Matts Blog

I wanted to put my knowledge of CSS to the test, and providing rounded corners to every browser (read: most browsers) seemed like a sufficient enough challenge and one worthwhile undertaking. I haven’t done it alone, there was some help (see the “further reading” at the bottom of the page). Anyway, I knew of CSS Sprites and I had the idea of using 6 spans within a div to achieve this (I have seen a similar version using 4 spans). So my coding and (hopefully) sufficient explanation follows below the click.

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Seems an odd title, aye… its come from my experiences with customising Windows Vista with all sorts of little features which just seem to gobble up extra processing time for something I already do to some extent, i.e. a gimmick.

After reading a recent SmashingMagazine article (and not to pee on their fire, it was pretty good) I decided to explore some seemingly good ideas to bring Mac features to the hulking Vista OS – its safe to say most of these additions where promptly uninstalled.

Albeit I already had some of them such as the ever wonderful Notepad++, but among other features was a number of Vista themes, and while perfectly fine looks and style wise, just would not have been practical for long term use – I am still after all this time finding the simplistic Vista Aero theme the perfect style for me.

They also forgot the completely free IIS (built into Windows XP, and can be installed with Vista) which now has more support with the PHP plug-in and ability to work with a local database server such as MySQL. I won’t deny it often feels cumbersome even when used locally – but its a smidge easier to set up. Mind, I do use WAMP too and that works just as well – if not much more quicker than IIS.

The article also covers object-docks and various other Mac features which have been recreated by third-parties for Vista – safe to say I wouldn’t waste my time with them; though no-doubt they could be useful, I have just got into the rythm of Windows.

I should point out the article stems from an earlier Mac-supporting article on SM, so it was another answer to this. I’ll give it one thing, it does prove that there is yet again another alternative to Mac for web-design tasks.

In other news of my own – I’ve had an idea, but ssshhh… its my precious

So I’ve been doing my daily reading and pondering upon these readings… of news articles of course. Cloud computing cropped up in one of the articles, among the fan-fair of OnLive a cloud-computing gaming system which basically means the player doesn’t need a real computer in their home or place of joy. Instead its all done through the internet, now cloud computing is by definition a bit more wider and often used for more useful work-like applications.

I wondered how reliable it really would be to have everything in this cloud, such as security, up-time, accessability, functionality and what-not. Is it really suitable to rely so heavily on a network like the internet? Regardless of infrastructure issues, there is an issue of relying on something which could given the right circumstance risk bringing everything to a halt through one big fault. It may be why applications are still sold on disks and hosted on a business’ server rather than sent down the tube.

What redundancy systems are there, can 100% uptime be guaranteed all the time? Take for example an MMO called Guild Wars, at one point in time this game had immense troubles in Europe and the United Kingdom, users either couldn’t connect or had intermittent connectivity. This was all due to one of the links between Germany and the US – the main connection between the two or some hardware fault was the cause, but this kept up for a week.

Repeat that scenario with an important application that your company relies on for everyday business and you’ve got one business not able to provide service for a large amount of time to its customers. Just like we thought we’d stop relying on paper, although its still in common usage even today for many things – I doubt we’ll stop relying on local systems to provide the quality of service we demand/require.

… “It’ll only take an hour”, when we all know its going to take a day.

It turns out my website provider doesn’t support ASP any more, and I can’t really blame them too much – I expected that stroke of bad luck to hit me sooner or later. Turns out I need ASP for my college course, so a backup plan was hatched to set up a server at home for the project. Figuring it would take me an hour or less to get everything sorted, the first hurdle was import/export laws and regulations for the MySQL server download (as I needed a database and I had the most experience with this). Setting up the IIS to gain ASP – I then spend 3-4 hours figuring out why my page which worked at college cannot be understood by my home machine.

The ego has popped – of what little there was – with disastrous effect. I figured I’d start searching round, doing internet searches and scouring through my system and the various panels offered up by the IIS… only to search in my installed Windows Features that ASP.NET was ticked, while the poor little ASP wasn’t. Hence the pop – something so simple I’d managed to miss it completely.

So it was that I have felt utterly thwarted and confused by the whole fiasco.

