Viewing Thread:
"Urusei Machie"

This is where I post problems and questions while I work on my Language/Travel website.

Link coming soon =)

3 columns in CSS

I mastered 2 columns no problem, float left, float right easy peasy. But when it came to 3 columns I could never get them to work and they'd mess up. :( Is there a simple way to have 3 columns and be able to change their width etc.

4 columns in CSS

Same as above but with 4 :)

Polls

Okay this one is my Holy Grail, I've been after it since April and it's now almost late November :) It's quite simple, a question, the choices, a submit button, a text link to results underneath. The results appear on a seperate page, and displayed in bar graphs. I suppose I can use php. I think Garin said he might be able to help me with this :-) Doesnt need to be advanced though I would like it to stop people from voting more than once.

Print This / Email This

You see these on lots of sites. Most of them seem to be in popups, my question is how come popup blockers dont block these? Or do some block them and I should stick them on their own page? The 'Print This' is simple enough just another page without all the graphics but the 'Email This' I wouldnt know how to send content. I mean I've done forms before but they send me information, not the other way around.

Comments

This one I'd like to have for my blog, news and polls. However I think I should look at some scripts to see what control I can have over the comments as I wont be able to monitor them all the time and I'd like some protection from spammers. I suppose I should do it in php also? Something like this would be fine link well maybe not in text bubbles :P but the main article at the top, followed by the comments, and then the form at the bottom to add your own comment. With name and email required. Oh a preview would be nice but not important.

Fewer Styles

The h1, h2, h3 thingies are important to search engines I read somewhere. So I have to use them for my main titles/buttons etc. I've noticed that I tend to create too many styles. For instance I might have two styles but the only difference between them is their colour, one black one white. This of course is a waste and I know there's a simple way to do this instead.

Example...

.menu {
font-family: arial;
font-size: 16px;
font-weight: bold;
color:#888888;
}

.menu2 {
font-family: arial;
font-size: 16px;
font-weight: bold;
color:#FFFFFF;
}

----

Okay a few more problems, I'll do a quick search on some of them to see if I can solve them myself. There are some main features there so hopefully it'll be small problems after all these are done. Like using image maps, which I think cjh has already done for me :)

From previous posts I thought you were nearly ready to launch?!?

From some of these queries it looks like you have a fair way to go ;¬(

Afternoon all, and hey Machie, how's it going :)

Well, where to start? Let's get the basics out of the way first ...

Machie:
"Okay not sure how this might be done. I have an image that when clicked, takes you to another page."

This will be just like a regular link, expect rather than just put a bit of text between the <a> element, you'd need to add the <img> element, for example:

<a href="link.htm">[B]<img src="[I]image.jpg[/I]" alt="my image">[/B]</a>

Nice an easy :)

I'll let Garin field the Daily Image/Link change feature query, as I don't want to step on any toes if he's already putting together something.

Machie:
"I tried the code, it came up with 10:26am o11 19th November 2006 Rather odd, it changed the 'n' into '11' for some reason."

It did this because n is a special character within the date function (it gets replaced with the month as a number, 11 being the 11th month, November) ... so you need to escape this letter with a back-slash, so you'd need <?=date('g:ia o\n jS F Y',time())?>. To be safe, you can also escape the 'o', just in case later versions of PHP make use of it.

For the other two layouts, try:

<?=date('l jS F Y',time())?>
<?=date('g:ia \o\n l',time())?>

... or if PHP short tags is off:

<?php echo date('l jS F Y',time());?>
<?php echo date('g:ia \o\n l',time());?>

Machie:
"This of course is a waste and I know there's a simple way to do this instead."

You can refer to a group of styles by more than one name, so for your example, you could do:

[B].menu, [U]menu2[/U][/B] {
font-family: arial;
font-size: 16px;
font-weight: bold;
}

.menu { color:#888888; }
.menu2 { color:#FFFFFF; }

or

[B].menu, [U].menu2[/U][/B] {
font-family: arial;
font-size: 16px;
font-weight: bold;
[I]color:#888888;[/I] /*set colour*/
}

.menu2 {
color:#FFFFFF; /*override colour*/
}

Glad to hear someone may find one of my guides useful :) But if you get stuck, of I've missed something, could you post it in that thread, rather than this one, so others can see it too?

