creating a custom .htaccess file is actually really cool-and easy!
The .htaccess file is a pretty powerful tool, it allows you to password protect folders, redirect users automatically, use custom error pages, change your file extensions, ban users by IP address, only allow users with certain IP addresses, stop directory listings and use an alternate index file.

Creating the file is actually super easy. All you have to do is put in the appropriate code into your favorite text editor, its really not a lot. just remember that when you are saving it, it must read .htaccess (this file is actually nameless, with an 8 letter file extension). Once you have uploaded the file you can then rename it using your FTP program.

this is how easy it is to tell it what to do if an error page is reached:

ErrorDocument /home/LOGIN/public_html/error-document.html

this is how easy it is to tell it what to do if an error page is reached:

css all in one line

CSS in a single line

Just like with other code, css is most often broken up in a particular way to make it easier to comprehend. Until recently I had only seens CSS written in the block formation that most of us are probably really accustomed to. then some people I know started writing there css all on one line without spaces.

I really did not much like it it when I first saw it. It kinda looked jumbled and confusing, but I seemed to be seeing more and more CSS written this way everyday with people exclaiming that it was a far easier way to read through css code.

It also seems that may immediate reaction was not very unusual. It seems most people did not fall in love with it right away, but shortly did come to see that there were indeed some advantages. and you know what, so did I!

so what are the advantages?

so far to me the main one is the huge reduction in the amount of scrolling i have to do. If you think about it, I bet you will realize that you do a lot of scrolling to pass up all those narrow columns of code and get to what you are looking for.

So in short, this:

#wrapper {
    width:800px;
    margin:0 auto;
}

#header {
    height:100px;
    position:relative;
}

#feature .post {
    width:490px;
    float:left;
}

#feature .link {
    width:195px;
    display:inline;
    margin:0 10px 0 0;
    float:right;
}

#footer {
    clear:both;
    font-size:93%;
    float:none;
}

becomes this:

#wrapper            {width:800px; margin:0 auto;}
#header             {height:100px; position:relative;}
#feature .post      {width:490px; float:left;}
#feature .link      {width:195px; display:inline; margin:0 10px 0 0; float:right;}
#footer             {clear:both; font-size:93%; float:none;}

*Likes Widgets*

I read a article that made me want to give opera another try, Its been a really long time since i even downloaded it, but the Tech Republic article got me interested ( http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=414 ) going over ten reasons they like it. speed, was way up there at the top, but for me, the thing that will make me go back and check it out are a supposedly gargantuan variety of widgets, I love these things.
These are the thingies I thank everyday for helping me wast time in the most technologically efficient way possible (at home, not at work ) :)

So yeah, its great to keep up on the news...google reader keeps all of the feeds for the news i am interested in all neat and tidy waiting for me to glance at them. Now I never miss a thing, I get to read every single cool article that I ever wanted. And the moment I click on it google reader it as read. So now I just have to find time to live my life around all of the articles I have been reading...

typography adventures

not that i totally have this font thing down pat. But in my search I have come across a few interesting sites and tools to help you decide on a type style. I can't deny I have come across some conflicting information about what fonts should be used where, but hopefulness with some more research it will start to make sense to me as a "whole"

cool related sites

http://www.typetester.org/
http://ilovetypography.com/
http://www.typechart.com/

css shorthand please!

I recently saw an article about using css shorthand I began to wonder if anyone was really not using shorthand for their css documents. I cant say for sure but it seems to save a lot of time overall. It is not that complicated either. for instance:

#wrapper{
margin-top: 5px;
margin-right: 4px;
margin-bottom: 3px;
margin-left: 2px;
}
becomes

#wrapper {
margin: 5px 4px 3px 2px;
}

also if the top two margins are the same, as the side tto are, you could do it like this:

#wrapper {
margin: 5px 4px;
(that would be 5px from the top and bottom, and 4px from each the left and right)
so if any one is till writing each of these seperatley hopefully they will now take advantage of the shorthand!

