Archive for the 'XHTML/CSS' Category

March 9, 2008

Reflection: Photoblog Theme

lightboxDue to popular demand, my photoblog theme — the creatively named Reflection — is now available for download.

Update: Reflection 1.1 has now been released.

I was quite shocked by the amount of people that said they wanted this thing. I thought it was actually okay, but not good enough to publish. However people seem to think otherwise so I decided to put it up.

Design-wise it’s all very simple. There’s a heavy amount of AJAX behind the front page, but it’s handled in a graceful way should JavaScript not be running. Everything on the site uses mootools for any AJAX requests or effects, which is a cracking little library. By far and away the best 3rd party JS library I’ve ever seen.

Anyway. If you want it, go grab it and tell me what you think.

5:33 pm | Posted in Photography, XHTML/CSS | 107 Comments » | Show comments »

July 21, 2007

Layout Changes

After many, many days of painful procrastination, I’ve eventually got around to implementing some of the changes to the layout and improvements to the JavaScript running the site. Photos in the Photoblog (and indeed on the index page) are displayed much differently now, as a smaller thumbnail; partially it looks better, but mostly it improves the page load-times.

Other than this, I finally fixed some very nasty IE6 rendering bugs on the sidebar. As you can see, the advert has changed shape; this was the main cause of most of my woes. Eventually the sidebar could expand, but this requires me re-editing images that I don’t have access to at the moment. And the JavaScript tabby slidey thing now works on IE6.

Hurrah! Now back to checking my e-mail with the frequency of an OCD sufferer.

8:50 pm | Posted in Site Development, Web Development, XHTML/CSS | No Comments »

June 14, 2007

New Layout

It’s taken pretty much all day, but finally the new layout is ready. It’s been changed a lot since the last time, since I wasn’t very happy with how it turned out. Let me know what you think!

Apart from layout changes, there’s a shiny new toolbar using mootools 1.1. Also, the AJAX search now actually works – shock horror. I’m planning some more exciting stuff tomorrow, as well as reverting to my old lightbox layout with the reflections.

Currently, IE6 support is crapped up, but I really can’t be bothered going through the CSS tonight trying to find the odd pixel jumps here and there which messes everything. I hate IE.

11:54 pm | Posted in Site Development, Web Development, XHTML/CSS | No Comments »

April 19, 2007

Shininess Increased

After a really good day in terms of web development work (not so much in terms of revision though), I’ve spent a bit of time tidying up the JavaScript and WordPress plugins to make them a little better in terms of bandwidth and usability.

I decided that I didn’t want the hassle of fiddling with moo.fx every 20 seconds, so I’ve upgraded everything to use mootools; basically the same thing, but more modular and generally quicker to load and render. Unfortunately this meant that the script I use to display my photos, Litebox, wasn’t going to work any longer as it depended upon prototype.lite.

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7:24 pm | Posted in Computing, Site Development, Web Development, XHTML/CSS | 2 Comments » | Show comments »

December 6, 2006

Photos are go!

Well – finally – I’ve found the sort of software that I’ve been pining for the past two months. Basically, I wanted the ability to post normally, but also post photoblog style images every so often, and I’d pretty much given up all hope of finding anything to suit this.

However, whilst I was browsing the WordPress Codex yesterday, I found a brilliant plugin – Yet Another Photoblog – by Johannes Jarolim. It ties together everything that I want – automatic thumbnail generation, a simple interface, EXIF parsing, and allows me to write a little comment about the photos that I’m taking.

So, last night, with the aid of the amazing A List Apart tutorial on creating CSS drop-shadows, I got the image displaying nicely, and then added Litebox 1.0 to get a nice image display. The next step is to get the EXIF information displaying the way I want it. But for the time being, I’m going to let this go. I hope you all like it – please leave a comment and let me know what you think!

4:09 pm | Posted in Photography, Site Development, XHTML/CSS | No Comments »

September 14, 2006

AJAX Search is up

Well, after a bit of fiddling, the AJAX search is now fully operational. I think it works pretty well – it’s certainly quite transparent and saves a lot of room. It hasn’t been fully tested yet please let me know if you run into bugs.
IE had some… interesting rendering issues that need fixing in relation to opacity. For some reason, if you don’t set a background colour then font rendering goes completely crazy and everything looks awful. The moral of this story: IE6 doesn’t like opacity unless everything has a background.

Other than that it has been a pretty busy day. I’ve been up and down to Coventry. Most of the time the journey is fine, but today the M6 decided that it was going to hate me. It took me two hours to travel about 25 miles – average speed, 12.5mph. Usually I can do it in half an hour.

