The Feedback & What-Are-You-Up-To Thread

[Maljonic]

Thank you, I'll have a proper look at those Fireworks tutorials later.

 

[wyrd_fish]

inspired by thoses tutorials, i set about creating an aged look in photoshop, it's really had work

teh best result i got was a sketch -> torn edges filter, followed by distort -> diffuse glow

but than i ran out of talent

any one else got any ideas?

 

[JingleBells]

I decided to update my website this evening, adding a quick breadcrumb system to aid navigation, and adjusting the site structure to aid adding pages.

Thoughts would be appreciated, especially if you find a page that doesn't work as I might have missed something

 

[Jonty]

Hi JingleBells

Looks good You can tell it's late, I clicked on the latter link in your post and was amazed until it dawned on me your site was the first link hehe. Still, looks and works great. It seems I've inadvertently used this technique on a site I'm working on, so thanks for that link explaining the methodology behind it all.

Keep up the good work!

Kind Regards

 

[Maljonic]

I like it, the breadcrum idea; I might use something similar on this site: http://www.space.maljonicsdreams.com/ where I've been having a go with layers on the front page.

 

[Cask]

I like the breadcrumbs but decided to go for having my personal site pulling articles from a database so I can just write the article and add it without having to touch HTML, well that's how it's meant to be when I've finished.

Had a 2 day blitz on it to get it to the stage that it is now, but it needs more work and by the end it will probably end up like one of the millions of precoded PHP/SQL blog sites that you can download anywhere just not quite as good.

 

[wyrd_fish]

looks nice so far

don't forget to add pages, i put off doing it for ages but it's not really all that hard in php

infact i'm currently updateing my site

i'll be sure to tell ya'all when its done

 

[Cask]

Thanks Wyrd. Do ya mean adding individual pages for the articles instead of the forum type listings that I've currently got? If so, not sure how to do that yet but sounds like something I want to do. Losing enthusiasm again for the site now though... must.... focus... argh.

 

[wyrd_fish]

i meant having, say, 10 news articles per page and then page numbers at the bottom

 

[Jonty]

Losing enthusiasm again for the site now though... must.... focus... argh.

hehe, tell me about it I've been working on something on and off for over a year. It's a cool project but it takes a lot of determination to keep going. The lines of code now totals four figures and rising, hehe Keep up the good work, Cask, it'll be worth it in the end

Kind Regards

 

[fatbusinessman]

That's all done with Paint Shop Pro 9, using vectors to get the initial shape and then with raster layers and fancy layer transition effects to build up the design.

Wow: Corel have bought out Jasc. Must have missed that one.

 

[Jonty]

Jasc was apparently acquired in October 2004 (Corel themselves changed hands in 2003). Apparently the PSP brand will continue for now, though.

Corel will sell Paint Shop Pro ... as stand alone products and will continue to provide worldwide service and support to customers under the Corel brand. In addition, Corel will actively support new R&D initiatives for the Paint Shop family, ensuring that the next-generation of Jasc products will continue to flourish.

Kind Regards

 

[Maljonic]

I decided to update my website this evening, adding a quick breadcrumb system to aid navigation, and adjusting the site structure to aid adding pages.

Thoughts would be appreciated, especially if you find a page that doesn't work as I might have missed something

I've been looking into this a bit now; I wonderd how you go about making a breadcrum trail on your website? I read soemthing about a Dreamweaver extention to automatically insert a breadcrum code on your pages; are there other ways of doing this too?

 

[JingleBells]

I wrote some custom php thing to add to each page, it just sets a variable called pageTitle and an array storing the path to the page.
It basically then builds the breadcrumbs, starts with a Home link, then each element in the array showing the path, and finally the pageTitle variable. (If you notice, the start of whats in the title bar and the breadcrumb are always the same ) Thats all processed in a header include file which saves me having to repeat oodles of code.

I'd post the source but its not on this machine, I'll post it when I get back to my machine later in the week.

 

[Maljonic]

Something like that sounds good, this Dreamweaver extention thing I'm looking at seems overly complicated.

 

[Jonty]

Hi guys

Just thought I'd post a handy little PHP scriptlet I wrote a while back but have recently unearthed again. It's in no way original, but it is rather useful nonetheless.

Basically, this function takes a timestamp (say from your blog database) and converts the time into an informal, textual equivalent. When included in a sentence you can make something rather informative and friendly.

