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
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.
Speeding up Firefox
Found an interesting post on ryanduff.net on Speeding up Firefox certainly seems useful…
SHE DID IT !!! 71 days 14 hours 18 minutes and 33 seconds
Well what a fantastic result… Ellen MacArthur crossed the finishing line in 71 days 14 hours 18 minutes and 33 seconds that’s 1 day 8 hours and 35 mins ahead of Francis Joyon’s time…!!!
What an achievement, I just cannot comprehend the determination and stamina of that girl…. Just fantastic.
Team Ellen
Busy keeping an eye on Ellen MacArthur @ Team Ellen.com
This is just so close… I can’t help but check back every few hours to see what’s happening.
Just hoping that the wind will keep her going, and that the high pressure that she is entering will not slow her down too much.
Amazingly there doesn’t seem to be much news coverage on this at the moment, don’t know why… We’ll just have to wait it out.
Go Ellen !!!
ADSL
Finally… I am now in the 21st Century… We have finally had ADSL installed, and what a relief it is, no longer having to worry how long I was spending online.
Maybe I will write some more for the blog…
Or maybe there still wont be enough time in the day… (to be honest that seems the most likely)
New Year already !!
I cannot believe that it is 2005 already and I havn’t posted anything since the middle of November.. Ho Hum.
I’ve just been so busy that there has not been any time to write anything.
On another note if you live in the Horsham area, pop along to Spellcast Glass Studio (in the alley-way between West street and the New Forum complex), where Sarah’s Glass bead jewellery is on display and for sale.
Well I must think of something more interesting to write… Who knows maybe I will put something up about the advantages of Rhapsody in C++ (Dan are you reading this).. You will just have to wait and see !! 
At last Sonar 4 Producer edition…
At last I finaly received my upgrade to Cakewalk Sonar 4 Producer Edition for my birthday… So now just need to find the time to put it to use. Time… ah yes I remember, that’s that stuff between cooking, eating, doing the web site, working and sleeping… So not much time left then. Oh well I’ll just have to fit it in somewhere. Ho Hum.
Sarah Downtons Web site is UP !!
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
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“)