group.

I know a fair bit about wikis since I am active in one for a game I play, but I still have been able to find this book real handy. A lot of the editing basics and template usage has been memorized, but some of the things not used often like transcluded pages, using short urls, and editing the overall layout of the wiki so it is not default, tend to be for non basic users and the book acts as a quick reference guide with an organized table of contents. The weak points behind the book however are its lack of thorough details when describing how to do some things. For instance, under the index, under ‘Bots’, there’s a page that it says is “Creating a Bot”, but on the page it is only a brief 2 short paragraphs that talk about what the API is and it gives you a link to a site that talks about how they work but it never explains the step by step guide on how to make one. It also talks about some extensions (Parserfunctions, and DPL) which are really handy for a wiki. Although, it doesn’t explain that these aren’t part of the package that you download so you have to download them separately. All in all, the book explains the basic to semi-basic features pretty thoroughly, but is a little lacking when explaining something more advanced. It is to be expected since the book doesn’t have a big bunch of pages that it could have had.

One of the strong points of this Mediawiki book is that it doesn’t just give you a few numbered steps saying, “Do this, then do that, then do this and it should work.” The book explains what some features are, gives you examples and shows you what the result will be. It teaches you the background to editing something so you know how it works vs. how to just implement something knowing nothing about it. After reading this book, I feel like it would be beneficial, if you’re going to continue using mediawiki, to look at other more in depth books about Mediawiki and Wikis in general. Hopefully they might explain some of the things that this book has lacked.

Deprecated Tags (part 2)

This is continuing the deprecated tags post from earlier. It shows the list of tags that should not be used and the alternatives for them. Remember, this list isn't the complete thing, but it contains the most common tags that are deprecated.

<center>

As the tag name says, this was used to center items in html. It was one of the most useful tools as it would center just about anything you put inside of it's tags. For text, the alternative would be to put something like "<p align='center'>". This can also be done by css by using the "text-align:center;" code. Different browsers display the same code in weird ways so it is a hassle trying to find the correct usage that will work on each of the browsers you need it on.

<font>

Ages ago, people would use this code like <font color='someColor'> to give the text inside of it a certain color. Now that is accomplished with CSS. You would use the appropriate tag in the css style, and add the code "color:someColor;" to change it. The bonus to this, is that it affects everything on the page with that tag, and you no longer need to put the <font> tag in each section you needed it on.

<dir> and <menu>

The 'dir' and 'menu' tags were used to create unordered lists. These would be just bullets organized in one column to list items. The alternative is a shorter <ul>. You would add that to start a tag, then for each item in the tag, you use <li></li>. I'm not sure why there were 2 tags to accomplish the same thing, but now it's much easier to remember since this tag is for "U"nordered "L"ists.

Deprecated Tags (part 1)

From a past post, a couple comments led to me thinking this would be helpful, so here it is. This is a list of tags that were once used, but are now deprecated. Deprecated tags are tags that are no longer used and may someday be not functional. You could use them, as they do work, but it's best to revert to the new version which often offers more customization. I'm splitting this into 2 posts because of the amount of time it took to type up. I will finish the other part later when I find time. This list isn't complete, but it contains the most common tags that are deprecated.

<i>

This tag was used to give text a slanted look. "i" is short for italicize as most people know how it looks like. The alternative to this is now <em>. "em" stands for emphasized text. It is used the same way the 'i' tag has been used (and still used on applications like Myspace).

<u> and <strike>

These tags was used for decorating text with lines, and though underlining it still works, it is not recommended, even if you use the alternative. People generally refer to underlined text as links and could cause the person you are trying to get to read it some strain. The alternative to the 'u' tag is using Cascading Style Sheets. It takes a bit more time to type but offers more benefits. Using css, and the text "text-decoration:underline", one can achieve the same effects. The text-decoration can do four different techniques:

text-decoration:overline
text-decoration:line-through
text-decoration:underline
text-decoration:blink

<b>

Also known as the bold tag, this was used to .... well ... make text bold. The alternative is the <strong> tag, but this can also be achieved using css. Using css, it can do more than just make something bold. CSS allows you to specify a number for the boldness, 400 being normal, 700 being regular bold. Though using any of the numbers, and varieties, I have not noticed anything different so it could be browser specific.