Left 3 Dead

In other notable happenings, we discovered a way to kick the AI permanently from a server session in Left 4 Dead – the host can type kick “Louis” (as that is usually the AI) into the console and voilà, it be gone. We noticed a substantial reduction in friendly fire cases, bar Log’s shotgun love unfortunately anyone who wishes to join cannot – at least until we figure out how to get the AI back.

On Windows 7

I haven’t really used Windows 7 much – although I must correct my last entry in that W7 is using less than 1GB now, more along the lines of 900MB of RAM. And is an almost likeable operating system with the exception of its music stealing bug… nasty bugs.

Today’s gaming has changed a lot since that of the 1990’s (of which I can remember, just) – we now have online retail stores, digital distribution, data rights management… and plenty of online connectivity. But this raises a problem, there is such a thing as a Digital Divide – in these modern days that usually means between third world countries or poverty stricken areas and the better off locales; of which the former two are less likely to have internet access than the latter.

I’d love to coin a new term, ok, just expand on the old one – the Gamer’s Digital Divide – this is not looked at often and somewhat overlooked by companies of varying sizes. While there are a number of games out there that can be played online, and probably should be for a fun experience – not everyone wants to play them online, and some people can’t. Unfortunately this is where VALVe’s Steam now falls short, and where Data Rights Management is causing a huge gap.

You can have the best hardware, most powerful gaming rig in your neighbourhood, but if you don’t have an internet connection there is absolutely no way for you to play that newly purchased game from the shop down the road. Why? because it wants to make sure you aren’t a pirate on the seas of the internet, which therefore requires an internet connection. You are now on the unfortunate side of the Gamer’s Digital Divide.

Why can’t Steam validate that it is on an off-line machine and just lock multiplayer? Letting you play singleplayer till your heart is content, I’d guess its because it needs to call home ‘just incase’. But that still doesn’t change that fact, what about players who do have an connection – but would rather not play multiplayer, can’t you lock that and strip back Steam’s system footprint? Same goes for the lone-wolf-gamer, I bet they don’t want a friends list.

Personally, I am a fan of Steam – but I don’t want that to blind me; there are still some folks who don’t want multiplayer, and to suggest that they should start playing online is both ignorant and rude, not everyone has time for other people online. The average age of a gamer is 35, which means plenty of gamers with a full-time job and/or a family; thats a lot to look after.

Cascading Style Sheets, how I love thee. Every time I think there is something I can’t do… a little google brings up a nugget of information which doesn’t seem to appear on the usual channels. For example today I wanted to make all text input fields in a form a certain width, many a time do I forget about attribute selectors… for example:

input[type="text"] { … }

or

input[type="password"] {…}

Although I’ve remembered this little feature, an often overlooked and unreferenced trick has no end of use. Often when you use a divide tag to wrap around other divides it seems to forget it is supposed to wrap them, often looking ugly in early stages of debugging. I remember reading a complicated fix for this, when one CSS guru just said…

#wrap { overflow : auto }

Pop, it remembers its supposed to be wrapping and hops to it.

I’ve also tried to get some standard practices into my work, for example including comments in unclear or complex markup. Placing all my colours in the head comments should I need to change them later (using Find + Replace), and if that wasn’t enough – I’ve started alphabetizing any style properties, all of them result in clean and easily read markup, of course keeping the XHTML markup clean helps too.

Furthermore, I’d like to share some Firefox Plugins which might make any web designers life easier:

• Fireshot – allows you to capture a part of the rendered browser screen or the entire web page into a single image.
• Colorzilla – allows you to color-drop a certain part of the page (even images) so you can easily get RGB/Hex numbers.

Hope you find those addons useful, I certainly do.

And don’t worry, I don’t make a habit of getting over-involved in April Fools

Only a couple of weeks ago did I even realise (or think upon) the idea that the family business’ website probably has IE6 users, a sudden and all too real problem for some of my design techniques. It is a well known and well hated fact that Internet Explorer 6 is out of date, has terrible website support and doesn’t really follow proper web-standards.

So when I realised I had produced PNG images, used div tags and unusual aligning the first thing I wanted to do was make sure the sites appeared as they should in IE6 – not being a browser I normally checked consistency with, thankfully everything was for the most part ok.

