Development Log

26 September 2005

OK, new personal website, I must not do another lilac version as it's becoming a bit of a trademark. Thinking about doing an autumn theme, I have a photo with me moshing in it which may provide possibilities for design. I have spent the evening after class cruising Zen Garden for some ideas.

All images will be produced by me or will be photos that I have taken, therefore copyright will not be an issue. I will be using one image as supplied by the department, the photo of the Manton building but I am likely to change it, for which permission has been given.

29 September 2005

Crikey, I'm having a few problems with these divs, having mastered getting text to wrap around the menu section, which I had wanted to do to keep it nice and tidy, it keeps popping out the top and sitting on its own. I've solved it now, however I'm left wondering how to get a nice curvy look, at the moment the divs are blocky and crude. To make it worse, Paint Shop Pro went bad so I had to delete it and I've lost the CD. All I have left is Adobe Photoshop, true it is an industry standard, but I don't know it as well. Crash course in Photoshop ensues.

5 October 2005

In lieu of being at uni for the lecture, I have been sitting at home surrounded by snotty tissues, creating graphics for the background structure. Unsurprisingly, I have been lacking inspiration. I really ought to be in bed, but the decongestant tablets have caffeine in them so my eyes keep popping open. Damn it.

6 October 2005

I have spent a flu'd up morning tweaking the design. I still need to look at colours properly but that has been a lesser priority a I try to get the divs to work. I also need to change the colours/font on the menu to differentiate it. The problem I've had has been with this main div which is composed of a background image to get the curvature and a background colour. It is joined by a second div below which contains the bottom curves. Problems have been with getting other browsers to stop mucking about with them. I'll do another test later, Mac old browser is still being a pain.

19 October 2005

Have spent a little time playing with colours, finding a right shade for the background colour to provide a little more contrast. Whilst the colours were yummy, on lcd screens I had issues with tilt adversely affecting contrast. Hopefully this is a little better. I have been told brown's are hard to work with, I think I agree.

19 October 2005 - Later

Divs are officially on my hit list.

25 October 2005

I have made marginal peace with divs, for now, we sit facing away from each other and don't talk. On a better note, I have updated the portfolio page with a link to Task 4.2 and added a screen shot of it.

On the back of the task and also the recent lecture on accessibility I have added access keys and a skip to content link which takes people past the fluff at the top to the main content itself. I have spent the evening checking over the brief and recent slides to make sure I've done it all. I think I have, but paranoia sets in.

9 November

Begin to mull over what to do for ACW2 which is a website based on a how to guide for something. Decide I could do a how to get a tattoo guide in answer to all the questions I get. Speak to Mark, owner of Sacred Art Tattoo who agrees to be photographed, bless him.

23 November

Spend the afternoon working on a design, looking at where to place the protected regions, mainly navigation, banner and footer. Have problems with the div for the photo which needs to be editable, it keeps popping out the side of the main div that contains it when viewing the test page with Firefox. Seek advice from Richard who points me in the right direction to fix it, I never realised how buggy IE was until today. Later, I hotfoot it down to the studio and take slightly camp photos of everyone to cover all the steps.

24 November

Having received feedback for ACW1 I have made small suggested changes and more importantly, reassessed my css having learnt a little more so it looks much cleaner now. Particularly with the css positioning for the menu and main section.

26 to 28 November

Spend time working on content for the tutorial and checking details with Mark, my tattooist. The tutorial is quite wordy however, considering having a tattoo is quite a big deal I hope this is ok. The tutorial is intended to be informative but gentle!

Test the tutorial using browsercam throughout the process and ringing people up to check the colours on their pc/mac screens as grey seems to take many shaded guises. Settle on a shade that people find looks ok in contrast to the text.

12 December

The tutorial finished, I check spelling, last conformance check to the brief and link the website from the main site, ready for upload.

13 January to 15 February 2006

Please excuse the lumped together entries, though I have been thinking about work done for the next piece of coursework, time hadn't allowed for steady updates, instead, I've just been working quietly on the two workbooks to create the ASP pages and then on working to changes the pages to be xhtml compliant and fit in with the website design.

Along the way I have occasionally broken the database, not realising it cannot be moved from the root and have scratched my head wondering why things haven't worked with formatting when really, it's my brain that hasn't worked and pages have been uploaded wrongly.

It's been an interesting task as I am used to working with SQL and PHP pages using PHPMyAdmin and raw SQL databases, this has usually involved moving code and css to change the look but makign sure I don't wreck the database so to code it from the start has been educational. Sometimes enjoyable, or masochistic, you work out which.