You'll notice that there are a few changes on this page. I am becoming familiar with the 3-column layout in CSS now. I decided I would like a couple "wings" off the main news column, so I'm also practicing up on my photoshop 6.0 skills. However, what would take me only 30 minutes to whip out in PSP5 takes me about 2 hours in PhS6. All in all, that's still a learning opportunity. The "wings" will eventually be done, I hope. The right panel will be a bunch of links and stuff, sort of a personal portal on some sites that I go to daily. That'll serve about three purposes: to get my butt here to make useless news posts to the 3 people that read this, to make going to my favorite pages easier, and to let those 3 people know what I'm actually reading lately.

The left panel...ummm...I do not know what will go there yet.

Well, I'm like 6 hours early, but Happy Halloween anyway!! Normally I'm not one to make a whole lot about holiday greetings, but Halloween is my favorite holiday of the year. First, it's autumn, and autumn is my favorite season of the year. You can't beat the crispness in the air, the cooling and changing of the world around, the less sunny skies, the thunderstorms, or the overall feeling of alertness that autumn brings. Second, what other holiday lets you put on a custome and act like a fool no matter what? Costumes are awesome, every holiday should make costumes mandatory. Third, it is one of those holidays that, on it's own, lends itself nicely to it's own themes. The holiday's roots itself are lost to me, but it is no doubt interesting to learn about jack-o-lanterns, witches, and ghosts and how this holiday came about around those themes. It almost resembles a mix between a harvest festival and a commemoration of the dead as well. Extremely wonderful and interesting.

But honestly, the autumn factor is the biggest reason I love this holiday, so enjoy the fun!

My ongoing exercise in separating content from form is moving along smoothly. My first "from scratch" php implementation is evident in my academe section. I have eliminated the individual pages for each piece of writing. Now, the academe front page lists all the papers and writings I have, and points them all to one single page which accepts a variable and pulls up the appropriate text file. Unfortunately, each text file still requires imbedded formatting, but that'll be fixed in time I believe.

Separating content from form is serving two purposes: making future website updating easier and enhancing my own skill with coding in php. My next project will be to organize the still life picture gallery in much the same fashion.

I went to see From Hell with some friends, yeah, that movie about Jack the Ripper starring Johnny Depp. Honestly, the movie was really cool in most respects. It had excellent atmosphere (though I tired of the sort of 'effy' accents) and excellent suspense. It was gory, but done in a way that didn't really glorify it or just to gross out the audience. It was deliberately artistic, if that makes sense. Actually, more like deliberately managed in order to increase the intensity and suspense. I really did enjoy the movie, except for the bungled ending when the killer is revealed. Even the part after that was acceptable, although abrupt. It was just the revealing that was lacking.

Also, I enjoyed the fact that the Hughes brothers did not explain, three times, each part of the movie, and instead left a lot of things up to the audience to either catch or not catch, and did not pander to the ones that did not catch it. Like Depp's opium problem and the underlying romance of Depp and Hurley. Even the possible motives behind The Ripper's actions was not flaunted or pounded in, but rather, possibly, just hinted at earlier in the movie.

Oh well, altogether, it gets no thumb up or down. Just ok. :)

Ok, I've tried, even asked around, and I still have not been able to 100% clean up the view of this page that Opera 5.12 gives. That is not a big deal though, since most of my asking around educated me that Opera is not terribly widely used nor up to par yet in terms of CSS support. So that's ok. I have completely fixed up Netscape 6's issues for this page, so now it pretty much looks exactly like the IE version.

Oh, there's an image up there now!! I'm getting used to Photoshop 6.0 now, and working with the Xaos Tools plugin, TypeCaster. Unfortunately, it really sucks to use the tools. I guess there's a memory leak or something somewhere, and eventually things on my computer start locking up as the resources disappear. Oh, and that image up top is not a final version. I accidentally lost resolution when I rotated it a bit, and then saved it. Doh!

I downloaded the free Opera 5.12 browser today. I must say, this page is completely unviewable in Opera, and I have yet to figure out why. I suspect Opera does not like having nested Spans is all.

I just downloaded photoshop 6.0 plus a load of plug-ins, so hopefully I can really get started on the graphics for this page. The more I look at this page, the more I do feel it needs some color and busy-ness. I think I will also add in some links on the left-side, mostly for my own benefit though. Who knows, this site is morphing a lot more lately as it reflects my tastes and advancement.

Just saw the movie Iron Monkey last night with Josh. Excellent movie, not only did it have pretty good, authentic eastern fighting, but it was funny too! Try to read the subtitles quick and check out people's expressions and what's going on. It's sometimes hilarious!

I am really starting to get the hang of css. I am now comfortable with aligning divs and spans into two columns now, and I am also learning some of the nuances between Netscape (v6) and IE 5.0 when it comes to styles. Netscape seems to have problems with vertical percentages (padding on the top doesn't look right in percentages, but looks fine with pixels) plus it doesn't appear to like nested spans either. At any rate, still plugging away at converting the whole site.

