tickled pink by the simplest fragment of css
Tickled pink…not for switching over to new Blogger last night, and tweaking the template all over the place, and having to replace my painstakingly built sidebar with endless widget tool entries (aargh)… but for the grooved right and bottom border on each post here. I wanted it to stay open visually but the text of the posts beside the text in the sidebar was too distracting.
Ok, so it’s only a few lines of css. So what?
Well, it may be just a few lines, but figuring out how to form them, where to put them and why, is a little milestone for me. It’s the first time that I fully understood the structure part of what I was doing in css rather than just tweaking or working around something.
If you’ve read this weblog, you know that I’m not a techie, even though my husband has started to say, “My wife is becoming a geek.” Maybe I am one at heart, but that doesn’t really count when it comes to knowledge, experience and occupation, does it?
When we first put computers into our offices in 1982-3, I watched my controller making as many versions of a spreadsheet as I asked for (based on different assumptions) as if it were magic, using Lotus 1-2-3. Mea culpa… his manual left with me. Now that was easy. Start at a dos prompt, create your formulas in command form, and presto! Dbase came next.
By the time my kids were teenagers, trying to convince me to IM them to come down for dinner (I insisted that calling up the stairs was easier), the growth was accelerating, but it had little to do with me. I had to be dragged into Windows in the late 90s kicking and protesting all the way.
I get that all these user interfaces do enable a lot of people, but considering the sheer mass of languages and programs today can make my head hurt. Years ago I bought a book called Learn Html Over The Weekend, and actually did, but it seems to me that making an html template is to web building now as speaking pidgin English would be to undertaking post graduate studies in linguistics. 10 years ago I could have built an elementary website. Now I’d have to spend months learning in order to build a state of the art weblog, and I only spend a couple of hours a day on blogging.
In his post today, Brad Feld looks for a developer with experience in the following:
Ruby/Ruby on Rails
Flex 2
XHTML/CSS/Javascript/AJAX/JSON/XML
MySQL
Apache2/Mongrel
This simply reminds me of why this weblog isn’t on verabass.com yet. Aside from the fact that I was out of commission from January through July for health reasons, getting a full comprehension of the best way to build what I want there (more than just a blog) is a big chore. You can’t just wander around the web with a shopping cart adding components like wikis and things and then sort of glue them all together. It’s a hundred times easier to find/hire a group of experts in different areas for a big project than to make something medium sized that is personal rather than commercial.
Don’t get me started on visual design, either. It’s the primary reason that learning to understand the way css is structured is important to me. Never mind that we need database structure and other components far more for functionality. We can’t build something both beautiful and functional with just Photoshop and javascripts, either.
Anyway, I’m tickled pink over my simple border. Isn’t it amazing how easy any little thing is once you know how to do it? Now this place will be easier on my eyes until moving day comes.
I think that I also managed to remove no-follow for comments here, although there still doesn’t appear to be any way past Blogger’s underlying structure stopping trackbacks.
ps. my learning of anything comes as much from books as from online resources, but one of the more easily comprehensible sites I’ve found with basics for newbies is HTML Dog’s The Best Practice Guide To XHTML and CSS. Beyond that, my favorite is the fab A List Apart.
August 13th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
Nice Post Vera - i’m trying to Learn as i go too* Adding Widgets to my Blog + doing it on my own (without my usual asking somebody else to do it for me ;)) was a Big thing for me* I remember going thru the Pain of upgrading to the New version of Blogger - all my Widgets in my Sidebar were Gone!! I was Livid* ;))
I’ve got to do a WordPress Blog + to date i was completely underwhelmed by the Graphic Design of WP themes - fortunately i’ve seen some decent ones recently so they seem to be finally getting with the program!! ;))
I came across whass supposed to be an excellent book for learning CSS - i can’t find the link right now but i’ll try + dig it up for U*
Cheers Vera!! Billy ;))
Peace*
August 13th, 2007 at 6:59 pm
Hi Billy,
Thanks for the commiseration. When Blogger first offered New Blogger it said ‘you might lose some of your setting or customizations’. Did you notice that now ‘might’ has been changed to ‘will’?
I observe lame design as one of the expanses (combined with limited usability) in the growing gap between non-business user services and funded start up or enterprise pros.
CSS reading is great, but for me it’s the doing that is a challenge. Years ago, when I made my first html template, and said, “Look what I did!” to friends/family, they said cool. Yesterday, they said, “Uh, yeah, there’s a line there. You drew a line?”. I didn’t bother pointing out the backgound, logo, etc., because the line was where I, uh, crossed a line.
The thing that tickled me pink was that, even though I’ve modified a css template before, this was the first time I started to understand the whole structure of it. Instead of just changing something already there and crossing my fingers, I finally knew what to put in, and especially where and why. It was crossing that little rubicon that felt good. The code is so elegant when it’s done well, that you can’t fully ‘get’ pieces of it (the way we do with javascripts for example) without ‘getting’ how it all fits together.
Vera
August 13th, 2007 at 9:45 pm
I’m with you. Design matters!
Writer