Rock & Blogroll

My custom themed blog resides at;

Rock & Blogroll @ Tumblr

The changed I made were mainly to the size of the sidebars and main content divs, I made to following changes; I changed the width of the sidebars to fit the screen better (it was around 275px but I may have made them small since) I also changed around the padding to fit around the edges a bit better. I styled and created my custom header. I made it in photoshop, I changed the padding on the left-side to 50px, this leaves the header in the middle which is what I was after. I also changed the position property to static so it will not move, this was definitely something I was after.

I liked the theme I was working with, it has a nice minimalist thing going for it. I couldn’t change the height of the sidebars because they had a rounded edge at the bottom. I could change all the colour without altering the CSS or HTML. I used Firebug quite extensively to live preview my work as I made changes.

I did try to put in a background image but I couldn’t style it to cover the entire background, i couldn’t even tile it. I tried a few different divs but nothing really worked. If I had’ve been better prepared I would’ve perhaps looked into it further.

I couldn’t manage to get my FLickr account to preview in the sidebar either, yet another part I couldn’t quite figure out. I did remove the twitter part of the right sidebar and I personalised the left sidebar. I was a little bit let down by this theme, for some reason it only wanted to support four links before it turned my quote into an anchor-tag.

After what has been many hours of pure frustration, MY WEBSITE IS FINALLY *EXPLETIVE* LIVE.

You can find the single most awesome Stonefest 2008 website (EVER) at the following location;
http://40stonefest.ueuo.com/Home.html

I had huge issues with links between my main and subpages not working because I had accidentally changed the paths. That doesn’t matter though, it’s up now.
That leaves me with about 12 hours to finish my blog theme off.

In case you can’t already tell I’m having some issues getting my website live. I tried using a website called something like 000webhosting.com and I couldn’t do the FTP  for whatever reason, I was having issues connecting to their network. The program they use “Filezilla’ is pretty complex on first impressions. I’ve since switched to ueuo.com which is proving to be just as painful, I can get everything up on their server but it all goes pear shaped after that. I would have done this earlier if I had’ve known I could do the file transfers at uni.

And on a side not I’ve been playing around with my blog theme, I ‘ve settled on a colour scheme but I’m having some trouble styling a background image to repeat.

Before I start on my blog theme update, I’m pretty sure my website is ready to be put up online, the only thing stopping me from doing that now is the fact you can’t do it from uni.

The blog theme is proving to be pretty tough, it’s hard to identify which aspects of the CSS applies to what. I’m just using the inbuilt ‘tumblr’ HTML editor, its quite tough. I tried pulling the HTML and CSS from the theme I’m using here on WordPress but I didn’t have much luck styling it, again it is really hard to tell which CSS applies to the HTML I want to style. Also there is quite a bit of Java in this theme which I’ve basically been pulling out because I don’t understand scripts etc.

Looks like it’ll be another late night…

I have just about finished my website now, last night I went through the criteria and put in the last few required elements. I had to include a page fragment and some of the original text I had included. I still have to put it online but I’m thinking I’ll wait until I’ve shown it to one of the tutors to make sure I’m not missing anything.

I also started looking at how to change a blog theme on the blogging website ‘tumblr’, the code in the edit html option is really quite different to what you’d find in the page source. This is an area ‘tumblr’ could improve their html editing functionality.

I’ve been using some Firefox add ons to help me understand some of the code in webpages and in the ‘tumblr’ themes. I downloaded the web developers toolbar and the firebug add on, this was a very good idea as the aility to live edit CSS and HTML is very handy especially considering the only experience I have with coding is in Dreamweaver and TextWrangler.

So I’ve taken a bit of a step backwards this week, I’ve sort of started from scratch again. I took all my code and CSS and then set about changing all the links.

I’ve finally settled on my background/header art. I scrapped most of my hand drawn objects for photo’s combined with a minimal amount of drawing. My paragraphs and content etc is going to be mostly in scrolling boxes as opposed to scrolling the actual website. There is still quite a lot of work left however, and I’m sure there will be plenty of things I’m going to struggle with.

I haven’t given much thought to the blog theme submission yet, time is running out for it too.

I’m one of those persons who likes to take time every day (often multiple times) to check out is making news in the world, wether it be TV or web based. A couple of nights ago as I was sitting in bed getting ready to turn in, I persued “Google News” and found a story about what I thought was a new search engine ‘Wolfram Alpha’. It’s actually quite far from it, from what I can gather from the limited time I spent playing with it, it’s seems more like a highly intuitive database.

The principle behind ‘Wolfram ALpha’ is to create a way to search for answers rather than terms. For example, I searched ‘GDP Australia’ and instead of finding websites which feature those terms I found out that Australia’s GDP is just under one trillion US dollars as well as some other relevant facts like unemployment. I recommend people have a look at, however, it is only still in it’s infancy and has a long way to go.

I made a start on my website CSS through the early stages of this week, it still doesn”t look like much – yet. I’m struggling a little with getting my menu bar to go horizontal, myself and a friend managed to get it after playing around with some classes after a couple of hours.

I still haven’t completed all my website artwork but it is definetely coming together now. I’ve gone with the relationship that ears share with sound, which is a pretty important – especially at a music festival. The big problem has been drawing something which looks like an ear, they are quite a tricky shape. I am still contemplating using a picture of an actual ear.

Without the extension we were granted there would’ve been no way I would have been able to get this assignement completed and submitted on time, that should be very clear by now.

We’re just hearing Teresa telling the tute about what is required in our final submission; mail, maps, downloads etc. I really don’t think I’ll have remembered any of this by the end of this class. That’s okay but, there’s always Google.

So after a little playing around with a graphics tablet it’s become abundantly clear that my drawing skills are minimal at best. If I do end up using a purely hand-drawn image in the background or header of my website I will be applying a filter over it.

Since the last post I have had a play around in Dreamweaver, specifically with linking pages together, as I didn’t make any great progess I will most probably just start over from scratch.