I used jquery for basically the first time today. it was pretty exciting. I have to admit I think i am going to go crazy now adding it to everything. navigation, galleries.... I am not that good at debugging for it yet, (when implementing). luckily there are people here that are! so now I can go home and spend all my time searching the web for itsy bitsy jquery widgets and such. yay!

well its Friday and looking back over the week i am pretty happy with what i got done. I managed to stick to my promise to myself to primarily use illustrator for any photo editing or designing to help me get used to it. I got the dynamic web products order form to paypal working and today i worked on some images for the different products. chances are I will do more work on this over the weekend

today has been a little like running into walls as you try to navigate a maze with a blindfold on. First I run into javascript that totally thwarts my plans by preventing me from placing it in an iframe (yep, i was gonna use an iframe} and then I could not solve my issues with modx and decided to move it to hostgator but the dns has not resolved yet. hopefully I can get it up before i leave today.

today I finished a layout for a real estate website in photoshop. I also learned some really neat things about uses for photoshop tools i had not played with much, like the different modes for layers, in particular 'color' which only adds the color and not any of the texture from a layout. I am very impressed by people who can use a good number of the photoshop tools in their daily work, i hope to be one someday soon!

icky order forms

today designing our new website order form, i came i was very surprised to find out how many web design companies are doing using really poor coding principles to design their sites. And the worst offenders of all are the order forms. I realize that whether or not it is okay to use tables in forms is iffy. I personally don't do it. for me the same principles for the rest of the site hold true for the order form. things are harder to change and less flexible using tables in your design structure, unless you use them for what they intended. but what about rows and rows of non- breaking spaces to add in white space or little clusters of "break" tags and the "center" tag??

I know many people would wonder at my surprise, but this is what they are selling, shouldnt they 'put their best face forward' so to speak? or perhaps it does not matter, because anyone who would order from them, would likely not know what to look for anyways. hmm, seems wrong somehow....

today was spent on the interesting task of laying out the graphical elements of a website design. trying to make sure that it will have the ability to flexible enough to meet the needs it is likely to encounter, such as a limitless amount of content, and or, perhaps pages with very little content are important. for instance, will the footer stay at the bottom of the page? if there is a left or right navigation section, do background images abruptly end, or else repeat start over, repeatedly in a way that is not very visually appealing? these things are as important as well as how it appears in safari, internet explorer 5 and up opera firefox, because even if it looks nice on all these browsers now, it may not once it is employed and chocked full of content, doing what it was intended for.

I decided to use the web template I created yesterday for the seo site i needed to do today today, and glad i did, because i was able to find several issues with it in safari and internet explorer. it just goes to show what you learn when you actually put something into play.

ah the fun of designing something sort of from scratch with a bit more time can be taken on. it is a great thing to know how to do, to determine what you will need, figure out what system you will use, such as a content a management system, like if you do not know a good programming language (how can you not?? or yeah, i don't)throw around design and color ideas and basically be in a collaborative state of made. as is much with this job it is not something we have lots of time to plan out, but more then we often do joomla! which i have actually used many times or Drupal which i have only just started to familiarize myself with.

my day

today I finished up abed limousine and added his vehicle images and and an updated price list as well as his keywords. I did some correction work on a california realestate site. its not perfect but its better. I should have it completed before i leave. Daniel worked on the admin back end and showed me the usefulness of fieldsets. i got my review. Yay! and did an add to replace the 'talk now' logo on http://callrobyn.net/

today's blog is is a huge thank you to all the people that make it possible for me to get even the tiniest bit of work done in a day. Yes, you know who you are, I'm always asking you for something, advice or just plain old help. thanks to you today I was able to make lots of progress on my work, getting a clients contact form functional, to fixing up an i-frame to not look so bad to adding a new editor to the the backend, and a few other things i have not even mentioned. thanks for helping make my adventures a little less emo.

today I worked more on, and just about finished the admin backend layout and style I have been working on. Worked with another designer to add in a different open source WYSIWYG editor because tinyMCE is really not exactly what we need. We added the MarkItUp Textile Editor. I like the look of it, and though I don't know all the differences I don't see how it could not be a ton better. I am told that the code it writes is a lot cleaner. The easy availability of inline styles is one of my huge issues with tinymce. We have already added the Markitup editor, I guess the textile plugin is just one of a number if plugins for the editor. Its not cooporating right now with my efforts to make it work, but that does not change the fact that it looks really neat. I like that it gives you a view of a layout view, that will comfort our wysiwyg lovers since you can see the results as they would look once rendered by a browser. It reminds me a lot of my favorite text editor E text editor (like textmate for mac) .