Especially if that someone else has written code when they only have half an idea of what they’re doing!

I’m talking about XHTML and CSS in particular.

Unfortunately Project BD has taken a bit of a back shelf stance at the moment, at least in terms of making the physical site anyway.  Two reasons for this:

1. I’m concetnrating on writing more content for the site first, so I actually have something to build it out of, rather than a vague idea in my head.
2. I’m still learning alot of CSS and how to use it effectively.

Point 2 has come very much into play this week as I’ve been given some more time to work on the department Intranet site.  I started making early pages using *shudder* table design, which was before I began to look into CSS layouts more.  As a result, those early pages are a fucking mess, especially as I’m also now trying to code in Web Standards.

To explain for any of you who don’t knwo HTML et al, (X)HTML is used to ‘mark-up’ the content of the page, CSS is used to present it well and make the page look good.  That’s a very simplistic breakdown but it gives you an idea.

To get techy again, I now have some pages that are a mix of table and CSS layout, and it’s getting to be a pain.  So much so, I’m now getting to the point of questioning whether I go back, and recode those early pages to do away with the table layout aspects.  If it were one or two pages, I’d do it and take the development time hit, but I’m looking at some 20 pages plus.  If I get the CSS right then it’s simply a case of applying the new stylesheet to all of them, but some pages have little unique aspects that don’t appear everywhere.

For anybody who’s learning now, or is thinking about picking up XHTML and co, go for it, you won’t regret it as it’s a great journey to go through.  But for the love of your own sanity, get your head into CSS layouts, Web Standards and semantics BEFORE your fingers starting tapping out your masterpiece.  It’ll save you a lot of stress later!

PS. Forgot to mention this nearly, but my own personal blog has moved over to Wordpress now because I wanted an environment I could play with the layout and style of my blog as a bit of a code testbed.  I am also using as it’s main function i.e. a blog, so feel free to potter over to boidster.wordpress.com.

I’m having issues at the moment.  Issues with myself.

Sunday evening, I sit down with the laptop to get a bit more work done on Project BD, mainly by trying to add some semblance of a Contact-Us-type page.  Luckily the recent .net magazine had a tutorial piece suggesting how one could be made, and it looked a decent base to start from in order to make my own from.  The main problem was I just couldn’t get into it.

It was like I’d come face to face with a large mental brick wall, and getting around it wasn’t easy.  That’s not a slight against the tutorial, as bar the odd little bits here and there I understood the methodlogy without too much trouble.

Rightly or wrongly I just gave up.  No point sitting staring at the screen getting more depressed over why my brain just wouldn’t kick into gear.

Next thing, I thought of, go look around at other peoples sites, try to understand what they’ve done, how they’ve done it, and how I might be able to code similar features myself.  This was a good and bad idea.  Good because there are so many great sites out there that aesthetically are really good and are backed up by good user interfaces, giving me plenty of fodder to learn from.  Yet it was bad for that exact sanme reason.

So now, whenever I look at the code I’ve done, it just looks shit, messy, and altogether a bit useless.  Maybe I’m being too harsh on myself, trying to run before I can walk, but it’s still nagging at me, and quite frankly I’m putting myself off my own code.  Christ I even wanted to play Halo more than do some coding, which was a surprise to me!

The only solution that is making sense now is to start all over again from scratch.  Ditch the code I’ve already got, take any learnings from it I can, and moving on to a new iteration.  If I can’t even get my own projects working properly, how in the name of the HTML gods am I going to be able to get paid to do this.

Those of you reading this who are savvy with HTML and CSS etc. will probably end up laughing your butts off in a minute or two after reading this post.

Last night I decided to get cracking on a layout design for Project BD. I already had an idea of how I wanted it to look in my head, and to be honest it’s nothing complicated.  Or at least it wasn’t till I started doing it.

That’s maybe a little unfair as for the most part I’ve got the design sorted out.  Having just learnt how to make a page using tables in HTML I then find out that tables are being frowned upon, in favour of the more fluid CSS styled layouts.  I can see why, as CSS layouts are better to use in terms of future development and provide you with more control over what is where.

Yet between the inadequacies of Internet Explorer not supporting things I try, then having to work out an alternative, and what seems to be a bit of design snobbery with certain tools at our disposal, it’s causing a real headache.  Yeah I know, welcome to web design you’re all saying!

Suffice to say, after over an hour of trying everything I could think of to get this bloomin’ design to work right, I decided to switch off the laptop and go do some reading to help me find the answer.  Lo and behold, by 10pm I thought I’d found the answer, but by then I was already knackered enough to have my eyes closing on me.  Here’s the real clincher though.  It looks like the solution was right under my nose the whole time, in the first book I turned to two hours earlier!

To make it better, I’ve got a book on JavaScript/Ajax on it’s way to me as well courtesy of Amazon.co.uk.  I paid for it, but you know what I mean.  Just so you know, if I happen to disappear from the online space for a while, you know what I’m doing!  It’s going to be a long learning road people, and I haven’t started thinking about content yet.

