Hid the edit button for now, but it should be making an appearance again shortly. Got the Dates menu generating correctly, just have to wire up the links to actually do something when clicked on. I'll also need to go back and fix how the menu works on a phone, which I think I can do with media queries. The plan is to switch it to a collapsible menu when viewing on a phone. Started to work on adding in the topics to the post and adding the topics into the menu system too. So that should be the next thing I get done. I'll have to remember to add the topics column into the database too, before pushing the code live.
So looks like there are some differences in the new Bootstrap, so had to learn a couple of new things. Also, had a couple of hiccups in the documentation. It was my fault because I kept doing searches through google and was getting linked to different versions of the documentation. That's all worked out now and now I know what to look for. Looks like they also deprecated a couple of classes that I was using and added in some new things, that actually make columns easier to implement. Well got all the basics worked out, which also fixed some display errors in IE.
I'm just going back to what I know and like to do. Instead of trying to learn some indepth CMS, I'm just going to do what I like doing and code the pages from scratch. It does mean that at some point I'll have to check CSS compatibility with IE, which is something I hate doing, but guess thems the breaks.
It's been about four weeks that I've been doing the Saskatoon Paleo diet. It was fun, but I have to save up some money now so I'm going to be putting that on pause and just using the crockpot for a bit. I've probably lost about 10 pounds total, that's without any exercise, but it has been rough overall. I have yet to feel this magical burst of energy that people always talk about, if anything I've been more tired since starting it. The problem is that it's hard to know if energy issues were from the change in diet or because I've been under other stressful pressures right now. The number one thing that's been on my mind this month is getting moved out of my apartment. As for Saskatoon's plan, I enjoyed the food that was provided and it was great not having to prepare, cook, or clean up after meals. It was also great to get something that I new was healthy and not loaded with sodium or sugar, but I kind of wish there was a place that did this same kind of deal but for just regular old omnivors. I don't think the problem is so much completely cutting things like carbs out of your diet is the way to go, I mean people need to definitly cut back on carbs, sugar, and red meat, but at the end of the day our current society is pretty demanding. I think our bodies need some level of those "bad" things to get through the day. I know coffee is great for a burst, but at the same time I would rather rely on some carbs to get me a little extra energy during the day instead of more and more caffeine.
I think what I need to is either move the Blog to the main page, or make the homepage show the newest three blogs, like how I had my original site laid out. I'm still not 100% on if I want to keep using/learning Concrete5 or just redo my site from scratch. If I redo my site, I think I'll focus on using Bootstrap and AngularJS...on the downside that means I'll have to take time to learn AngularJS. Although that would probalby be a good thing to learn, that would take away from my main goal of trying to put more time into learning Unity3D. As for the voting system, I want some feedback on my posts, but I always don't want negative. My ego feels a little fragile at the moment, so I don't want to go all in with a comment system. That was actually what I left out of the Blog when I was following the instructions to build it, mostly I'm not looking for a discussion, just a place to get my thoughts out. So I found a simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down voting, but I'll have to mess with it some because I just want the thumbs-up part of it. :D
I finally got the navigation menu to go horizontally! After hours of looking into it trying to find some button that would do it I just added in custom CSS to make it happen...and apparently that is the way to do it. See this is what I don't get about CMS's in general! They boast about front-end website building, but when it comes down to it you either have to register and download a ton of addons to get things working or just edit the backend code to actually get what you want. They make it seem like it's just like editing a Word document, but it's not...it never is. So when it comes down to it, you either need a degree in the CMS to know what it can and can't do natively or you just start hacking the CSS and JavaScript to force it to do what you want. At the end of the day you have a site that loads slower than clean code and really takes just about as long to develop because of all the researching and fumbling around you do to figure out what is the right and wrong approach to something simple you are trying to do. Hopefully it gets easier the more I play around with it, but I'm already kind of looking around for something more straight forward. I guess I'm going to have to signup on the site so I can try and use the addons, see if those make it easier.
