Above the Fold: The Blog

I have spent a productive Bank Holiday weekend skinning this blog so that it now matches the rest of the site. Happily, it turned out to be much easier than I’d thought because WordPress is so well designed.

The re-work did require a few minor tweaks to the main site layout, turning it from a two-column layout to a three-column layout so that everything would fit well. A List Apart came to my rescue with this great article on three column layouts with liquid centre column and fixed sidebars. I was actually going there for something else, but when I spotted the article titled “In Search of the Holy Grail” after seeing several similar articles over the last few months, I had to give it a try. And the best bit is that it works in IE6 (with a hack or two), Firefox and Opera. I’m informed that it explodes nicely in IE7, though, so hopefully the community will be coming up with a few hacks to get around Microsoft’s latest insanity.

In fact, the only thing that the new layout doesn’t do properly is the little acorns in the left-hand navigation bar and ocassionaly in the right-hand bar. They display perfectly in Firefox and Opera, but randomly disappear in IE6. Damn.

If you’re viewing this in IE6, you will also miss the lovely little maple leaf motifs that decorate the post titles because, again, IE6 is randomly not displaying them. So I used a hack to pull those out and align the post titles properly. Firefox and Opera users can see the blog in its full glory.

Of course, I didn’t spend the entire weekend buried in code because that would be far too geeky. Nope, I braved the mud yesterday to venture into the local woods for a bit of a walk and a photo opportunity - it’s rhododendron season and I couldn’t resist. I will hopefully be updating the gallery with some results soon. But playing around with PHP, XHTML and CSS for a weekend after weeks of only seeing VBA and SQL at work was actually a lot of fun. I really am turning into a sad geek

Having a day off is always pleasant, although I always seem to end up doing useful things regarding websites rather than curlcing up in an armchair with a book. Ah, well.

In that useful things category, I have PHP-ed Above the Fold. It now has navigation, headers and footers neatly seperated out and modularised, making page creation that little bit simpler. A couple of ifs and switches allows me to feed titles and h2#id values into the header, personalising each page, and differenciate between different levels of navigation with ease. All that I now need to supply is a couple of variables and the includes and all of it is taken care of.

Maybe editing pure PHP files isn’t as “clever” as using a template class would have been, but for something this small it didn’t seem worth digging out the PEAR classes. Maybe when I start designing some new web apps for this site. Hmm

I also took the time to add a page for the Larren Art site. This lanched a couple of weeks ago and I’m very happy with the end result. You can read more about the design process in the Larren project page.

I am still humming and hawing about including a link to my fannish website on my CV. On the one hand, it’s host to my biggest and best web app - PHP/MySQL backbone, accessible, simple to use and surprisingly popular. It’s got login facilities for registered users and differing levels of access for the admin.

On the other hand, it’s fannish and doesn’t really feel “right” for a CV that’s supposed to be relatively serious.