The trip did serve a purpose, and hopefully in a few days time I should have a clearer direction of where the project I’m working on is going. However, for the time being I will simply leave you with a lovely formula to show off my LaTeX renderer, as I really must be going to bed.

11:20 pm | Posted in Maths, Site Development, Whining, XHTML/CSS | 5 Comments » | Show comments »

September 12, 2006

More fun with WordPress

Well it’s been a fun and productive day today on the blog. This morning I mainly concentrated on getting some tabs functional, which you can now see along the top of the screen. I think they fit the theme pretty well, although I did have to move the image over to the left. For those who are interested in purely CSS tabs, I heartily suggest A List Apart’s guide which uses the sliding doors technique to great effect.

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10:57 pm | Posted in Site Development, XHTML/CSS | 4 Comments » | Show comments »

March 14, 2006

End of Term

Well, after the complete downer at the end of term, things are looking up. I’m spending a week down in Plymouth with Sarah, and it’s been nice and relaxing so far. I’ve spent quite a few hours coding on the website tonight, trying to get things done by the end of the week. When I get back on Saturday, I’m going to have an awful lot of revision to do and not a whole load of time, so for the main part I will probably not be blogging or doing much else than revision.

My first four exams are at the beginning of April, and I’m not looking forward to them that much.

  • Topics in Mathematical Biology
    The course itself doesn’t seem to be too hard. Sure, there’s non-linear PDEs and all that jazz, but we don’t seem to actually do an awful lot with it. The problem with this exam is definately going to be the sheer amount of things that we have to know. And, unfortunately, there’s just no way around that apart from extensive revision.
  • Introduction to Topology
    I’d like to think that at this point in time, I understand topology fairly well. Again, there’s a fair amount to revise for but this is something that I can tackle, and it certainly isn’t insurmountable in terms of understanding. Which is always good. I just hope we don’t get a nasty exam.
  • Measure Theory
    This one has me a little worried. The problem is that there’s a lot to revise for and it’s also quite challenging from the standpoint of knowledge. We didn’t have the best lecturer, so that doesn’t really help matters. Really need to get going on some past exam sheets and do some questions.
  • Combinatorics
    I understand and enjoy this course. My only worry is that the lecturer, Daan Krammer, sets a nice(ish) exam. Last year’s was pretty nasty, and although it’s fairly easy to do, it takes a lot of time – not something that you have an awful lot of in the examination rooms.

Anyway, this is all worrying about nothing at the moment. I’ll worry more when I get back to Coventry and get going on the actual revision. For the time being, I’m going to drink some tea and enjoy myself here (as much as I can).

On the website front, I’ve finally got the “proper” CSS coding in place which means user-selectable themes! I know that’s what you’ve all been begging me for in a completely silent fashion. But yes, I have three CSS templates for the new (WB) theme, the default theme and also the old theme which did mainly suck. But there we go. Just need to write the appropriate bits for password changing, selecting themes, profile information perhaps and a couple other things, then I’ll have something that closely resembles a proper website.

I’m also going to make a distinct effort when I get back to catalogue all of my loose pieces of code here and there that do minorly useful things. I really want to put them on the web, since at least some people might e-mail me. I like e-mails, after all.

On top of that, I hope to accomplish the image catalogue as well as putting the photo galleries back online. I’d also quite like to optimize the scripting so that it all runs a lot faster and uses less SQL queries. Also, the CSS could, as always, need some work but I think I’ll leave that for the time being.

I can’t wait to get this thing finished. It’s been a long time coming and, considering the amount of work I’ve put into it, I’ve not had a lot to show for it. Certainly the coding will be most of the work, but I must sit down and actually write some content, otherwise this place will be nothing more than a skeleton. I’m more determined than ever that during this exam period I will blog more than I have done before. I need somewhere that I can vent my frustrations and not bombard my poor Sarah with rambling maths questions.

Anyway, I must stop writing now as it is certainly time for bed. Tomorrow, I think I’ll mainly concentrate on the user control panel and get that out of the way. Once I get that done, I can move on to sort out the other bits and pieces that are more shiny.

1:16 am | Posted in Exams, Maths, Site Development, University, XHTML/CSS | No Comments »

November 8, 2005

It’s been a while

I’ve not been on here for a while again, mainly due to maths and far too little time, but I thought I’d give a quick update to let you all know how I’m getting on.

Firstly, the maths. Measure Theory has been a pig this week (those who are doing the course will love and cherish question 7 on this week’s assignment). I only know a handful of people who have completely finished it, and I’m certainly not one of them. I’ve managed to complete 2/3 of it, so maybe I’ll get lucky and they won’t mark the stupidly hard question.