I've been trying this Saskatoon Paleo Meal Plan, but don't be confused I'm not doing it because I'm going to be a paleo person or anything like that. I'm really just doing it because I'm tired of grocery shopping, cooking, and cleaning. These things consume a good bit of time and it's hard to find recipes for one serving...and the math to make a recipe one serving gets annoying when you have to deal with fractions of a teaspoon. Basically their meal plan is I give them money and they give me meals, shakes, deserts, and supplements all portioned and packaged out. Which means I just have to heat and eat. Clean-up is as easy as getting takeout. I'm about at the end of the first week, this time I only paid for one week which was about 160$. At first glance that may sound high but with everything you get and not having to spend time cooking, cleaning, or shopping I feel it's worth it. At the moment I've paused my workouts, while my body is adjusting to the lower calorie and carb intake. The first maybe...three days I had a very slight headache, nothing bad enough that I had to take anything for. It was more like that feeling right before you get a headache, where things are a little more annoying but nothing that makes you want to crawl into bed or bite someone's head off. For those of you that are interested in the weightloss aspects of this, it looks like I've lost about 5 lbs. this week. This is without exercise, but don't be fooled the past four days I have been hungry inbetween meals. That hungry seems to be a bit less each day. I also realized that if hunger was a bigger issue for an individual it would be easy to head to the store and just get more of what they give you for snacks. Which this week was carrots, celery, and assorted nuts. I've just been powering through those urges though, and everything seems to be fine.
Well that was a royal pain in the butt! I'm testing out this CMS, which are supposed to make creating a site faster and easier, but I still don't see it. I was following a guide on how to build a Blog in this CMS. The guide was maybe a 3 out of 5, but it took me like three hours to get through it! Just so many settings to setup! When I built my site from scratch it just seemed like it was much easier. I just made a form with three fields, made a database to match, and bam! That was it, everything worked fine. Don't get me wrong I picked up a couple things from going through the tutorial, but overall there is no way I could just sit down and setup it up again without going back through the tutorial. I mean really the only thing that is has is the ability to format my entries, but honestly I could have built that into my custom one. Well I guess the reality is that I'm trying to use a CMS for overall speed when building, so hopefully when I get the basics built I won't have to spend time coding this and I can focus on learning other things.
I think it's an October thing. I usually start to become a bit unsettled around this time, wanting a change, wanting to be better than what I am. I'm doing contract work at the moment. Dealing a lot with various technologies that I haven't had the pleasure of using before. This stuff is amazing, but it's also a lot to take in all at once. I'm definitely off my game at the moment, which is just making everything more difficult. I've got a lot on my mind this year and I need to start sorting things out to feel whole again.
Currently taking a SharePoint2013 Designer class. This is the second class that my company has me taking. The first one wasn't too bad, hopefully this one will be as good. So what's going on? Well the company I've been working at split so I've been busy learning new system and migrating systems. On the plus side I've been working on rebuilding one of the web applications, because a lot of the code was depricated. The plus side to this is that I decided to rebuild it in CodeIgnitor, so I'm happily getting to finally learn that. I would like to rebuild this site in it, but whether I decide to continue with CodeIgnitor or not after this project is done remains to be seen. Regardless I feel like learning this has already gave me a great understanding of Model View Control(MVC), which I had more of a hazy understanding of before. I feel much more clear on it now, and the more I play around with it the more I seem to be refining what is what. I mention sticking with CodeIgnitor and the only reason I say that is because my buddy Rob in CT told me about another framework called Gumby which I'm interested in taking a look at. Really comes down to time. Ah yes time! Always against me. There are several things I wanted to start on this year and life has interrupted me!! Trying to re-organize and focus. Want to play with CodeIgnitor, Gumby, SASS, Unity, and investing. I think I'm going to have to eliminate TV or VideoGames to accomplish this...maybe even both if I'm able. Oh it's going to suck! LOL
