Recently in Website Tweaks Category

As every day goes by my weblog is evolving. Today I have tried various styles of tabbed navigation and have finally decided on quite a simple one, but effective no less, which I found on Simple Bits. I'm certainly finding my way around MT. All this experimentation has made me look very closely at the templates, and I know what I'm looking at now, and what all those codes are for.

I also fiddled with the footer, and added the favourite icon, to give that icon some meaning. If you look at my blogger code you'll see I said I uploaded a better-looking photo than my own, and it was the favourite icon I was referring to.

The tab bar I wanted used the Sliding Doors Technique, but for some reason this wouldn't work for me unless I removed the display:block code from the CSS and then the images wouldn't display properly. See Version 3 for an example of the look I wanted. Never mind, I'm happy with the look I ended up with.

Do you like the fixed background? I love it. I've been trying to work out how to do it for ages, and it was so easy it's embarrassing. Perhaps if I knew CSS a little better things wouldn't take so long.

I had to change all the white borders after I got the background set, and I think it looks pretty cool. Perhaps something now to brighten it up? I think I'll leave the stylesheet alone for a while until I'm used to my new look.

I'm saying very little the last couple of days but I'm busily working on the site. Today I added Ultimate Form Mail from Surefire Webdesign, and it seems to be working beautifully. I also had to convert the whole site to PHP, and I'm now using header, footer, sidebar and contact includes. I still have a little work to go on the design, and hope to incorporate a better photo album.

I tried working through the tutorial on Elise's site but kept getting an error - I must have redone it 10 times before I found another script.

I've added an element to my site that should make it better viewable in all resolutions. Previously the layout was fixed, but after reading a tutorial on Elise's site, my weblog is now fluid, adjusting itself for everyone's viewing preference. Much better than looking at alot of blank space on a high resolution screen.

I've also added a footer. Very easy to do and also at Learning Movable Type. I'll get around to her other suggestions for improving the site when I have time. Link converting the site to PHP, and adding breadcrumbs (the You Are Here... links at the top of some websites).

There's lots more too, but it all involves much reading and testing and there's just so many hours in the day.

I did it. After much back and forth between the style-sheet and my weblog to see how things look, I think I've finally come up with something that I'm happy with. I had to do a lot of internet searches to find out the correct CSS, you'd think I'd be able to remember the easy parts of CSS, but there's just so much to know. Keep slogging along and I'll eventually get there. With everything computer I never let it beat me.

Here's my brain-drain image for today. Cute? I think the grey-matter is going through a mincer, the image is a little small to make it out properly.

The need to know what you are doing is so important when tinkering with the template files. Yesterday, after changing all the templates, none of my individual entries would work. I had to go back to the MT default templates. I think the problem had to do with dynamic page generation, this time around I have all the pages cached statically.

I'm still not done with playing, though I'll take extra care this time. I might start by installing TypeMover. It allows backup, restoration, and migration, which would have been handy yesterday. I exported my blog to a text file on my computer, and when I tried to restore I found it should have exported to a folder on the host machine, which it didn't. After much cutting and pasting this morning I got it all back up, but what a terrible waste of time, when with a decent program I could have done it so easily. I won't get caught out again.

I've spent the day huddled over the computer studying everything I could find on setting up a photoblog that will integrate with MT just how I want. I do have a photoblog already, but it doesn't give me full control over the shape of the picture, and therefore some look a bit distorted.

I've been reading all about the various plugins for MT, and have tried my hand today at installing a few. Most are quite easy and only need a line of code here or there. The photo gallery tutorial wasn't very specific, and I gave up. I don't know enough about PHP yet, and only a little CSS. I still have my original album on here, no drama, but quite a frustrating day.