Thursday October 16 2008
Sick & Behind & outsourcing
I’ve been sick for the past 10 days or so and it looks like it’s finally starting to clear up. However this illness has led to me falling behind in all areas of my life. I’m currently in the middle of giving and grading mid-term exams at the university where I work on my day job. I’ve also barely been able to do any work on my current clients site. Fortunately, this client is also a close friend and he’s very understanding. Additionally he has a somewhat soft deadline.
Another thing I’m behind on is the reading I need to do. I’ve been asked to write a review on a book about Moodle 1.9 from packt publishing. Anyhow the plan is to finish the reading tomorrow and get started writing the review to be placed on my teaching blog as well as amazon & slashdot.
In the meantime, I’ve secured some other work styling an ExpressionEngine forum for another firm. I’m excited to be doing some outsourcing for another firm and hopefully it will lead to further work. Once I’ve finished the work, I’ll see about publishing their name here. First I want to be sure that I’ve done a good job and second I also want to be sure that the firm is okay with letting it be known that they have outsourced part of their contract.
This is my first time doing this so I’m not sure if I bid too low, just right or too high. Actually it wasn’t so much of a bid as I was asked via twitter if I would be available. I think I may have bid a little on the low side. I guess the only way to find out is to see how long it takes to get the project complete. It’s about to start any time now, I’m just waiting to get the source files.
Sunday August 24 2008
Smoother than expected
I’ve been working on my latests client site, a language school. Things are going much smoother than expected. The client purchased a template and I’ve now gotten everything moved into various EE templates for embedding and have structured the templates to help with url naming. It’s all filled with text that I’ve chosen, but starting tomorrow I’ll be setting up the various weblogs and categories to get the dynamic content running.
I’ll also need to get the mp3 plugin and flv plugin set up, but that should be relatively easy as I have used both a few times on my personal sites. I’m not sure if things are going smoother because I’m getting better or because I used a pre-built template. I think it’s a little of both with the majority going to the exisiting template. I did have to fix a couple of things in the template, but it was nice to not have to build the CSS from scratch.
Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Sunday Aug 24, 2008 at 01:03 PM
code |
| tags:
css,
code,
expressionengine |
Thursday August 14 2008
Smokin’ Busy
Since the weekend I got smokin’ busy. From friday to Sunday I wrote a massive post comparing online slideshow services for my teaching blog. I also got in touch with my original client, but he hasn’t yet delivered the promised images. Also I am about to start a site design for a friend opening a business (yes he’s paying me) and was contacted by a language school in a nearby city about doing a site for them - still emailing back and forth.
finally I also picked up a small design project of replicating a menu built in tables and making it tableless as well as adding superfish javascript functionality to it. This was going well until I looked in IE and realized it was completely messed up. I don’t know why it took me so long to find the solution, but I had to delete one of the classes in superfish.css to get everything to render fine. Now I just need to tweak up the navbar a bit and send it to the client.
Later today, I’m meeting a local web designer (also a non-Korean) for a coffee to talk about design and life in Korea. Hopefully this turns into a good connection or friend.
Busy busy busy.
Tuesday July 15 2008
No comp - no code
I haven’t got a comp back from my graphic designer after having sent the latest feedback a few days ago. Without the comp, the client isn’t going to approve the design. Without approval I can’t slice the image and start coding. The client is also partly to blame, as I haven’t yet received a key image to include in the banner image. What’s a coder to do?
Read some of the books that I have and practice my skills in other ways. I’ll be finishing off the book I bought on typography today and probably re-starting the javascript book because I didn’t understand it the first time around (only made it about 35%). I’ve also started planning out a redesign of my family site. I’ve got the wireframe ready, but am stuck on what I want to do with graphics parts, besides we need to get a new family photo done so I can include that in the design as well.
Sunday July 06 2008
Conditionals with EE
update
solved this problem by changing the if from category_url_title =="” to if segment_4 ==’’
-------
Below is a question I’ve posted on the EE forums regarding my use of conditonals on the business site. Everything looks right to me, but it’s not working. I’m not sure if it’s just not possible or I’ve forgotten something or screwed up my semantics. I’m pretty sure that I’ve forgotten soemthing. Will wait and see for a response.
I’ve got a template set up for services with the code below. Everything works fine except that the read more link appears when on a single category listing. I want it to appear on the complete listing like it does, but not once you click through it.
Is there a conditional I can wrap the code it or am I going to have to set up a new template?
{exp:weblog:category_heading}
{/if}
<h1>{category_name}</h1>
{if category_description}
{/if}
<br />
{/exp:weblog:category_heading}
{exp:weblog:entries weblog="CsWebDesign" limit="50" disable="member_data|pagination|trackbacks" orderby="title" sort="asc" uncategorized_entries="n"}
<h3>{title}</h3>
{categories}{exp:trunchtml chars="150" inline="_... <a href='{path=createsean/services}'>read on</a>"}{/categories}
{cs_body}
{/exp:trunchtml}
{/exp:weblog:entries}
I’ve got this conditional set up but nothing is happening with it - am I missing something or maybe this just can’t be done.
{if category_url_title ==""}
{categories}{exp:trunchtml chars="150" inline="_... <a href='{path=createsean/services}'>read on</a>"}{/categories}
{cs_body}
{/exp:trunchtml}
{if:else}
{cs_body}
{/if}
Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Sunday Jul 6, 2008 at 01:35 PM
code | Expression Engine |
| tags:
ee thread,
code,
expressionengine |
Thursday July 03 2008
Disable=""
I must remember to use the disable parameter in weblog entries. it’s helpful for reducing queries and theoretically speeding up page load.
disable="categories|custom_fields|member_data|pagination|trackbacks"
for some reason this entry was messing up the tagging template. Hopefully adding more text will fix that.
Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Thursday Jul 3, 2008 at 10:14 AM
code | Expression Engine |
| tags:
code,
remember this,
expressionengine |
Tuesday June 24 2008
Styling Code
As I mentioned in the previous entry I wanted to be able to style code on this blog. Coincidentally last night there was a thread on the EE forums asking the same question. In the end I discovered that when wrapping text in [ code][ /code] tags EE adds another div with a class codeblock which I was then able to style. It’s temporarily set to look like this:
.codeblock {width: 200; overflow: auto; background: #e7e7e7; border: 1px solid #666;}
Looking at this, setting the width doesn’t seem to be having any effect.
Hmm.. blog title is getting cropped in IE - will have to fix that soon.