PHP

Otherwise known as PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, is by far one of the most useful languages out there. There's practically no limit to the number of things it can do. For instance, using this blog deals with PHP. You would enter information like a blog title, and description and once you hit submit, the information is all stored in a database. The database is basically a giant table where you got different columns for things like "post number", "post title", "date of posting", "labels", etc. You could even create your own blog, quite simply from scratch. You would have to do this is you get the teacher Amir Khawaja for a GRC276 class.

The most important thing to learn, besides the codes to use, is how to use it. If you know how it will gather the information and display it, the job is half done. For the blog example, you would have these steps to understand:

1. Knowing how the information input gets stored in the database
2. Knowing how to read / access the information in the database
3. Knowing how to display the information that has been read / accessed

If you understand how something will do it's job, finding the code in a book, or online can easily be done. Then if you encounter an error, you know how it should work and can (sometimes) simply solve it.

Most of my free time when not doing some kind of designing, is spent playing games. With that, comes people from all around the world. One person I talk to often, lives in Canada and is taking an html course. She isn't majoring in web design, but it was a class she needed to learn, and I found it strange when some questions were asked. A couple questions included using the <font> and <basefont> tags.

That brought up memories of old teachers getting mad when we used such tags. It almost makes me worry if the teachers there know what they are talking about. Surely they know how to make websites and stuff, but when teaching outdated tags.... tsk tsk.

Helpful tip of the day: Don't use the "b", "i", "font", "basefont", "center" tags. :D

JudyNV:
Is this a really bad attitude or am I being practical?

Not really sure about the bad attitude, as I have some bad habits myself. For a simple website, a deep use of css wouldn't be all that practical, but for a web designer, even a simple website built with a good amount of css makes it easier to manage if/when it does become bigger. My problem is I like going from design to design, since I haven't thought of 1 "so awesome, it never needs to change" design.


@KAckroyd:

I'm definitely not a guru when it comes to coding, but I'll be glad to help in any way I possibly can. Though, :)

@Eric Houser:
I'd like to see CS5 I didn't know it was out yet. Do you work with joomla for CMS? I've been working with that and Virtuemart.

Well, technically, it's not out yet. On some sites I've been on, I've seen the word joomla before, but haven't checked out at what it was yet and haven't heard of Virtuemart at all. In a class last semester, I learned there was Jquery. After using Javascript a bit, I'm a little bothered about changing it to jquery, but if all else fails, javascript will still be the backup.

Answers to Questions (2/11/2010)

I'll try to answer all the questions you ask me, by simply making a new post, so you wouldn't have to search through blog posts to find the answer hidden in the comments area. I also might include comments to things talked about in previous posts, which I'll copy the original text so you know what it is I'm referring to. It'll seem more organized :)



JudyNV: Quick question. How big is the learning curve to move from DW CS3 to CS5?

Dreamweaver CS5 is suppose to come out around April or May if it gets released on time, so I can not comment on that, but as for CS4, the curve isn't very steep. Aside from a couple new features and a new look, a lot has stayed the same. The Put file area, where you upload the files, hasn't changed, nor has the css. You can still view the code, split, and design views, but a new feature is the live view, which can show you exactly what you would see if you previewed it in a browser. My main problem was that, if you had PHP in the page, it wouldn't display properly. I'm really looking forward to see what kind of features CS5 will bring. Some people have assumed some things, while others are telling of stuff they found out from a "friend of a friend". Some rumors have it that Dreamweaver will pump up the support of Web standards and Cascading Stylesheets. We can only wait and see, while praying they don't remove some neat features that we use now. :(


KAckroyd: CSS and all of the rest of that is so daunting for me.

I really like css, though the daunting never stops. One of the most recent things I have been working on is a type of javascript/php thing where certain drop down boxes show up if certain options are selected. One major problem I had with that was the drop down boxes were each in a cell in a table. When they went "visible", all of a sudden, they were outside of the div area. An hour or so later, I finally found the answer. This is kinda like learning a new language (It actually is a new language I guess). You may know thousands of words, but there will always be a couple words/phrases you'll have to look up. Hopefully, I can be of some help :)

Objectives

So, as a web designer, there are many things that I want to do. Finding ways to do new things with with code that can do almost anything imaginable is a passion. I only have a few things set as objectives for now, but once reached, they will be quickly replaced with new objectives. Among those are:

• Creating an extensive, yet simple to use site visited by thousands of people.
• Keeping up to date on the newest releases for web design. Including CSS3, and Dreamweaver CS5.
• Continue to learn different types of code (Php, Ajax, JQuery, etc)
• Make beautiful websites that look and feel professional