While I have a large percentage of visitors using up-to-date browsers (there are some search engines in there too), there was a minority of users still using early browsers, probably featuring a huge amount of security holes. I plead to anyone still using a version of Internet Explorer 6 or less, or even early versions of Firefox, upgrade – you can find out the version usually by going into ‘help -> about’ a version number should be somewhere in there.

You will be loved by the website designer/developer community and hated by all hackers and virii producers. Ok, perhaps not so strongly but you will be doing the online world a favour!

I’ve been doing a lot of research today, more than I had expected to do; turns out I love producing websites and will happily spend hours doing so. I’ve not been able to devote a lot of time to the graphical side of things but I have produced some basic HTML forms with a clean CSS layout, ready for insertion into a large scale project whenever I need them.

Aside form that, I’m posting to share some of the places I have found on the internet which have proven to be full of knowledge nuggets and inspiration; particularly in the realm of Cascading Style Sheets and their uses.

For starters, I wouldn’t go anywhere without my CSS and XHTML references, luckily w3schools has them free for access to anyone; so I needn’t worry about losing them, unless I don’t have an internet connection. XHTML Reference and the CSS Reference; that site also has some very handy free tutorials for getting started in website design.

One of my new favourite sites comes in the flavour of Smashing Magazine, one of my new favourite sources for web 2.0 style trends and tips/tricks on making CSS do magic things. It also has some general style ideas, resources and I believe fonts; nice for those beautiful banners.

If there would be just a small number of must-try articles I would point anyone towards it would be these:

• Holy Grail of CSS Layouts

This tutorial will give you a good idea of using div tags to format your site, its a little tough to get your head round initially; but that soon wears off when you realise what is going on.

• Accessible Forms

Accessible Forms will give you a little experience in making use of lists for formatting, although do step with trepidation; the CSS and XHTML don’t initially match until you stick the class on the form (nothing else). You may also notice the idea of only affecting elements within another surrounding element.

I hope you all find this useful, if you have any questions let me know

I’m working on a brand new style for the site, something a lot more colourful than before. I have uploaded the current work in progress which can be viewed [here], this one has a number of benefits over previous styles – mainly:

• XHTML DTD Transitional conformity.
• CSS 2.0 valid.
• It has some lovely colour in there.

This one is my little gem, it hasn’t needed a single fix in Internet Explorer (just yet); while it is primarily being made for the frontpage, I am playing with the idea of developing it further into a WordPress theme for this blog. Only when it is completely finished and finalised I should imagine.

The only issue developed is that my host provider has PHP short-tags enabled, and while I normally wouldn’t have an issue with this – it has caused a little trauma thanks to the XML tag at the start of the page being wrongly identified as a PHP opening tag.

This is just a general rant or opinion on this, considering I have an online identity that spreads to just about to every corner (that isn’t sordid). I find it more and more difficult to devote a minute of my time to new sites that I sign up to; plus my interest in some of them is generally limited.

For example I have a small number of art sites which I am registered to, these make for casual browsing. I also have a larger collection of game related websites, be it for specific games or for overall news – less casual browsing more for recent news. I also visit a number of general news and technology websites. Chuck in the time I spend gaming or working on new layouts for my website/in general, and I soon have very little time to spend on any other sites or even services.

For example I am always logged into xfire, I rarely log into MSN and I rarely spend any time looking at facebook or similar sites. I’ve read a number of articles in the newspaper or on sites which try to shout down facebook, and claim its the end of our new generation’s “true” social lives – I step with trepidation here, as I do similar things already but not in the same community; and I’m never 100% sure as to the validity of either sides arguments.

But its safe to say I rarely have any interest in developing my online – private presence, be it upload photos, join groups, take quizzes or whatever. Perhaps I’ve become one of the veterans of the internet, much like those of Usenet, and CB Radio – when the general public masses flood in (although admittedly I was one of those) making a significant change to the structure or ways of the web.

On another note, I am never sure where to draw the line; do I want to try and integrate my current online links/acquaintances with my private life through sites such as facebook, or do I try and keep the two completely divided? Or instead of trying to force anything just let it go with the flow?