Well it has been a long a$$ while since...holy crow like 2 years since I just put a comment on here, let alone done any kind of work to it! That makes me depressed. Well I have learned a lot since then. Heck I've learned enough to the point where when I inadvertently tell someone I have a website, I don't want them to go to it because I don't feel like it is anywhere close to representing my site building abilities. On the plus side, I've met a lot of cool intelligent people at jobs, who I hope I can maintain as friends. Some are programmers, artists, entrepreneurs, etc. Just a lot of cool, intelligent, creative people! Who I hope that I can maintain communications and friendships with, which is going to be hard because a lot of them are scattered across the country and I'm terrible at keeping up with people if I don't have some kind of regular interaction.(If you are one of the cool people I have had the privilege of interacting with feel free to contact me whenever, doesn't matter if you haven't heard from me, if you just want random conversation or some chit-chat send me a message!) Anyways, I've been working with getting Bitbucket setup and reading/testing out GIT. I think it will be a smooth transition from SVN to GIT. Started to take some notes on CodeIgnitor, I'm still pretty curious about learning that one. Maybe it's just the name, I don't know but sounds cool to me for some reason. I believe I have a much better understanding of MVC, had to read a bunch of stuff and talk to like three people about it, because it just wasn't clicking for me. Now I've compiled that information into a simple model/drawing that I can understand, pretty sure it's right. At the very least it makes sense to me.lol One of those cool friends I met was talking to me about a couple of other technologies that his company uses, so I think I will start looking at those after I get more familiar with CodeIgnitor. So probably not this year but at some point I will start looking into AngularJS, Laravel, and ExpressionEngine. Sadly, this year has been slow. My current company is breaking up, half being sold and I will be owned by the new owners...that sounds weird when you think about it...it's kind of like I'm no different then a printer being changed hands.lol Anyways, hopefully that will work out for the best. For the past quarter of this year all my free time has been going to watching my brother's dog and trying to maintain his house as he was out of town training for a new job. He's back now, and I wish him the best on his new venture but at the same time the past 3 months have drained me(mentally and physically). On the plus side that's done now and I'm almost finished moving into a new apartment. I'm looking forward to having a place by myself for at least some of my life, hopefully not all of it though.lol It should be good though, not having to be concerned about roommates or just "other people interruptions". I know that sounds very anti-social, but I've always felt I needed to give it a shot and this may be the only chance in life I get to. If it works, then I can enjoy it and plan for some kind of "pool house business office" kind of thing when I eventually buy a house. If it doesn't, then at least I won't go through the rest of my life wondering about. See when you think about it that way it's much more positive! In general, no matter how negative the things I say may come across, I am actually a positive person. Well my 15 minute break is up so back to work! Hoping to start uploading some site changes before the end of next month.
Been jotting down some ideas and now I have almost got an old laptop to the point where I can work whenever or where ever I want, so I should start to be re-coding this site in a couple of days.
Well I jumped the gun on my ankle it's still healing after all this time. Ankles apparently take much longer to heal then I knew.
Well I sprained my ankle Tuesday playing soccer, so I'm just kind of limping around, trying to lay down as much as possible when not at work. Took some more notes on how I want to revamp certain sections of the website. Started looking at MVC for PHP on last weekend, going to have to take another look at. On the plus side I've been starting to use MVC for ASP.NET at work so that should help me a bit in the learning. Wondering if I should get second web host that supports ASP.NET, it would be nice to have the option to code my site in whatever I'm doing my job in. Kind of like a double work whammy! Ah well, anyways I'm going to get back to icing and resting my ankle.
Can't really decide how I want to approach this. I've just started to read up on MVC, wondering if I want to try to implement that within my rebuild. I definitely have learned a lot and want to implement some ideas I've come up with from projects I've worked on.
Okay, I'm currently sick thanks to the Holiday run around, but I've been thinking a lot about updates to do to the site. First off I want to split this updates page up. This was just supposed to be updates to the site and I'm using it more like a blog. So I'm going to divide this up into a blog section and site updates section. Maybe do something to the site update section so it's a little more informal. I should think of ways to make a link between the two sections too, so I can reference updates from the blog. I also need to implement some kind of formatting, seeing as how all these entries are just one block of text.
Enjoying the job so far. Lots of cool people and more information then I can retain, it's great! Been taking what afternoons and weekends I can to try and come up with some kind of "gamey" web idea. Have a handful of ideas, some are too grand and a couple just aren't panning out. Just haven't got to something that feels right for me at this point in time. Was actually thinking today that I should just start coding something, to see if that would help spark some ideas. Possible on the weekend.
