Thursday, October 18, 2007

What I've Been Up To

Maybe it's just me, but, after posting for about three and a half years now, I seem to have little to say. Maybe it's just that we can only have so many prime interests at any one time. Lately, I've been fiddling around, so to speak, and I've also just finished my little web page course. I mentioned it once before; it's a refresher of the one that I first took about three years ago. That was another interest that got pushed to the side, perhaps in favour of photography and Photoshop, so I decided to re-take the course. Yes, there really are only so many balls that I can juggle at once.

I have liked building web pages, but it does take time, and one does get rusty quickly. Hence the re-take. Even then, the circumstances of life took me away from the course for two weeks. When I checked back in on Sunday evening, to my dismay, I found that I had only two days to finish two lessons, including the final exam if I wanted to complete the thing. So that's what I did for much of Monday and Tuesday. Needless to say, I wasn't too motivated to do much of anything yesterday.

It really takes time to build a page from scratch, especially if one is rusty. That's why it took me many hours to come up with this one (see snapshot below). The teacher gave us the filler content and the basic coding minus images, and we had to make the design, which is easier said than done. After many hours, this is what I came up with. It looks better in Firefox than Internet Explorer. People who are learning to do such coding generally work from Firefox because it tends to interpret things in a proper way — unlike IE.



If you want to check out the real page click here. If you do, you will notice that paragraphs change slightly when you hover over with your mouse. You may also notice fancy lettering on the first letter in the first heading and some opacity on the second and third images. It's not much, but it took me a long time accomplish it.

9 comments:

ChrisB said...

I'm very impressed having looked at the real page. I know from what my daughter says that this type of stuff is very time consuming.

Ruth said...

I need to start with some basic html training. According to my daughters, it is easy. (hmm) Firefox is the browser for me. Blogger works well with it compared to IE.

Gina said...

Coding from scratch is hard work. Congrats!

karla said...

Web design is one of most the tedious things I have ever done.

Good for you AC.

You really do know the in's and out's quite very well and I must admit that I have frequented your template (by viewing your page source) for help with my own CSS style code from time to time.

Tossing Pebbles in the Stream said...

Your clever fellow! Who said. "You can't teach an old dog new tricks".

I would like to learn to do coding. I did manage to teach myself some basic code.

The problem with living "on the boundary" is that any course is just over an hour away.

I await some dramatic changes in your blog now!!!

Catherine said...

Ah, fascinating. I'd love to learn that someday...or at least, being ignorant, I think I would.

I've definitely felt that the muse has left, many times. But she always seems to come back....

mreddie said...

It's hard enough for me to just write and post - beyond is a mystery that maybe I will go further into someday. Looks like a good job to me. ec

Pam said...

My stepson's wife does webpages, so I have some small idea, from listening to her, of what goes into them. No easy task. Good job,AC.

As for the blogging thing, I hear you. There are times when I have so much I would like to say and then there are the times when my mind goes blank and I am at a loss for words.

Anonymous said...

Very impressive, A/C. I can well appreciate the amount of time put into this. I used to hand code my own personal website and am very aware of the effort involved. I loved the challenge of being able to display something as I would imagine it in my head or on paper. It truly is fascinating stuff and can easily become all consuming. I don't do it much anymore, except for tweeking my blog template.