Ok, so a friend is throwing a Rave. I did up a fairly basic site due to lack of notice and such, and it worked fine, just fine. I then send him the lean site at under half a Megabyte, and he uploads it. The great Java counter I had keyed to the start time exactly then stops working all together. I open my Sun Java Console and find a good long string of error, but nothing which tells me, a non programmer, what the hell has gone wrong. SO I pop into IRC, check with friends, and find this may be a server issue with permissions. Peachy. So I send work over IM to the Rave planner that he needs to call up his Host and bitch them out for bad Java permissions. That was last night. As of now the site is still not working for the counter, though everything else is fine. Bah. I hate code.
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&. That is the key. Stuart posted that he thought using the ampersand, followed by amp;, would work, and what do you know, the XML checks and validates, as does the HTML. Therefore, I will be notifying Chris that this might be the best way to do it, since some things like Texas A&M, and AT&T, the two culprits in the :bnb: feed today, kind of look funny with ' and ' instead of &. Know what I mean? Oh, and it seems I have been christened the RSS feed monitor, and now have the responsibility of checking the feed regularly to make sure nothing is broken. I look forward to this, and it might even mean that I write more for that newsletter. I hope to institute a built in regular expression option in MT to automate this at some point. Wish me luck!
Ok so a certain Gnome asked my advice on why the :bnb: RSS feed was broken, and I found that there were 2 ampersand's in the posts. Do any of my knowledgeable albeit limited quantity of readers know anything about what can be done, perhaps in a text replacement hack, to make the ampersand show up in both HTML and XML, without messing up the feed? Please, feel free to shoot off an email and let me know what you have as idea's.
I am sitting here, freshly woken up at a time when nothing good is on, and I saw an interesting sounding show on Prairie Public Television called Dot.Com, which is the furthest thing from high tech most of the time. Well, they are talking about creating your own web site, locally taped and generally informative. I like how the guest said that the site you want always depends on what you want to do with it. He then got on to the topic of graphics, and he pointed out two sites, one of an art gallery, and they use graphics a lot to show their product. Then he showed the IRS web site which uses graphics sparsely, and those that are there are merely for decoration. I had a theory at the point when he mentioned the art gallery, and I want to present it here.
As he said, and I have said before, graphics can be both good, and bad, depending on the site. So, the question, put simpler, is whether the site will be text content, or graphical content. Most site, I will say, should not be graphical content, unless you are selling something that requires graphical explanation, i.e.: words simply cannot be used to describe the item. This is where Amazon misses it. They seem to think that every item, from a book to a Linksys Router needs a graphical representation. While they have been smart and limited their pages to few other images, and the item images are small in bytes, it is still not really necessary for a lot of their items. What I am saying it, their site is not one that should use graphics as the content. They can do much more with words.
This site, as you can tell, is a textual content site. My words are the draw, the usefulness, and the reason people come. eBay people come for the auctions, and only when you read an auction, usually, do you see the images, which can be elaborate, plentiful, and large. They also do the pure design aspect right. Now, if only they could make the sellers and buyers more reliable... Anyways, my theory is that these two different kinds of sites, textual and graphical content, cannot be mixed without ruining the idea of the site, and the message. I mean that yes, a textual content site can have graphics, as mine does, but they should be sparse and not rely on a graphical browser to get a message across.
With a graphical site, one that is based or relies heavily on the graphical side of a site, there need not be much text, but it is important to make sure that you do not use graphics as your content too often, because it will eventually lead to a site that is clunky, unusable, and text browser unfriendly, and yes, there are still those that use Lynx and other text browsers, not to mention the blind who will find your pretty graphical site useless and unfriendly. The message I am trying to get across is that while graphical content is good, and Flash is good for some uses, both have and can be perverted to make them useless and clunky. Graphics are good, and may be good for showing a product a little better, but if you use it too much, the site will become worthless, no matter the cost.
Ok, so I am frustrated. I have had the help of a great reader who knows infinitely more about making standards compliant web sites, and the standards involving the web then I will ever know. He took the front page of the site and did a correction on it, before I realized it was from the front page, and was pretty useless for the proper coding of the template. Once that got figured out, I sent him a copy of my template, and I got it back when I got home from work, along wit a list of things I am bad about. Well, I tossed it in and then the problems began. The first was that the area above where the logo and description is was white in Opera. this was a problem.
So I compared the old one(yes, I backed it up) and the new one, and realized the significant code is nearly identical. This means I cannot find the offending code. That means I am back to my old very non compliant code. Sorry Sitsofe, but I need the site to look good, and I simply cannot find the problem. The code for that section is identical, I tell ya. I can't find, though, the problem. I compared the code letter for letter and it is all identical, but with the old code it is bad, and the new code is whitened. Grrrr. I hate code problems I cannot find! If anyone who knows standards and rules for good CSS and HTML, or XHTML, then please email me @ geek at this site. Thanks.
The site that would never end is as close to done as I can get. The buttons are done. The code has been checked and triple checked. Today I will be going to the school and trying to get this contract over with and paid up. I am currently waiting for Al to call me back so I can figure out when I can meet with him. I just want to get this over with and get Christina and Dave's payments to them.
I do, though, suspect this will be the first and last site I do for these motives, which is to say for profit. Dave has expressed his disinterest in working together again, and I have expressed similar views. I also don't know where I could find another graphic artist with such great skill and realistic expectations on money. The next site I had hoped to line up looks like it will be very unprofitable for me.