MySQL and php integration will take place in a few weeks when 11-9.net gets moved to a new host and I am then granted MySQL access.

Thanks to Jamie for helping with the color of this page. And yes Chad, the purple is now gone, replaced with what I do think is a better color. The rest of the pages are also getting replaced with appropriate code inasmuchas I can do at the moment. I think almost the entire site is workable though now, whereas yesterday many links were broken or not showing up right.

It stormed tonight, which I love, so I enjoyed that outside my window. Makes me wish I had a deck or something though, or maybe a nice large backyard to sit in.

This page has now almost fully been converted to CSS, but not only have I been cleaning that up, but my friend Chad gave me some invaluable tips on how to line things up so that both Netscape and IE like it. In fact, IE 5 is pretty happy with my site, and Netscape 6 really has no major issues either. The big test will be upgrading some more in IE soon (not looking forward to it).

The only real problem came when trying to do a 3 column layout on the bottom. I instead went with a two column layout and aligned the lower image to the left while the test went right. Then I just did the percentages until the dancer lined up in the middle. Unfortunately, Netscape still doesn't do percentages right...

As a note, this site as a whole is slowly crumbling as some parts get updates and others do not. Hopefully in the next day or two I can inventory what all needs to be changed here quickly, and then go through each page and do each change. At least then the site as a whole will both be viewable and functionable.

This particular page is almost 80% table-free now that I have figured out some more tricks to laying out my CSS elements. All that is left is a tricky 3-column layout for my footer.

In doing this project, I'm seeing ways that I can easily speed up the process of changing my page if I so desire at a later day. I can easily change the color scheme of all of my pages with a single lengthy update of one file. I can additionally throw in a javascript at the top of the page to dynamically link a stylesheet as well, thus I can change whole stylesheets by updating just one javascript-called textfile, rather than the header in every single page.

Not that most of you care...but hey, it's my current project!

I'm now slowly changing this page and a few others piece by piece to be fully CSS supported. Curiously, this is quickly eliminated all text formatting and tables as well. Notice the date not in the right anymore? That's because I'm not comfortable with relatively moving class cells around yet to overlap things and make the date right justified.

At any rate though, I'll be trying, as a personal experiment, to make all my pages supported by my main CSS file, a javascript footer file, and sans tables. I know I can do tables just fine, so this will let me know if I can also do CSS-only. Fun!

Today I think I will go about making my first CSS file from scratch. I've played with them before using a web-based web page generator, so I know what they can do. I've just never been the one to actually do the coding. Thankfully though, that web-based generator also had a section to manually do it, plus it showed what was done by the system.

Yesterday I updated each footer for my page (all of which are the same) as a file import for javascript. Now, if I want to change my footer format, I just change one file rather than 70-odd pages worth. Hopefully this CSS file will make further web page changes even easier.

I've been playing with a new toy the past couple days. Usually I have used Notepad for most of my webpage design needs. But I downloaded the free program HTML-Kit from Download.com. It is actually awesome. It basically is 4 programs in one: text editor, HTML editor (it has tools to help you and check you code), browser (you can preview your pages as you build them, no more saving then reloading IE), and FTP program which can dynamically save your work to the FTP with just one simple click of the "save" tool. This eliminates the need for reloading my browser and for using an external FTP program to constantly upload fixed pages. Neat!

A couple things happened this week that have caused a rather revolutionary addition to my webpage. Chad, a best friend of mine, runs a website and just put up his own self-made news script. I loved reading that little thing which let me back into his life a bit more than normal. Granted, personal news lists like this won't make it as big as something like The Onion, but they are interesting reads for the dozen or so people that actually care about it.

Also, I heard from another friend from even farther back, and it was nice talking about what's new with each other, and this would maybe help keep in touch, without actually being in touch, if you know what I mean. The same would hold true for my parents. I bet it would be pretty nice to come on here maybe 2-4 times a week and see an update by me...that's more often than I even email them! (doh!)

At any rate, I also wanted to begin learning php, the new sensation in web design enchancement. Perl came and passed me by, and Java is almost doing the same, but I am quite determined to pick up php quickly.

Instead of belting out my own script first though, I'll take Ryan's advice that he gave me when I wanted to learn HTML: "Steal something you like, figure out how it works, play with it, then eventually make your own." It sure worked well with HTML, so it'll work decently with php. The code is really complicated though, so I guess it'll turn out to be a demonstration to me on what php can do and how to utilize it with a webserver.

I have to give credit where credit is due though. This news script is called Easynews and can be downloaded for free. It's actually amazingly awesome for a beginner. First of all, there is no requirement for a database. A text file acts as the database and it is accessed for all the page generation. Secondly, it's almost completely configurable. I can change the text, the format of the posts and headlines, how they line up, everything. I honestly could not even think of how to further make it customizable.

Anyway, this will be a longer post than normal, I think, mostly to introduce this concept to my web page, and also document to myself, the thoughts and processes that lead to this inclusion (yes, there's an archive feature). I hope those half dozen or so of my fans that read this, will enjoy it as much as I enjoy posting on here.