// Converts the specified time into an informal equivalent
function time2informal ($time)
{
  // Ensure the time is specified
  if (empty($time)) exit("Please specify a valid time");

  // Extract the hour, in 24 hour format without leading zeros, from the time
  $hour = date("G", strtotime($time));

  // Create and return the informal time
  if ($hour >= 0 and $hour <= 4) {
    return "in the wee hours of the morning";
  } elseif ($hour >= 5 and $hour <= 7) {
    return "early in the morning";
  } elseif ($hour >= 8 and $hour <= 11) {
    return "in the morning";
  } elseif ($hour >= 12 and $hour <= 13) {
    return "at lunchtime";
  } elseif ($hour >= 14 and $hour <= 17) {
    return "in the afternoon";
  } elseif ($hour >= 18 and $hour <= 20) {
    return "in the evening";
  } elseif ($hour >= 21 and $hour <= 23) {
    return "late at night";
  } else {
    return "at an unknown time";
  }
}

If you include this function in a blank PHP file with the example line below ...

echo "This little bit of informative text was written ".time2informal(time())." on ".date("l jS F Y \a\\t g:ia");

... you should get (for example) ...

This little bit of informative text was written at lunchtime on Sunday 27th March 2005 at 12:35pm

Naturally you replace the 'time()' argument passed with your database timestamp or whatever you wish to convert. This just makes things more friendly than, say 'Posted 12.35 27-03-2005' etc. which so often graces blogs, news sites et al.

Anyway, feel free to use it and modify it as you wish. You don't have to credit me if you don't want to on your site, just don't try and sell it off as your own or use it in association with anything illegal or immoral

Kind Regards

 

[wyrd_fish]

i once made a simmilar script, wasn't as good as yours, and never got used

like so much of my stuff i get distracted and things never get finished

 

[Jonty]

like so much of my stuff i get distracted and things never get finished

hehe, I'm good at that doing that too I have folders full of odd scripts and random images I've created but never used, just in case they come in handy

Kind Regards

 

[Gef]

I got loads of work on at the moment! Not sure if thats good or bad, heres some work in progress designs I been doing anyway..

http://creative.icowip.co.uk/ee/v2/
http://creative.icowip.co.uk/halimodern/
http://creative.icowip.co.uk/homebuilding/Page 2/
http://creative.icowip.co.uk/pffportal/

 

[Maljonic]

I just wondered, do you always put your design over to the left like that? I know it's, partly as least, because it fills up the screen on lower resolutions (I guess it is anyway) but couldn't you put it in the middle instead, so it's pretty much the same on most screens?

Anyway as for myself, after all the umming and arring on the content manager thread, I decided to make my space site http://www.planet-surveyor.com/ entirely CM based with phpnuke. It's the only site I've ever done this with and I wanted to give it a try to see how it compares - just to do something different really, plus it kind of suits the genre I think.

 

[Gef]

Some designs I center or strech, its a lot easier to lay out content when its locked though. All depends on the site and the content though.

 

[Maljonic]

That's cool, I just wondered; they look great anyway.

 

[Jonty]

its a lot easier to lay out content when its locked though

You're telling me I'm working on my first truly 'liquid' layout and it isn't half hard after using fixed-width designs Great work, though, Gef; keep it up!

Kind Regards

 

[Shovel]

All the designs I've from scratch of late have been liquid. It's bloody hard work. My plan for the next site is to make an elastic design - much like fixed, but sizing all the major boxes using em units, thus they will resize at the same time as you resize the text. Screen resolution is pretty stagnant at the mo so it's a good time to do fixed/elastic designs. Only when LCD screens go superstella do we have a problem.

That said, when that happens, we might get away with it anyway when Apple (no doubt with Microsoft desperately chasing) get their "pixeless" desktop sussed out. The idea being that everything (windows, titlebars, etc) is done in vectors and so gets smoothly resized at all resolutions, not limiting you just to resizing text. It is supposed appear in OSX 10.5 "Moggy" *


* this fact was crudely stolen from FatBusinesman. The "Moggy" codename was completely made up.

 

[Jonty]

That said, when that happens, we might get away with it anyway when Apple (no doubt with Microsoft desperately chasing) get their "pixeless" desktop sussed out. The idea being that everything (windows, titlebars, etc) is done in vectors and so gets smoothly resized at all resolutions, not limiting you just to resizing text. It is supposed appear in OSX 10.5 "Moggy"

That rocks SVG is like that, it's brilliant seeing your image look perfect at 10% of its original size and just as lovely at 1000% of the original. I believe Longhorn will have a form of SVG integrated into the UI (XAML), but nothing quite so widescale as 'Moggy' (hehe, the cat theme continues, eh? ).

