October 31st, 2007
The next plan was to enable the flash in my new design’s header to change the dimensions of the div it was sat in so that for most the time it takes up less room, but when it needs it the space expands to allow for larger content there. I had already anticipated doing something like this so had included the mootools JS library at the very start of building my new design.
http://www.broken-links.com/2007/05/01/a-mootools-quickstart-guide/
October 27th, 2007
I decided that I would like to create a breadcrumb links bar for the top section of each page of my new website design. A google search brought many many differing ways of achieving this using PHP however none of them seemed to concisely achieve what I needed. So instead I used a few of the most useful examples as a reference and created my own. The following are a good place to start I found, especially the first listed here (although last one I found):
http://www.sillybean.net/archives/452
http://www.zend.com/zend/spotlight/breadcrumb28.php
http://gr0w.com/articles/code/php_breadcrumb_links_creator/
Next comes the CSS for that general area, including my new design’s main navigation.
October 24th, 2007
Whilst I have been deleting the unnesessary, old and forgotten files scattered on my website I have decided to look into creating my own error pages. I am always being warned when something goes wrong that error pages could not be found to handle the error, and now I am removing lots of files maybe they will be needed more than ever.
The 404 error is especially noticeable when you are producing a new PHP script to display links to the latest posts on your website.
So in order to create these pages, I’ve had to quickly learn a little bit of SSI or ‘Server Side Includes’ from Apache because I am unable to change the name or type of file used to handle the errors on my server to PHP.
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/howto/ssi.html - all the reference I would need on SSI.
October 21st, 2007
Having completely exhausted a search for floating some images at the bottom right hand corner of a variably sized <div> and deciding this was impossible I came up with half a solution involving a normal float RIGHT <div> that cleared a second, hidden floating <div>, the height of which COULD have been determined by the overall height of the containing <div>. But it wasn’t great, and text would wrap very poorly around the images, cutting into the padding and margins. Using EM on the buffer’s height meant I could make it vaguely change in line with textsize changes but generally it looked crap and was different in every browser.
October 20th, 2007
Alongside neovirtua efforts, I have found myself swinging back towards the more artistic side of things after spending what seemed like the entire second year of my course coding. My puzzle flash code-thing has been all-but finished scriptwise for a while and is now in the process of gaining some nice vector art (at one stage Illustrator was a bad, bad word) and creating images for websites has rekindled my love of all things photoshop.
Based on a couple of puzzles I received a long time ago, this flash generates a random puzzle and then jumbles the pieces up for the player to solve.
The flash actionscript behind this is flexible enough to allow for any size
puzzle to be created and jumbled as many times as I like. In addition to this,
the difficulty of rotating pieces is also a feature.
