Category Archives: Web Stuff

Eric Meyer on Professional CSS XHTML Techniques

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Not posted for a while but I’m looking forward to going to Eric Meyer on Professional CSS XHTML Techniques – A One Day Workshop by Carson Workshops, focusing on CSS, XHTML and Accessibility
So I’d better go to bed as I have to be up at 6:30 tommorow morning, and I’m still here typing away…!!
I hope to get some nice nuggets out of this course, I hope so, as I need to do a presentation on what I’ve learnt at work when I return
I am going with Peter Westwood and I hope a good day will be had by all…!!
Well off to bed… night

SarahDownton.co.uk

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Right… a bit of an overhall on Sarah’s site tonight… new pictures for the “Spring Collection”, plus prety much every page was updated in some form or another.

I am looking into how I can make this all automatic. Hopefully we will shortly be moving over to a new host that supports PHP and mySQL so I can automate a lot of the boilerplate work, plus let Sarah add her own news items and pictures into a gallery (possibly Simple PHP Gallery) as they come up. Also thinking about maybe using word press so she can keep a blog on the site too… maybe I can even run the whole site off it… (I will have to see about that).

The best bit will be the automated gallery, as at the moment adding all the descriptions multiple times for the alt and title tags and the image title is a pain in the bum. Plus I have to create all the thumbnails by hand, and make sure all the thumbnails are linked to the correct images.

Ahhh well, now just got to work out a way to give her an admin interface that she can use easily, but is also powerfull enough to do what she wants.

Sarah Downtons Web site is UP !!

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Well…. after a final push I finally managed to find the time to finish off (so far) Sarah Downtons new web site.
There are still things we can (and indeed will) add, and that is all part of the fun really.
Keeping a website fresh is really hard, but please take a look (and keep coming back).
For the techies out there the design is now fully XHTML/CSS and is also XHTML 1.0 strict compliant (it validates from W3C) the CSS also validates. (Please let me know if that is not the case, Note: unfortunately, the site uses URL forwarding for the domain name, and therefore the site will NOT validate from www.sarahdownton.co.uk as is… I have no control over that wrapper frame, and guess what… it fails !)
Question now is… have I broken it for other browsers, I have tried it in Firefox 1.0PR IE6 and Opera7, but I do not have a copy of IE 4/5/5.5 to try. (They probably fail completely).
Well I hope you like the new site let me know what you think.

Some Progress with Sarah’s Website

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I have made some progress with Sarah’s new website design… I have overcome some of the CSS incompatibilities that seemed to be causing me so much grief.
So given a bit more time.. There seems to be less of it these days… I should have something new to put up soon…(sorry but “soon” is as close as I can get to a deadline with this)
What I will do now though, is to put up what we have got so far, even if this is not as complete as I would like. The new stuff (specifically the bead pictures) is far better from a display point of view, even if the page doesn’t look very different.
The thing is I can now change the style and look of the page completely, without having to scrabble arround in html layout tables…!!! ;-)
After that the next step is to set up an eBay selling account (and Paypal), so that we can sell online.
Sigh… Well more stuff to do… It’s never ending it seems.
As for CSS, I feel that I am understanding more and more all the time, it can be a real head banging experience if you are not careful, but certainly looking at how other people have laid out their sites has helped enormously (see my blog post “A useful CSS resource“)

Re-sizeable Two Columns – Left Menu CSS

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I have modified the BlueRobot layout reservoir 2 column – left menu layout to allow for dynamic resizing.
See my new design here -> Re-sizeable Two Columns – Left Menu
The only real difference is in the CSS, in that this now scales correctly. (Try changing the font size in the browser, Ctrl + “Mouse scroll wheel” should do the trick). All positioning and sizes are now done using em’s as opposed to pixels. This can make the site much more accessible for people who like their fonts a bit bigger.
I have tested this in Firefox IE6 and Mozilla (latest versions) and if someone can test in Opera and others (ie Safari etc) that would be great!
There is every posibility that there are some issues with this, as it is a first hit, and as such may need some tweaking.

Posted in CSS

New Silverlemon (Sarah Downton) website

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I know I know… Man… setting up a new web site can be a pain.. I am struggling with CSS incompatibilities at the moment… (between IE6 and Firefox). You think you’ve cracked it, and then load it into IE and it all looks like a pile of rubbish…!
I must have read the CSS2 spec through at least twice from cover to cover, but there is always something that catches you out.
Hopefully I will have the new site up as soon as we get some final pictures for it as well… (that’s the olther thing holding up the process), trying to get pictures that are good enough, and can also be scaled down to show the detail even at thumbnail size is a challenge.
Currently there are two URL’s for this site www.silverlemon.co.uk and www.sarahdownton.co.uk

We will be going with the www.sarahdownton.co.uk URL now, so the new site will also reflect this.