Kind Regards

 

[Shovel]

XAML isn't a vector graphics format. It's just an XML format to describe user interface. Thus, rather than having a Form object and adding TextBox and Label objects to it, you have an XML structure to describe it, something akin to:

<Window><Text>My Form</Text>
<Label>Blah</Blah>
<TextBox></TextBox>
</Window>

The above, by the way, is not actual XAML at all, I made it up. But that is how it works.

There is/was some plan for vector graphics in Longhorn, possibly Avalon, or maybe Indigo. However, I have completely lost track of which codename is which.

SVG is a bit of an odd one really. At a graphics level it's fantastic, but the SVG 1.2 spec is headed fast in the direction of becoming some kind of standardised version of Shockwave Flash, containing all kinds of non-graphics parts. 1.0 and 1.1 are pretty solid though, from what I can gather. The latest Opera 8.0 beta has some preliminary support in there for it, limited Mozilla SVG builds are available and you can get Adobe's plugin for IE. Just a shame that IE completely mesed up their implementation of the <object /> tag (OK, seriously, how hard can it be?) which means you can't have nice degrading objects.

E.g. - this is supposed to work:

<object type="application/xml+svg" data="super-svg-logo.xml">
  <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="fallback-flash-version.swf">
    <object type="image/png" data="ultrafallback-png.png">
       This text will only display if the browser does not support (or fails to load) the SVG, Flash and PNG alternatives.
</object></object></object>

Not only does IE not support using images in the <object /> tag (automatically fails and falls back to the inner text), rather than treating each nested <object /> as an alternative representation, it will instead load ALL OF THEM, meaning that you end up with both the SVG and flash versions appearing on the resulting page.

Words cannot describe how utterly appauling that bug is. Ahem.

 

[Jonty]

Hey Ben

Thanks for setting me straight about XAML, I should stop posting at night, unlike you I think my brain gets addled after 10pm, hehe I think, like you say, some form of vectors may feature in Longhorn, but I'm not sure where (Avalon is the presentation layer, but then we're going to have Windows Graphics Foundation (the new DirectX moniker) for more advanced effects).

As for SVG, it is certainly developing in all sorts of ways. From the first releases, though, it's always been more than just graphics (righly or wrongly) with support for audio, video, 'shader' effects and such. Opera has said it will be supporting SVG in its forthcoming builds (like you say, only minimally at first) and Mozilla has placed SVG as a priority for the future. The major sticking point is still IE. For a plugin, Adobe's SVG support is very popular (I forget how many million downloads) but botched implementation of <object> tag is really a sticking point. We could hope IE7 will fix this, and its mass adoption help, but realisticlly I doubt it's particularly high up on MS's to-do list

Someday I may finish my own SVG creation, someday ...

Kind Regards

 

[Chilly]

I've recently been coding a site that allows the less moral amognst you bet on when famous people will die. Yeah I know, I'm going to hell. But aside from the content of the site, I have had to learn php, sql and html (again, used to know it but forgot). The site is heavily database driven and at the moment in a very bad state presentation wise. I think I will finish the core engine (need to do all sorts of trickery to assign winnings and such) before I spend much time on the actual look of the site.
clicky

It's SFW as long as no one reads over your shoulder

Any tips on database wrappers as I'm writing all my own SQL, db connects and such and I hear there are some good libraries with mysql wrappers and such. Any help appreciated. And please - if you do want to tell me I'm a demented sick fuck, at least sign up to my forum and post it there so we can all have a giggle

 

[TheJkWhoSaysNi]

I've just finished writing a template system...... in JavaScript as a university assignment. http://www.eng.nene.ac.uk/~bf04thbu/a2/

Currently works in IE5+, Mozilla Firefox 1.0 (Although i still need to test it with earlier versions of mozilla). The template system doesnt work with opera, although people can still read the content... just without the template surrounding it.

Comments/Suggestions would be nice.

 

[JingleBells]

Throws an error in both firefox 1.0.2 and IE SP2, something to do with page having no properties on line 80 of control.js

After looking at the code, you need to add something to check what happens if I don't specify a paramter to the page, ie just: http://www.eng.nene.ac.uk/~bf04thbu/a2/

or you could add:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
//Supresses errors in crappy browsers
window.onerror = function () { return true; }
//--></script>

to some part of the <head>