Dreamweaver Woes

I have been updating the Snowball’s World website.  I wanted to clean-up the HTML, CSS, and the file structure of the website.  I thought this would fairly straight forward, but, instead I ended up fighting Dreamweaver CS4 all afternoon and through the night (this was after doing fierce battle with Flash CS4 this morning).  The hard lesson I’m learning is that you can’t depend on Dreamweaver to write sensible code and you really have to understand HTML and CSS is fix what Dreamweaver does.  It puts things like the links to style sheets in the wrong place and can sometimes write bits of HTML randomly within a page.  Sometimes Dreamweaver doesn’t make a good design choices.  This is especially true with CSS.  Basically, anything beyond basic CSS you have to hand code.  I ended up recoding all the CSS so it made sense and to also consolidate the styles and decouple them from the positional specifications.   The worst thing of all was trying to get Dreamweaver to recognize that I had set-up a test server.  It seemed the program could never keep track of where it was, so I ended up making a complete copy of what was on the server and hiding in a place that Dreamweaver didn’t know about.  Then it lost track of what was checked in and check-out and would save my crappy changes to the live server when ever I previewed changes.  So irritating!!!  I feel bad for the folks that encountered Snowball’s World in a broken state today.  Finally when I kinda got it to recognize the test server settings, I couldn’t get Dreamweaver to update my local files properly and then upload the files to the live server properly when I was finished.  I ended up having to manually drop and drag files and hand edit most of the links.  Yeeks … I left off tonight by resetting the website management configuration.  Once I did that I was able to properly check-in my work.  We’ll see if things are better tomorrow.  I have 3 more pages within Snowball’s World to update to the new page template.  Despite the trouble, I am pleased with the way the first two pages turned out.  Plus I learned a lot while struggling with Dreamweaver and throroughly picking through my HTML and CSS.  Dreamweaver is great for visualizing your work while coding.  However, relying on the design view only will result in some disasterous results.

Omari’s Sister Translations is Live

Omari’s Sister Translations is live at:

http://translations.omarissister.com

I have only posted the chapters 4 and 5 of “Zettai Heiwa Daisakusen.” I will post chapter 6 tomorrow and chapter 7 later. I’m currently in the process of translating chapter 8 (I’ve been slowed by putting up the website — hahaha!). Anyhow, I got to play around with some Javascript. I used a modified version of the 3-state button code from the Negrino and Smith Javascript book and I did fierce battle with the tabbed panel script that comes with Dreamweaver. I started playing around with a drop down menu for the chapter selection, but I decided that wasn’t necessary and went with links in the right side secondary menu column. I felt it was better to get to the point, rather than have the user hunt around the UI looking for a way to read the chapter they want. Yep … I had to remind myself to keep it simple.

Next is the tough part because I have to do specific page layout styles to fulfill the assignment requirements. The current website uses a hybrid style. I still have to make a page in which everything is liquid and one that is completely fixed. My feeling is that form follows function so I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about matching functions for those forms. I think for the liquid layout I will modify an existing page for mobile devices. This makes sense to me because you don’t know how the different mobile browsers will render the page, so if it done as a liquid layout, the page will fill the width given. As for the fixed, the only thing that comes to mind is a “print friendly” page. So … whoo-hoo! A “print friendly” might be a good opportunity to play with PHP … hmmm … Anyhow, check it out. I like the way it turned out .

Prototype: Form to Play with PHP

made a prototype folder to play with forms and PHP.  So far I’ve found that Yahoo web hosting doesn’t allow the “post” method.  I changed to the “get” method and now the submit button works without an error.  I found that once I completed the PHP script to accept the post, I could use the “post” method on my form.  You may try this simple echo:

http://www.lovely-items.com/Prototypes/requests.html

There is no form validation yet because Dreamweaver’s canned validation is weak.  I will have to write a stronger one in Javascript.   Since this is a simple echo, the information entered into the form only exists in the reply webpage and “goes” no where else.  Also, remember, this is a prototype — a little playground I’ve made for myself so none of this is final.

I sorta jumped ahead of the book I’m using and plopped the PHP script into the existing reply.html webpage.  It took a little playing around to get everything right.  In the end, it was simply replacing the original text with the PHP script in the middle of the HTML and renaming the page with the .php extension.  On the form, I pointed the post method to the new PHP file and everything worked when I uploaded the files to the web server.  Nice and simple.

Next is to get this script to send me and the customer a confirming e-mail (it would be nice to get validation that the e-mail is real too, but I’ll take this one step at a time.)

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The other thing about Yahoo web hosting is that they do not use the latest version of PHP.  They are on PHP 4.  Go Daddy, on the other hand, is on PHP 5.  I don’t know enough yet to know how this limits me.  I hope it’s not something important because it would be a pain in the behind to change hosts.

Omari’s Sister Website Update Done

Well, I finally did it!  I completely re-did my personal website.  I used Dreamweaver and all the fancy new tricks I just learned in the class I am taking.  I also learned how to use the new Adobe website tool, “Fireworks.”  It’s a tool that should be apart of Dreamweaver that can be used to mock up website graphics really fast.  Other tools I used were Illustrator for the title graphics and the flowers in the menu bar, Flash to generate the graphics for the menu and to create all of the galleries, and Fireworks for the content graphics.  I absolutely LOVE the way it turned out .  I’m so proud of myself.  I feel now I can take on any personal or small business advertising website design assignment.  Now onto expanding my knowledge of javascript and some server side scripting so I can start putting together more complete solutions.  Anyhow, check it out!

Link

Snowball’S World is Live

Check it out!  It took me a total of ~12-hours from blank sheet of paper to website.  Most of the time was spent prepping the photos in Photoshop.  I had to fix the color, crop them, crank down the resolution, and resize the images to fit within the browser window and to reduce the overall file sizes.  I also did a little “magic” to some of the pictures.  Since this was part of an assignment, I had to do some goofy things I wouldn’t do  like use tables.  I’ve very pleased with the way it turned out given the boundaries of the assignment.   (I’m so glad I know Flash!!!)   Here’s a link.  Enjoy getting to know my guinea better and some more of my incessant cuteness.

Snowball Web is Coming

I’m adding to my personal website.   The new addition will be devoted to my cute but evil pet guinea pig, Snowball (from Hell).  Here’s a little teaser of what it’s all about.  Pay attention to his eyes ;p.

Link