Well got a job programming, thank you lord! Anyways, I am still straightening financials out but I am planning on spending some of my free time working on my site again. Not sure if I am going to try and rewrite it in ASP.NET or not. I am thinking about it to get some extra practice in. I do not know so far the ratio of PHP to ASP.net I am using is more in favor of the latter, so that is the main thing swaying my decision. On another note I just noticed that it looks like my web host reactivated magic quotes for some reason. Dag nab it!
Well I'm getting a bit annoyed. I am starting to learn cakePHP, but very slowly...not because I'm slow. Just been crazy at work lately, I've literally been able to sit down once and do a little bit of work/research with cake. The most annoying part is that I have the whole project laid out I just need to learn the framework so I can put it together. I was just thinking the other day that I should of just started to code the project and not worry about the framework, but I do feel I need to learn this. Even if for no other reason then to get a better hold on the MVC approach. I've already decided I'm going to start looking for a new temporary job with regular hours and holidays off. This job is sucking up way to much of my life for something that is just supposed to pay the bills until I find a full time programming gig. I thought this job was gonna give me more free time to work on code, but instead it's doing the opposite and the late hours and physical exhaustion are eating in to the few hours I have before work to get work done(I know that sounds weird).
I'm still trying to figure out how I want to handle this. I don't know if I want to just start building a project with cakePHP framework or if I want to first remodel my site using the framework to get a bit of a hands on approach with something I already know how to use. Going from scratch might be a little difficult because I'll have to be doing more then one thing at a time and making sure everything is working correctly, where as if I remodel my site with it first I will already know how it is supposed to work and look so I can focus more on properly setting up the framework and keeping things organized. Redoing the site might be a better approach it's just that I know I'm not going to have a lot of free time this month which is frustrating. I wish I didn't have to sleep, that would make things much easier(don't get me wrong I still want the option to sleep, because it's fun, just that it wasn't a necessity).
Wow, I have to say frameworks are an amazing way to handle web pages. I've been digging into the cakePHP framework for two days now and I'm really impressed. It's an amazing use of PHP to create pages, I'm still not 100% on a couple of the things but hopefully I will have enough of it down to start working with it within a couple of days. This kind of brings me back to when I first started learning PHP a couple of years ago, a friend and I were looking over it and were coming up with...well basically how the framework is doing it. A more dynamic way to manipulate and produce the html code by just building the HTML strings with code instead of having to actually full around with the HTML itself. I don't know how to explain it, just feels like my brain is getting a jump start. Man I love working on this stuff, it's invigorating!
I uploaded the changes I did to the site using jQuery today. Seems to be working well in Chrome, I am noticing though that transitions don't seem to be as fluid when viewed through Internet Explorer (surprise surprise), so I guess I'm going to have to look into a way that I can hopefully fix that(I think I remember a work around for it, although I'm not big on kludges). I also notice that there seems to be a delay between pages where jQuery attributes haven't been applied to the page, so for a split second everything is unformatted and then is snapped into it's proper layout. Maybe a way to delay the display so that when it is shown everything is already loaded. Well anyways I'll have to put that on the side burner, because I need to start looking into the cakePHP framework.
Well after fighting with Apache for a couple of days, trying to get it installed and setup manually with php mysql and all that garbage I finally was about to give up, and then I came across this site www.wampserver.com/en which is basically a package deal setting up everything for you quickly and easily. It also makes option settings a breeze, because all you have to do is use a context menu to turn settings/options on and off. You can even activate specific versions of php and/or mysql with no hassle, making it easy to match your live web server. Now I just have to see if I can get cakePHP up and running. I think that if it takes me too long to get that going I'm just going to start on my project and just adopt the framework later, yes it will be more work but I need to get going on this stuff.
