Domestic Geek

Gah, I am so out of practice with all this web coding stuff — use it or lose it. I've definitely lost it. I spend hours today jacking around with css that wasn't working. My sidebars are a mess, I totally forgot to make sidebar headers, my comments page is nowhere close to done. It'll be wonky for a few days while I mess with it, but since I'm live, perhaps I'll be more inclined to actually get it all fixed.

You know, back in the day, expandable themes were kind of cool. If you're not familiar with the term, it means that a section of a site can expand or contact as you make a browser window larger or smaller to fill the space so that the whole site fills the window. That was fine for the days of 800x600 or even 1024x768 resolutions, but right now I have an Apple Cinema Display with a 1680x1050 resolution. Most times my main browser window fills the screen. Do you have any idea how much of a pain it is to read a blog entry that spans almost that entire entry sans sidebars? It's a royal PITA! Even better are the ones that have two columns: one that floats right an one that floats left with no set width for the whole page. It leaves a big huge freakin' while hole in the middle of their site. Not pretty, let me tell you.

I've got an idea in my head for something I'm working on and I'm ready to bang my head on the wall.

I'm sure it can be done, I just haven't figured it out yet.

I wish I was a CSS guru instead of just a really good hack. Hmph.

I've been reading this book, CSS Mastery by Andy Budd, for the last few days. It was recommended to me by a couple of people and now I'm recommending it to you.

Most of what I know about CSS is self-taught. I learned a little bit more in school, but not much. This book explains very well concepts such as child selectors, quirks mode, ems, etc. that I "kind of" grasped but didn't really understand.

Web Design Stuff

There is a really cool Firefox extention that I found today over at Lockergnome called Web Developer. I haven't really had time to figure out all that it can do yet, but there are tons of features. It has a css editor, view source, outline cetain page elements (tables, links w/o title attributes), the list goes on and on. I'm looking forward to see what all it can do.

Since I'm looking into working for myself, I've been checking out the web design competition. A lot of them say they work with Drupal (a CMS). I figured I'd better post a link to remind myself to look into it.

Cool Firefox Tip

Using Firefox, I had often wondered how popups managed to still popup when I have them blocked. From petebevin.com:

I had my Platt College graduation ceremony today. I officially have a degree in Web Design. Whoo Hoo!



I didn't go to bed Thursday night because I thought I had to have my final web project done in order to get my degree (have I mentioned before that I'm the Queen of Procrastination™?. I found out on Friday that I was graduating regardless. In fact, I graduated with honors! Oh, well. So be it. I got the project done and off my conscience.

My friend Dave took our little party to Chilis for lunch today. YUM! I had a raspberry margarita to celebrate.

Now I have to get my design business going. Marcus is trying to drum up business for me. I haven't been to the pizza place in the last two days and it has felt so damned good.

Found a link to a printable CSS Cheat Sheet. This is really cool. I'm going to go print it right now.

Here's an excellent tutorial for doing dropcaps with CSS.

Are there any WYSIWYG web page editors out there that really work with CSS? I know Dreamweaver has some CSS capabilities, but when you use some attribute that it can't render, man does it screw it up! Kind of misses the point of using a web page editor, y'know? It's almost easier to just code it from scratch at that point.