Combinatorics has been going well. Got the third assignment in a whole 3 days earlier than it was actually due in, and with an (almost) complete set of answers. The lecture notes are excellent, which is always good, and I think the course is one of the most organised I’ve seen so far. Then again, Daan Krammer has always produced brilliantly organised notes and – touch wood – reasonable exams, so my hopes are high.

I’ve decided not to bother going to any more Rings and Modules lectures. Frankly, I still don’t even get what a module is, let alone tensor products, finite dimensional algebras, faithful semi-modules and the rest. It’s like a complete contrast of Combinatorics; appauling lecturing style and lecture notes (sorry), not enough examples that actually make sense and a complete disregard for any sort of coherence. I was actually hoping that somebody would take note of what was said on the SSLC forms for Algebra II, but alas, Dr. Moody doesn’t seem to have caught onto the problems. I’m hoping that with a good book and some time over Christmas, I can teach myself the remainder of the course. However, this just doesn’t look likely anymore.

Since I’ve now effectively dropped both this and Dynamical Systems, I’ve had to take up Topics in Mathematical Biology just to make up my CATS (without those two I would be doing 42 this term). The dynamics of systems has always intruiged me, and I wrote my second year essay on the topic. I’ve managed to wade my way through and copy up about 20 pages of notes in the past week, so I only have a little bit to go. In fact, I should be doing this as we speak.

Besides all the maths, I’ve not been up to a whole lot. One thing to definately note is my 2nd year of dating my girlfriend (Sarah). I cannot believe it’s been 2 years already – hardly seems like I was in Cryfield getting hideously drunk – but it was a nice day. We went to see Serenity at Star City, which is by far the best film I’ve seen in a long time. After that, Pizza Hut was consumed (it’s a tradition) and then just general lazyness watching TV for the rest of the day.

Also been checking Warwick Accommodation, and apparently forms come out on Friday for final year undergraduates applying for on-campus accommodation. I’ve been looking forward to going back on campus for a while now, but the first vestiges of doubt started crawling back into my mind. Perhaps a little more thought is required on the subject, but I’ll apply anyway and deal with it later.

Other than all of this I’ve immersed myself in implementing some rudimentary AJAX for a project. It’s all to do with tape librarys, but it’s extremely boring so I won’t mention it here. Re-considering my decision to have my blog on here – I do miss my old website, and am seriously considering moving back there. I even completely re-did the CSS to enable me to implement styles a lot easier (so I can have both the original and new styling on here). However, I’m still waiting on my host to update to PHP5 (I know, it’s not completely production stable yet) so I’ll have to put it off for a little longer yet.

What little time I have left out of all that has been spent playing Black & White 2. I especially enjoy throwing rocks at random buildings and blowing up people with giant volcanos of immense and utter doom. In my case it does still suffer from the boredom factor of the original; it’s cool for a time, but after a few days the monotony starts to set in (constantly re-building towns, blowing people up, hurling rocks at giant axe-wielding monkeys, etc etc). Oh well, I do have the shortest attention span ever, after all.

And now I’ve realised that this really is rather a long list and I should probably get back to copying up the remaining 13.5 sides of notes still remaining. Yay?!

9:21 pm | Posted in Maths, Warwick Blogs, Web Development, Whining, XHTML/CSS | 3 Comments » | Show comments »

September 24, 2005

Back to maths…

So, back to maths and another year. Kind of looking forward to it, but there’s a lot of stuff to do this year, and I haven’t really got back into the swing of things yet. At the moment, I’m trying to prove a set is open, but I can’t get my head around it for the life of me. Considering this is one of the easier things to do, I should be able to do it – but never mind.

Spent most of last night playing around with the CSS and getting everything working again. I noticed Mark has used the same layout, so I’m a little chuffed about that. But no, apart from that, it’s been a pretty boring day. San Andreas has been a constant source of amusement; mainly finding new and more inventive ways to kill the main character. For instance, jumping out of the a military jet and landing without a parachute, or cycling off of the edge of a mountain. Ouch.

Currenly trying to get some work done, but a couple of my friends who are joining this year (to do Computer Science) have arrived on campus and want to say hi. It’s all rather depressing really, since I really want to get back on campus, even though I do enjoy living off-campus. Having a car helps, but it’s still a pain.

Anyway, I’m going to go to the Piazza now and force myself to have a pint. Oh, the hardship.

1:46 pm | Posted in Maths, Site Development, Warwick Blogs, XHTML/CSS | 3 Comments » | Show comments »