Creating breadcrumb links

27th October, 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.

Site Maintenance & Error Pages

24th October, 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.

Annoying CSS

21st October, 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.

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Personal Projects

20th October, 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.

Placement Update

16th September, 2007

So I have been working for my placement with the guys behind http://www.neovirtua.com/ and realised I haven’t done much in the way of updating my website in a while.

I started a couple of days back a personal project to build a flash puzzle game, which can be found at http://www.srjm.co.uk/puzzle.swf. At this point it only swaps around a single piece to make it easy for me to complete (this still involves no less than 7 moves to get the pieces in place) as I test functions but soon that will change.

Page Design

22nd August, 2007

A preview of the my first freelance project before starting my placement with Neovirtua.

Freelance Project

9th August, 2007

Seems I have found a bit of a freelance job to do creating a page design for a website aimed at buyers and sellers of houses. Best get brainstorming on some designs and reading up on vector graphics!

Other Stuff

Always interesting to look through for inspiration – Computer Arts Tutorials

4th August

4th August, 2007

Following the creation of a sort of aviary enclosure for the dovecote, and the subsequent danger of cats managing to get over the top, plans for a higher and improved part on top were made. Only they couldn’t work out what angle the frame uprights for the top section would lean at. I was posed the trigonometric puzzle and instead of trying to remember GCSE maths I simply went back to my MSN convo which happened to contain two maths students, one attending UCL and the other Bath University.

Needless to say I got a quick and easy answer by simply drawing a triangle and labelling some lengths using the Handwriting Tool usually reserved for drawing moronic pictures. But afterwards a thought occured to me that maybe, like the really boring app I made for AI and matrices and vectors I could make one for working out any angle or length of a triangle if you provide some others.

So there we are, a flash challenge to complete before I start a placement. http://www.clarku.edu/~djoyce/trig/oblique.html

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