Blah, okay I'm also trying to learn how to use cakePHP before I start working on my web scheduling program. I just figured out that I'm going to have to switch my web server from Abyss to Apache, something about mod_rewrites I just spent like an hour reading over it and decided it's gonna take me too long to figure out how to setup Abyss to work with the mod_rewrite functionality, especially when there is documentation to get it to work with Apache(if there are indeed problems after installing it). Since I'm trying to get more stuff done I sadly don't have the time to invest on learning the information necessary to get Abyss working properly with cake, so I'm gonna do it the easy way and just use a different web server on my development box. This in no way means that I have any ill feelings towards Aprelium, I've been using their web server on my local box for a long time and I think it is great. Lets just chalk this up to my own lack of time and effort. If in the future I learn how to set it up to handle things I will start to use it again and probably edit this post so no one will ever know!
No worries I haven't stopped working, I've just been caught up with jQuery (some times it's a little frustrating cause right before I feel like I'm going to have a break through in understanding a piece of it I have to stop to head to work, but no worries I keep pressing on and usually by the next day I get it down). I've made some visual changes with it and am playing around with how to display error messages. I'm deciding if I want to wait until after I do some file renames and organization to upload. In any case it will have to wait until I get a solid day off, which won't be for a couple of weeks. I'm a little eager to get the changes up because it just feels more gratifying when it's out there in the world.
Well now that I have been able to spend a day off looking at jQuery I'm starting to see the usefulness of it. I'm mostly learning it through the UI part of it, and hoping to progress more into it as I go along. I haven't uploaded my changes to this live site yet, just want to make sure about a couple more things. I'll probably just backup everything before I make the switch. It does seem to help speed up development some what. I'm really hoping to get a stronger grasp on it as I go along, already thinking of ways to rewrite my javascript function to work with it. Well that's about it for now, hope to have the changes up within a week or two whenever I get another couple of days off to work on it and time to make the switch.
Started looking at the jQuery documentation last night. I'm still a little iffy on it, looks like it might take me a bit to convert my site to utilize it. So far it is interesting but I don't know if I'm grasping the full usefulness of it, it might just be cause I have just started looking at it I'm not sure. For now it seems like I'm going to have to make some large scale changes to implement it. I'll try to do updates on my progress but until I can convert the site locally and still have the functionality of what I built so far it might be a bit before I get anything up on the live site. I actually wanted to get my resume up, but now I don't know if I want to spend time doing that then have to redo it with jQuery. Well I've got to head to work for now, lets hope it doesn't take me too long to get this tool down.
Okay I added in a delete confirmation popup, so in case I accidentally click on the delete button I will be given a choice to not delete something. I also have the popup display the information of the record that is going to be deleted. The other thing I got done was the edit button, so if I mess up on a post or need to add more to a post that I already posted I can hit that and go back in to change whatever I need to. I'm gonna check again but I think those were the two things I wanted to finish up for now before I start messing around with the web side project I mentioned on the 15th. I was at work today thinking about it and decided that I'm going to attempt to use jQuery when building that project. I have only really played around a very little bit with jQuery but I noticed that more people are starting to ask for it on job requests, and heck if it turns out that I like using it maybe I can apply it to my main site and get things moving along a little quicker. I already know from reviewing their examples and documentation on it that some of the pre-built things they offer are things that I either need or have already built, so the potential to cut down on the amount of work should help a lot and keep me focused on more important things. Well anyways it's like one in the morning and I'm fading fast..and I should be getting some new computer parts later today!
Wired up the delete button, so that any of the updates can be deleted from the database using the website. Just have to be logged in as an admin. Need to add a popup that confirms if the user wants to delete the entry, but not a priority at the moment. Also, wrote down some notes and keep thinking of ways to organize the pages better. I think I might try and do that next before the site gets larger, it's already going to be a bit of a challenge to make sure that everything is going to work once moved and renamed.
I hate when I do something wrong in SVN, always takes me too long to get it back on track.
I'm afraid I didn't get much done tonight. My mind is a little scattered...had too many little things on it. I edited the login text boxes to accept an enter button to change the fields and start the login. So there is no need to tab between them or manually click on the login button. After that I was just looking through some of the classes again, trying to remember why I did something. I think I can combine two of the objects I created. I don't know I keep getting annoyed working on a website, it always feels like I'm just mashing together multiple languages that weren't meant to be together.
