Learning the bones last

Okay—Spent the morning on JQuery.  Now it’s Friday afternoon.  Cloudy.  No more sun comes over the mountains now until January 10th or 11th, so it’s just white outside. Inside, my solarium is calling for Christmas decorations, lights on the apple trees and lanterns hanging in place of geraniums.  I’m doing my best to ignore it.  Who needs decorations yet, right?  I’m still full from Thanksgiving. Calming Christmas music is playing in the background thanks to Pandora One.  I should be calm and open to learning.

I discover that today is the day for the bones of the web site.  Oh how I wish I would have learned this first. Oh tidings of comfort and joy!   Could I have learned it first?  This is a chicken and the egg subject that could keep me awake at night.  So ever onward.

Side note:  I am deciding that I will work on a web page that doesn’t mean much to me.  It’s much easier than doing something that I have to live with.  This is why I tell my students they should never design their own property.  It’s like god-awful decisions of choosing every single little thing.  It’s too much.  For today only. I’m doing this because it’s faster.  Tomorrow I will have to return to my own site and see what Curt thinks of it.  

Little did I know that there are both fixed and fluid web page templates available to steal from many different places.  The first site I went to was Dynamic Drive.  I saw a page that might work for me and simply copied it from <Developer —>View Source> under the VIEW column in Chrome.  Turns out I didn’t need to do all that, they had it ready for me to copy at the bottom of the page.

I pasted it into Sea Monkey so that I could see use WISIWIG instant gratification.  🙂  I added my own header.  It was WAY TOO BIG, so I had to look in the page’s html code to find it.  I started scrolling from the top and noticed in the code that this fixed page had a column width at the top of 840 px.  So I made my header 840 wide as well.  I also tried it bigger, but then it wasn’t centered and I vetoed going back to figure out where the centering code for the header was.  (Probably that decision was due to Pacabell playing so sweetly in the background).

It came with two columns on the right.  The colors were yellow and green and I didn’t particularly like those colors. Well……it came upon a midnight clear that I could NOT find out how to change that at I went on. I’ll bet I could if I had more time.

By the by…..I’ve heard others complain about not being able to get info from folks to put a web site up.  This time it’s even stranger.  I think people in Fairbanks might not want to be identified speaking out on the Climate Change issue.  Anyway, they are just a little uptight about giving me info.  So I’m waiting…..

Links?  You want links too???  Oh gosh….  how ever green your branches!

Screen Shot 2014-12-05 at 5.05.46 PM
Fixed

Okay….sleighriding along over the river and through the woods, I have already repeated this whole process using a FLUID web template.  Interesting, considering a fluid skeleton!  I hated it at first.  But, I figured out how to resize the fluid boxes.  I added a fluid header so it too scrunches down.  First, notice this fixed version.  This is what happens when I shrink my screen size–you lose all of the Fairbanks column and the header is 1/3 gone.  Granted it it in 840 px so most browsers can see it in its entirety. If I’m teaching web classes in the villages, I’m going to want to have fixed pages just because (I’m guessing) they load more quickly.

Now for the comparison in Sea Monkey at least.

So, I made the banner at 80%—I suppose I could actually make it bigger, but I’m dashing through the snow…  The one on the right is with the screen squished down.  Notice how it squishes and still reads no matter how small the box gets.  That’s cool.  So….I did notice that some of the templates had combinations of fixed and fluid boxes.  That’s an interesting idea.  I guess I really need to know for sure if loading speeds are different.  AND, I should wait until I upload to make sure it works in real time.

Screen Shot 2014-12-05 at 5.06.07 PM
Fluid
Screen Shot 2014-12-05 at 5.06.29 PM
Squished Fluid

There is a slight issue—one of the boxes is longer than the other.  ARG.  But….hush hush the Christ Child is sleeping.

One other P.S.:  the 3rd link is in the footer image at the bottom.  It goes to the national site.  If I cared more, I would put some visible link.  I MAY end up caring if these folks really want this web site.

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Okay….this is what happens when you don’t read the directions.  Pacabell is playing again.  Interesting.  I was supposed to do 2 websites from scratch and a 3rd one was supposed to be a template.  Ahhhhh…..it came upon a midnight clear:  the text book is on the web.  Go to Chapter 15 and copy that!  Ha!  I’m learning too much!

JOYFUL AND TRIUMPHANT!  Glory in the highest…..well, maybe not the highest.  You’ll see.  I just threw some stuff in there, but, I’ll have you know, I DID change the column widths to match the other sites.  I don’t have time to get the columns left justified, so……   blue satin sashes, these are a few of my favorite things!   P.S. This one doesn’t have any links except the banneScreen Shot 2014-12-05 at 5.56.44 PMr.

Oh my gosh, it’s Pacabell AGAIN!  Thumbs down.

So the answer of fluid vs fixed?  I’d say what I usually tell Permaculture students:  IT DEPENDS.  I really like how the fluid bones move, but I can see how much easier it is to just have a standard size.  So I’m sure whatever I choose, it will be for very good reasons.

My question is:  what about copyright.  I left the text book’s copyright at the bottom.  I didn’t leave the Dynamic Drive copyright on the other two just because they are there to be used.  Should I put my own copyright on those???  I really have a hard time with copyright.  I don’t think I would care as much if my son weren’t a musician.  Wanna hear his music? Click here!

Back to work!

Ah…I found the answer while uploading to the server:  http://www.dynamicdrive.com/style/csslibrary/tos/  I’m supposed to leave the credit notes within the source code.  Hmmm.  Seems nice enough.  It won’t bother me again.

OH MY!  Pacabell is being WAY overused today–this time in harpsichord.  When did Pacabell and his canon decide it was a Christmas song anyway?

Here are my links!

Fixed

Fluid

TEXT BOOK afterthought

Ah….comfort and joy!

God rest ye merry, gentlefolk!  🙂

 

Afterthought:  How am I ever going to remember this process if I don’t start building websites for a living? Question:  will I still be able to access this stuff for a while????

The reason I thought of that is that I’m composing on Sea Monkey, copying it over to TextWrangeler and uploading it from there to the server.  The reason that’s important to note is that I forgot to link the header to the internet source it’s from.  Instead I had uploaded it from the desk top.  It of course didn’t show up.  So—since I had saved everything in Sea Monkey, it was easy to go back and fix it.  Sea Monkey is my back up incase I save on top of something I needed on the server.  A true Permaculturist would have THREE  systems: 2 back ups.  I’ll work on that!