webnonsense

[helenic]

For the first time in months I spent almost all of yesterday coding. My personal domain still has a lot of content needing to be sorted out (I have it, I just haven't edited it or formatted it for putting online) so it won't be up immediately, but I'm hoping to be able to release it soon. Possibly next week; it depends how disciplined I am with the MPhil reading. Once I get into webdesign I find it very difficult to stop. I've been learning lots of CSS, and at the sage advice of the Mystic Robert I even wrote a song about it.

I have also discovered that:

i) fluid columns are one of the most beautiful inventions on this earth
ii) if you use CuteHTML to do a find/replace for an html fragment on all the files in a directory, not just the html files, you will render all your images unreadable and will have to create them ALL AGAIN FROM SCRATCH. This is sufficiently frustrating that it will utterly undo a whole day's worth of coding elation, particularly if it gets to past midnight and you find yourself attempting to re-write the missing number strings of the jpeg in textpad. PARTICULARLY when you don't know anything about how images are encoded. Back stuff up online, kids.
iii) my computer at work has Adobe Photoshop 8.0 installed on it. This will more than make up for item (ii) above.

While I'm on the subject, here is a nice linkage poll for you to fill out if you want me to include a link to your site:

[Poll #570932]

Comments

[kungfuchaos.livejournal.com]

a word of warning if youre gonna get fancy with the web design for your job... this was a problem i ran into... cambridge students use every colour and flavour of browser under the sun. i had quite a time making my stuff look cool in lynx as well as firefox...

[chrisvenus]

If you're writing web pages it should be viewable on all browsers anyway. And you can never get things to look cool in lynx but you can get them to be usable. That's the target. Though, of course you could say that the demographic that uses lynx are not going to be interested in this site so I don't need to cater for it. Oh such a complicated thing is browser compatibility.

On the other hand its pretty easy to do until you start getting into javascript. :)

[kungfuchaos.livejournal.com]

uh, dont get me *started* on script compatibility. though i was pleasantly surprised at the universality of inline frames - my project was to make powerpoint slides available online with a screenshot of the slide, a frame containing the notes and scrolling-through-presentation options. ended up looking ok!

[chrisvenus]

Does powerpoint not do that out of the box? If you ever do do javascript stuff though then I highly reccomend the o'reilly book "Dynamic HTML" which is a godlike reference for all things DHTML and includes which methods and properties are in which spec and on which browser (focusing only on NN/mozilla and IE).

I'm playing with iframes at the moment. Floating iframes that stck in the corner of your screen, accept content as you click on links and resize themselves to fit the content. Ugh!

[kungfuchaos.livejournal.com]

it does yeah, but the result looked fascinatingly horrible. also, we have a website template we're sticking to, and integrating flash animations and a few spreadsheets into the overall thing, so a from-scratch customisable layout was chosen as a better option.

*watches as an iframe floats gently past on the breeze* :-)

[chrisvenus]

Yeah. I can believe it looks horrible thinking about it. The only time I've really used powerpoint was in a roleplaying game when I created a powerpoint slide presentation because it was funny. One of my most memorable moments of roleplaying too. :)

[deliberateblank.livejournal.com]

Back stuff up online, kids.

Source code control. It lets you checkpoint your project, comment changes so you know why you made them a year later, and rewind/forward through changes at will. And recreate a working copy if you accidentally blast it.

I use Subversion (http://subversion.tigris.org/) with the TortoiseSVN (http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/) Windows front-end, which once you've got it running is really easy to use.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't help with destroyed images, would it? I know with CVS you tend to exclude images because otherwise it just caches multiple copies of them in the tree...

[deliberateblank.livejournal.com]

Never exclude anything which is "source", binary or no.

SVN (and for that matter CVS and any other repo out there) can quite happily store binary files such as images. You still get the tracking benefits, the only thing it can't sensibly do is tell you the exact difference between them, only that they've changed and (if you comment check-ins) why. Unless you do actually change the file, only one copy of the data should be stored. With SVN this is certainly the case.

If the image *does* change, most repo's will store a whole new copy, but what else can you realistically do if you want to checkpoint the whole project? SVN tries to do store binary diffs only, but I doubt that would help much with a changing JPEG for example.

Anyway, I assumed the problem here was the containing html getting smashed, not the images themselves. In either case, a check-in before performing any major change or using any new software or feature against the project would allow instant roll-back if something goes wrong.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

I think her 'find and replace' tool munged the binary files in the directory, that was the problem as I read it anyway.

You're right that CVS only re-stores the file if it changes, of course... I suppose that's not too bad. And disk is cheap anyway.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

The only site I really invest time and energy into is ukfetish.info, which isn't a personal site. You're welcome to link it or not (from either of your sites), depending on your content policy.

[ashfae.livejournal.com]

Alas! My website has disappeared into the abyss. *sob!* But one day I shall rebuild it, and make it better, bigger, stronger, faster...

[liriselei.livejournal.com]

I've been learning lots of CSS, and at the sage advice of the Mystic Robert I even wrote a song about it.

which sadly isn't visible to those of us not on borusa's flist - repost it here ?