Hmmm... wrote:
> From previous posts I thought you were nearly ready to launch?!?
>
> From some of these queries it looks like you have a fair way to
> go ;¬(

heh, these are either new things I thought up since then or issues like the 3 column thing, which I put off in the design but would really like to use. I think I even used tables for one page :(

The polls I wanted to do before but had problems but Garin said he can help me. Which hopefully he can because over the two weeks I've prepared a years worth already. A new poll every week, one for the langauge section, one for the travel section and a few others. So that's a few hundred polls ready.

My new deadline is the 18th December, though I'll try and get it up sooner. :)

As soon as I finish the title graphic I'll set up the coming soon page.

Ah wonderful cjh :D thank you for that, and your presentation is quite impressive. I think that's 2 problems solved now. I'll just have to check over the date scripts and see if I can get them working.

No problem :) Just a shame they don't have a preview option here, it would save me looking like such a plank to begin with :)

Machie:
"My new deadline is the 18th December, though I'll try and get it up sooner."

2006 I hope :)

"As soon as I finish the title graphic I'll set up the coming soon page."

There you go, that is your challenge for the day :)

Machie, some advice if I may...

You clearly have great ambitions for your site and thats no bad thing but I cant help think your current course is going to leave with something unmanageable. You want blogs, news, polls and alsorts of other dynamic elements. The biggest challenge of all that though will be bringing all those elements together especially if you're using separate scripts from different sources/people. I'm beginning to think you'd be better advised just installing a CMS like Joomla or Drupal and devoting your time to learning how to create templates in it. Joomla/Drupal at least have modules for all the features you want.
If you're not keen on that route, then I'd suggest you put your dynamic elements to one side for the moment. Concentrate on getting the design finished, create some templates for all the different section of your site. Post them on here and get some advise on how best to create templates of what you've got which you can easily integrate different dynamic elements into. It could well be the biggest help you can get off these forums in my opinion.

Perhaps I have a false impression of what you've achieved so far. From reading your posts though, it seems like you're trying to achieve everything at once. When really you should finalise the design (and optimize the css etc.) then move onto the rest.

:(

The designs aren't complete yet no, I still don't have a working poll. I thought it would be important to the sites design so I wanted to get it working before I finish anything. The 3+ column thing I wanted in the past, infact I did ask about it but I think it got ignored. So I felt stuck doing everything in 2 column divs all the time. Which was okay but not what I wanted.

You're right it's probably a bad idea to use so many different codes so I think I'll stick with Perl instead of php. I'm not comfortable with using bits of it when I dont want to use it all over my website.

All the things I need to get my site up and running are now listed in this thread. I dont need anything else, no forums, no image galleries, etc. Oh wait I do need to sort out a banner rotation script. Apart from that this is all I need.

So hopefully I can get all this done, then I can worry about drawing the title graphic (instead of using a temporary one) and painting the favicon (actually I did that yesterday). I already have over 400 pages of content just waiting to go up now.

"Joomla!
This site is temporarily unavailable.
Please notify the System Administrator"

I checked out the two sites you mentioned, but it didn't look very good when I got several errors :S So I think I'll pass.

The news section, the blog, etc that's all sorted. It's just the poll that's caused so much trouble and put me off the design for so long. Which is why I worked on the content instead, building that up and creating so many pages, lessons, articles and reviews.

Ok...

Perl Poll - http://www.cgi-world.com/pollit.html looks to do everything you want.

3 column css layouts - http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=ThreeColumnLayouts Plenty to choose from there. However if I remember what you've got already correctly, adding further columns shouldnt be anything more than adding the div and making it float left or right. If its not doing that then I'd suggest your widths are incorrect.

Banner rotation - http://www.getcruising.com/crypt/_banmat.html fairly straight forward and looks like it'll do what you want.

Machie:
"I think I'll stick with Perl instead of php."

Sorry I won't be able to help with anything Perl related, as I know nothing about it :)

As for the CSS columns, searching for 3 columns in CSS and 4 columns in CSS in Google brought up some examples quickly (some via www.glish.com/css/) and to be honest I thought you'd come across them as soon as you got Google'ing.