In fact it would be a large cost but most would go to whoever would do the graphics. As that would not be me, it just isn't worth it to me. As well, the contract would be for my dad's work which would mean I would again feel as if I got the contract simply because my father works there, and I would be warned to not screw it up and risk my father's delicate reputation. I don't want that over my head, so I will have to recommend they go elsewhere.
So, when I was sitting there, while waiting for the advance for rent the other day, Al asked me about their request for a change in font on the classes page. I told him my scripter had said it was not possible, but that I thought I knew a way to do it, and I would look into it. Well, Christina did a set of buttons in case Dave has not decided to cooperate enough to do the color changes on the buttons he made by the time the rest of the site is done completely.
As she was working on those I decided to look into this. I knew from Christine's blog that CSS can be used on one line form inputs, as they are usually applied to a certain tag, like b(bold) or ul(unordered or bulleted list). I also knew that one could use CSS to control background colors and font size/type. So, I borrowed the code from Christine's blog, and applied the specific bits I wanted with a radically opposite from default font to a test page and with a little more tweaking it works like a charm. Thus, I am brilliant!
In the ever expanding troubles related to this JobWORKS site, after the advancement that things seemed to take around the end of last week, things have taken a turn for the unknown worse. It seems that I should have taken advantage of the updated text offered last week, and to waited for Al to return, and things have changed in that text, and now I have to wait until Wednesday before I can get the updated stuff. This will put a serious crimp in my plans, and will likely put us in a crunch in order to get the site done for Friday. Oh well, they are hardly the worst people I have had to deal with, and at least are giving me the chance to prove we can do it.
I am not even sure I should file this under web design, because of the absolutely horrid design of the site, but I installed Flash MX and decided to work on the transcription of the old stuff from the flash file the so called easy way. I have learnt how truly wrong I was. See, the person who 'designed' the flash version has made a few mistakes, though the possibility that the maker meant to do it this way is no way in doubt.
It was a mistake for this person to piss me off, as now I will go into JobWORKS and ask who did the site and make them a public embarrassment. they coded this thing so that anyone trying to take anything from it would have a major hassle. That is also known as ensuring job security, and this has done no such thing. This has only angered me, the next person who would want to work on it, and I will never allow this to get out again.
When I am done I will kindly ask them to trash the old site so it can never be brought back to the public. This kind of 'design' should be forbidden and makes me wish for some sort of certifications for web designers and graphic artists. If it weren't for the fact that there is too much certification demand out there now, I would spearhead something like this, but I would not want this to degrade into yet another bull shit cert.
I made a mistake. I relied on another person for my info without looking it up. I did this because I have learnt to trust the folks at The ScreenSavers and what they say. We all messed up on quoting the pricing for Dreamweaver MX. We quoted it at a whopping $899, which would be a tripling of price from the $299 of Dreamweaver 4. The actual price of Dreamweaver MX is $399, while the full package of Cold Fusion, Flash, Fireworks and Dream MX is $799. My apologies. I can admit when I am wrong and this is one of those times.
Well, we have yet more progress on the site. Christina is nearly done her part, other then the mail form which sounds like it will be simple. I am digging into the stuff I need to move over. The only problem is Dave. His hard drive has apparently died a harsh and painful death, and I am not sure where he stands for progress on the graphics. I sure hope he does not tell me that it won't be done by June 3, because I have signed the contract, and I very much do not want to have to put up with a let down at this point. I need this site done no matter what by June 3, preferably sooner. I know my stuff can and will be done in a week. I am pretty sure it will take a couple days after I get the relevant info on perl and the questions they want on the mail form for Christina's part to be done.
Therefore, Dave is the solitary wild card at this point. I would think the solution would be obvious by now, since he is getting $700, but I am not sure what his situation is. I do know he felt that he wasn't in any rush due to the feelings of distrust he got when they turned down a deposit. I still apologize for that, as it was my past that caused it. It is not their fault for being cautious, as anyone with half a brain would be. I just wish he realized how important this is to me. This is our first contact, and getting it done early will leave a hugely positive impression on them, and will likely get us a number of referrals. That, without a doubt, is a good thing.
Well, as I type this I am installing Dreamweaver MX. I hope it doesn't break version 4. It is a 65 MB file, so if you don't have high speed, or even if you do, make sure you want it. It is not a download for the frivolous. I will let you know ASAP what it is like and hopefully include some screen shots.
Warning!! Large screen shot!
I apparently missed it, but Macromedia has just today announced the release of Dreamweaver MX, which is still in beta, but is sounding quite great to use. I will certainly be checking it out ASAP and getting back to you all.
Well, things have progressed quickly today, on the request for a site, though things were not exactly like I had hoped. It looks like the owner of the dealership, which I will not mention, does not know about this effort, and thus the work for now will be only a small demo site that will, I sure hope, lead to a contract both for site redesign, and updating. Right now the person who contacted me is doing the updating for free, because their company is the one who supplies all their computers. I have a lot of ideas, one of which is prominent and I will try to get two or three options for the owner to go with.
I want this to be a choice between, not a choice to do it or not. The site, from what I have seen, really needs to be reworked, with a lot of updates, but I am really worried that I am going to do all this work, and for all I know I could be out done or out classed by a more trained professional, or god forbid, a company like Web Slingers or Intrinsix. I will be working on this only to a small degree for the next week or so, then I will focus on this for a couple weeks. Depending on how things go, I may have a little more time then I thought to get a job. If I make most of the money for this site to keep myself, and it looks like I could, I will be able to nicely relax and live as I wish. Ahh, dreams. Ok, now back to reality...