PS. Phil, sorry for bugging you last night on MSN and then disappearing.  I was going to ask you about this lot, but it’s probably best you didn’t answer, for your sake :p

I thought this weekend I’d get a chance to add some more stuff to Project BD and my new blog site, then learn a bit more JavaScript.  Unfortunately, the web building didn’t happen much at all, and the JS learning didn’t get much further either.

I’ve kind of hit a design brick wall at the moment.  All this website design and development stuff is still very new to me, and knowing what to use and how best to use it, let alone remembering the correct syntax and tags is becoming a bit of a hinderance.  I know it’s just a case of my own background knowledge needing to grow as I use the various languages more, but it’s becoming a hinderance.

See, I have these big ideas of what I want to do, but then I end up spending a few hours working out how to do it; and I can’t help but feel that what I’m trying to do is probably piddle easy if you know what you’re doing.  Right now, I’m feeling like a very small fish in a ridiculously huge ocean, with my eventual dream of making some semblance of a living out of this web stuff floating off into the distance.

Now I’ve turned to iTunes, and more specifically the podcast sections.  During the week I do about an hour round trip to and from work everyday which gives me plenty of time in the car to listen to podcasts.  At this point I found one that is pretty useful by a chap named Paul Boag (boagworld.com).  He works in a web design agency and covers many facets of web building from dealing with clients to physical coding and everything in between.

On the flipside, I’ve found this Visual Quickstart Guide book really good to use as a reference, along with www.w3schools.com.

I think I need to go back to the drawing board and do some serious reading/learning before I can seriously take it further.  Phil, think I may need to nab your advice matey!

Part of the distraction was my purchasing Virtua Tennis 3 on the 360, for the princely sum of £30.  Not quite a PS3 a la Paul, but hey.

In summary, it’s superb.  If you’re a VT fan of old, I still fondly remember it on the Dreamcast, then this will not disappoint.  Single player has a decent challenge level, online seems quite smooth, plenty of mini-games to play and improve your skills with, and a create-a-character mode.

It’s hard to explain, but the satisfaction of setting someone up for well placed cross-court drive is brilliant, and the game really does get the adrenaline going at the higher levels.  Without going in to some long review about the graphics and sound etc (which by the way are also pretty darn funky) if you’re a Tennis fan, get it.  If you liked VT previously, get it.  If you don’t like Tennis, get it anyway because it’s a great example of how good a virtual sports game can be.

That’ll be me then!

Yup I’ve gone and taken the leap head first (and it literally is head first, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment) into the wonderful world of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and their associated web building brothers.

It’s something I’ve wanted to do for absolutely ages.  I even bought a book to teach myself at home, but seeing as my discipline with self-induced learning is almost non-existant, I gave up.  All I’d managed to learn is some basic tags, how to write the code…….that was in fact it.  Not one thing was built.

That was about 18 months ago.  Fast forward to last week, and I finished off a course taking me into HTML and CSS and how to use it properly.  All of which was done on works time, and works budget!

This wasn’t just a whim thing though.  Sadly my boss wouldn’t have let me do the course without a good business reason to do so.  That reason is redeveloping, which has in fact now turned into rewriting virtually from the ground up, the departments intranet information site.  Something dubbed the Knowledge Based System, or KBS for short.

Sounds cool right, I get a project to exercise my new found skills and keep learning more and more stuff as I go along.  It is, but that’s before you understand that this site, in it’s current state, totals over 100 individual pages, and has absolutely feck all filing structure within it’s directory meaning that it’s a nightmare to find anything.  The phrase, ‘trial by fire’ springs to mind.  Never mind I’ve got other interested parties from different functions within the business also interested in what I do to see if they could use a modified version!

Now see why I said head first?

Last week was the first full week I’ve been given on it, and I absolutely bloody loved it.  Not only did I learn one hell of a lot about actual page structure and more tags that hadn’t been covered during the course, but I managed to get ahead of my own schedule for completion during the week.  There’s still a ton of work to be done, mostly coding of physical pages to take the exisiting content we have.

Originally, I was going to make it a version 2.0 of the original KBs, but due to the amount of stuff I have to begin over with, it’s looking like being my first V 1.0 of anything!  Sadly, due to commitments in the job I’m actually employed to do (the coding is outside of my normal role by a long shot) I’ve not had chance to do anything on it yet.  I can’t even show you guys examples of what I’m doing as the information is confidential to the business.  Nothing critical, but it’s still not for general consumption.

Outside of work, I’ve already started basic design work on a personal website project, hereby known as Project BD.  Although I’m keeping everything under wraps for the moment, mainly because I think it’s a concept not widely done before, and for another reason that will be become clear soonish.  However, those of you who read this blog regularly, and more you guys that I know, will find this concept quite a large diversion from the norm of what I’m involved in.  Not even Paul and Phil know what I’m working on, but chaps, trust me, you’ll love the reason behind it!

Don’t ya just love teasers! ;p

Unlike my promise to keep the NY Diaries running, my journies into coding-land will be periodically i.e. when I have something to write about, covered right here on GBS.  Probably many of you reading this already have some experience in coding, but at least you can have a laugh at my expense for the no doubt huge amount of mistakes I’ll be making.  We all have to learn somehow!

The rest of you I hope will find it an interesting production diary of sorts,as I plan to incorporate Project BD into these updates as well.