I seem to have spent most of this week trying to fix broken things, including my scanner which is why I’ve had to switch to taking digital captures of my Moleskine. In retrospect, this has been a Good ThingTM. The repro on my camera (ouch… I paid a lot more than that for it) is far better than anything my Canoscan can ever manage. It has particular issues with graphite – rendering rather nasty pixellated strokes.
Aside from my hardware issues.. I’ve been tweaking the CSS on the site to try and rescue some of the stuff that went awry after I uploaded the latest version of K2. I wonder sometimes, and would appreciate some feedback from seasoned CSS fiddlers here, if there’s a good standard route to learning CSS and how to code from scratch without relying too much on googling every five minutes. A good book recommendation would be cool, I can order from the US if necessary (and under the customs limit). I generally use Adobe GoLive to create sites, but 9 times out of 10 I invariably end up editing everything in source view, and GoLive has a really annoying habit of pissing around with your positioning. If I change something from absolute positioned to relative, and adjust the pixel positioning to compensate, as soon as I hit ‘preview’ golive whacks those previous pixel values straight back in again. It doesn’t seem to matter whether I use the CSS editor, source view or the Inspector palette. Generally, I have to start the page from scratch all over again with relative positioning to begin with. Very. Bloody. Annoying. The live renderer is in a css world all of it’s own as well. Bah.
Hardly surprising that GoLive is being canned really. I suppose I’ll have to get Dreamweaver now. Or beef up the memory on my Macbook and use NVU and Mamp. Both of which I have installed, but you can never have enough memory, right? Well.. you can’t actually fit more than 2gig in a Macbook anyway..
Anyway, apart from that. Pretty busy here in Legoland. We had a ‘teambuilding day’ last week. Which I think I shall refrain from commenting on, except I don’t care if I never see another plank of wood in my life… ever again. This sketch started while I was waiting for a cab on Friday. I’m attempting to force myself to draw with a pencil more (hell just drawing full stop) by taking an A6 moleskine pad with me everywhere. It fits nicely into the side flap of my bag, and certainly weighs a darn sight less than a laptop!
Sketching standing up by the side of the road is pretty interesting. Can’t say I’d recommend it though. Made my hands hurt..
I still can’t decide whether this font is too large now. All the text seems to be merging together in front of me. I like the tidiness of justified text though. Aaaaargh… [edit] Gone back to 11px. Much better. I don’t trust EM sizes ro render accuratelt in all browsers, and frankly, if your monitor is set to anything over 1600 x 1200 you will go blind.
The font looks fine on this end, and I agree, justified text always looks sharp.
As for learning CSS…well, for me it’s usually trial and error and hitting various websites (w3schools.com, or various googled sites when looking for something specific). I also discovered the more I started coding the sites, the less I relied on a WYSIWYG and worked with just straight text. Which is what I do now, 100% of the time. I have both Dreamweaver and NVU on my mac, but I don’t use either one, and haven’t in probably a few years now. I use Textmate on my Mac and Homesite if I’m doing it on the PC.
Books, well, quite frankly I don’t have any, but if I had to recommend one, I think I’d go with “Beginning CSS Development” (http://www.csswebdevelopment.com/) by Simon Collison. He’s a good designer… (www.collylogic.com)
Thanks Shad. Damn that guy’s site sho’ is sexy. Makes me want to tear my code apart all over again…ngggggghhhh.
I think I’ll try and pick up a copy of that book though. It looks pretty decent. I know you can get most of the info you need from the net but there’s nowt like an index for getting you where you need to go.
Hmmm… my comments seemed to be deciding not parse line breaks any more. *sigh.
Meant to say. NVU uses the Gecko rendering engine doesn’t it? Is there anything for the Mac that behaves similarly to [shudder]IE[/shudder] ? Cos it’ll be hard to check the IE stuff-ups on a Mac.
Aside from running IE6 on OS X using WINE, I really don’t know. Hence the setup I have (side by side Windows and Mac machines, using Synergy! Rox!)
If you still have your PC, I’d suggest just putting them side by side and after coding on one, check them on both. It’s the best way, IMO, to get the user experience, on all the browsers you care about.
Heh… good point. Unless I’m in a field somewhere (unlikely), there’s not much chance I won’t be within spitting distance of a PC.
I just turned the air a revolting shade of blue here. Thanks to the unwieldyness that is Blogger’s WYSIWYG (read: it’s a bag of shite in Firefox) I thought I’d lost a whole days work on a template I’m doing for someone.
Luckily enough I did actually stash a copy of it somewhere where I thought ‘better put it here so I don’t overwrite it’. Only trouble was, until I’d lost half a head of hair from stress… I couldn’t remember where I put it.
Gaah
-Sarah (adding my own linebreaks). pffffff
Hi Sarah, think it looks all superb, I don’t know how you find the time to do it. As for CSS, I just dumped all the tables from my site. Its pretty tricky stuff to get right across browsers, and I notice the colour differences between browsers on the Mac (look at Safari and Camino).
I given up using Dreamweaver, Golive and the like as it fills my code with s**te, so I’m now coding everything by hand and working everything out in PS and paper. Mind you I have kept most things simple with a standard two column layout. I would use wordpress or typepad or similar – but i like to get ‘dirty’ with the code, must stem from my days as a programmer.
Still looks great though, line spacing is always a way to make things look readable.
Steve
(i wanna mac pro)
Hey Steve !
Well I ordered the CSS book, and after havinmg removed IE 7 beta from my pc it looks like I may need it. The site is arsed beyond repair in IE6.
IhateIEIhateIEIhateIEIhateIEIhateIEIhateIEIhateIEIhateIE
Bah.
I think the trick to CSS is to try to use as little as possible, initially i found i was adding little fixes and tiny pads and odd little margins just to fix IE problems – keep simple and add a nice background. Unless you are a Guru at this lark. And why doesnt windows anti-alias fonts yet, i do something on a Mac and it looks crap on a PC. I need to get a CSS book, theres a lot i just cannot understand, let me know how you get along with the book.Steve
I’ll let you know how I get on with that book. I think I’m just about ready to ditch ‘drag and drop’ web design progs. It’s just way too frustrating see it churning out different looking sites in IE. I’ve spent a whole day today fixing a site I’m devving because I was using IE 7 to test in and when I checked it from a PC running IE 6 it was completely farked.
I guess I’ll have to deal with the IE7 issues when it eventually goes live. Hopefully it’ll be a while yet…
Still, it’s been a good day really, I finally managed to get the comment styling on here back under control and learnt a bit more CSS in the process. I just wish I could work out why it’s no longer parsing line breaks in the comments. Bah.
Also, the flash header is going to be killed off. I noticed while I was browsing a few other sites that my lightbox gallery is decidedly slower than most other sites, and I’m blaming the flash header for that. So I guess I’m going to have to get creative with individual page template headers and have an extra list menu. Hooray ! More fiddling !!!
I’ve found that using an underscored css value to correct IE fubars seems to work pretty well.
Ho hum…