Alrighty, I looked around and then did a couple of tests and found out that the live site was using PHP Magic Quotes so I sent the hosting site a message and they disabled that for me. That makes it easier for me so I didn't have to add in a function to do a check for the state of MQ every time I wanted to post something. Lets see what else...oh yeah I fixed the logout out button so that instead of just jumping back to the main page it grabs the current url and returns the user to the same page they were at. I also cleaned up some code so that the script that handles the login/logout is handled by one PHP page instead of two different ones. So I effective was able to remove an entire page, and not lose any functionality. Dang I was cleaning up a couple of things on my TODO list so I forgot a couple of other things I fixed, I think it was mostly just cleaning up some of the objects. I just threw in some placement for Edit and Delete buttons on the Updates section, this will make it so that when an admin posts an update they can go back and either Delete the update or Edit something they already posted.
Okay just fixed the login so it is functional, can't make mew users at this time but now I can login so I can do my updates through the website instead of through the database. I did notice a problem when I was copying my updates from my local test site to the live site. It seems like for some reason it's leaving the slashes in on the live site. That is going to be annoying to figure out since I don't have that issue locally. I'll take a look at it tonight, gotta get ready for work. Well it looks like there must me a different setting on the server DB then on my local DB, because locally I have to use the addslashes function or else the database won't except the data. Because the apostrophes break up the text, but they must have some kind of setting on the server that automatically handles that. I'm going to have to find out so I can match mySQL to theirs, so that is what I will be looking for tonight.
Put the checks in for the updates, so that if the subject and/or description fields are blank it won't allow a post...oh yeah let me through one in for the date too. At the moment it just doesn't react so need to build an error handler to display why nothing is happening, should be able to get it done tonight, I've built one before on another project so shouldn't be a problem. Probably going to make it as dynamic as I can so it can easily be called on any page.
Okay well I already typed in this update, but I forgot to tweak the function to handle the adding of slashes so I lost my original description...I knew I was forgetting something when I did it. lol Anyways I set it up so that I can add updates through a website interface now instead of having to manually enter them in the database. Aside from that convenience the interface does a couple more things for me: keeps track of the max characters I can type in for the subject and description of the update, automatically adds the current date in, automatically fills in the user's id(of whoever is logged in), as well as automatically generating a uid for the post itself. So far it works great, need to add a couple of blank field checks in and fix the login before I put the changes online but should be able to get that done before the end of the week. ...copy...now I will press submit. lol
Finally got some time away from my temp job. Okay I just took out the little background image I had, because it really wasn't that great just something I threw together when I was bored. And I'm no artist. Aside from that all I really got done today was fixed some placement issues I was having with the login stuff, and testing to see if I should use tables or not for placement. I don't think I need to, just need to test a couple of instances in IE and Chrome to find out if it works better or not.
Well it was inevitable, I had to preemptively get a hourly job to cover my bills. So that means things are going to slow down on my site development. I'm still trying to get the swing of my work schedule down, hopefully I will be a bit more in tune this week. It looks like I've got a couple hours in the morning to get some work done, if I have no other errands to get done in that time. Hopefully this will just encourage me to work faster, optimistically giving my overall abilities a performance boost! Well here's to hoping.
Fixed the login box, mostly spacing and attached it to the actual bottom bar instead of having it attached to the top and moving it down there. Also fixed the part of the login JS methods, mostly cause I already had it built just had to tweak it a bit. Aside from that I tweaked the coloring of some of the buttons on top so that it's more clear which ones are disabled or "coming soon" instead of just having a dead link floating around up there.
Well I had a bug in the daily first that took me a bit to workout. After trying several tests on it I finally started typing in random thoughts until it bugged again and realized it only bugged when I had apostrophes in the text. I guess I was just more awake this time, so I put in preventive measures by running a check before hand and adding slashes when needed. I also put in checks for begin white spaces, to prevent a blank entry from being put in. While testing I also noticed that leaving word wrap on would make the DF output display cleaner so threw that in too. I removed the login from the main menu and placed it at the bottom of the page, since there was room down there and it felt crammed in at the top. Also put labels into the login text boxes that are removed when information is typed in.
Well that took me three days longer then I wanted. Two days I didn't have enough time because I had to keep running down to my dad's place of business to try and help figure out what was wrong with his digitizer and had to drop off some applications at various stores for a job...any job. And today I was just out of it so it took me longer I wanted. Anyways, I think I got the Daily First completed now(aside from a couple of extra safe guards I will put in later). The first person each day can post whatever they want and it will be a part of the site. For the most part I will let whatever people post stay up. I also set it up so that it displays how many characters you have left to type for the post and stops typing from going over that number. I don't want to be the first one to post on it, cause that doesn't seem fair. Hopefully their won't be any issues on the live site and it works like on the test site. Oh yeah, I also had an issue because I was using an out-of-date DateTime object in PHP. That was a pain in the butt. On the plus side it is a good thing I found out about that, because I wasn't even taking my PHP version into account while writing any of this and I've come to find out that my webserver is using an older version then I am. Good stuff to know!
Almost done setting up The Daily First section on the main page. Built to main structure for it and have it displaying on the page correctly. Now just have to finish wiring up the button and a couple checks so users can anonymously post to the page. Also think I'm going to setup a secondary page like the updates one so that there will be a history of what has been "firsted". Should be able to finish it up tomorrow.
Started putting together the login fields. At first I'm only going to have it setup for an admin login, until I get a couple more things done. Also started laying out "The Daily First" section on the front page, just some random idea I thought I would put up when I was trying to think of things to actually have on the site.
Replaced the CSS hover command on the table highlighting with JavaScript. Works better and is compatible with internet explorer. Also messed around a little with Gimp and just made a quick patterned background, not sure if I want to keep it or not just wanted a little more behind the site. The complete black background just looked a little off.
Added in the updates page, which will give a full list of the site updates. Also, broke up the CSS files trying to keep a specific style sheet for each page. I figure why load a CSS file if the user isn't even going to the page. I mean it will probably be a trivial amount of information, so we'll see how it goes. Also created an extra CSS for the updates page mostly just allows the description to stretch out and adds a hover that increases the text size. Thinking about replacing this with Javascript so it doesn't matter what part of the table row the mouse is on, also I just checked and IE doesn't like the CSS hover unless it's a link so it doesn't even work in there.
After stopping at a friend's house and seeing the compatibility issues from Chrome to Opera to Firefox I decided to remove the animated drop down main menu and replace it with a stagnant one. I think the most I'm going to have are the button hover effects, until someone actually comes up with a standard for CSS3 and follows it. I'm leaving rounded corners in since it doesn't really matter if the browser can support them or not. Also resized the width of the page to make it a little more user friendly to the majority of people. Last but not least I added a bottom icon bar to show the things that I use and built the site on.
Finished transferring and setting up site to SuperGreen. Exported database, uploaded pages, fixed a couple of pathing errors, and tweaked the connection information. Looks like everything is working so far, just hoping that SuperGreen has all the stuff I'm looking for in a hosting site. I'm always concerned that when I make some kind of large change that I'll over look something. Here's crossing my fingers!
Finished the short update display on the main page to list the 5 latest updates. Adjusted the basic styles too and wrote them down because the color scheme was clashing really bad and I kept forgetting what colors I was using. So going to try to use less colors and stick to a standard.
Added in the dbconnection stuff and built a class to handle the retrieval and display of the update information...actually going to need to set this class up so that it can do two different retrievals. The short one for the main frame and then the extended one for the update page.
Redesigned the main menu and applied a style format to it to have it drop down and do rollovers. Pretty sure I want it like this so that it is out of the users way when not needed. Using CSS3, so doesn't work at all in the current IE version but I'm not even going to worry about that until the site is actually up and getting traffic.
Well this is the third reincarnation of my website. I'm hoping I can keep enough going on it for it to become the one that sticks to the internet. Just need to keep thinking up things to do, add to, or improve on and I should be able to keep it going. This also serves as a note to the visitors, there might be random things up on the site as I make various attempts to expand the site and keep my interest going.