I sit here…
trying to think of some witty, thoughtful or meaningful title for this post - but i simply can’t! Bah, it’s been a funny couple of days and my head is fried…
What have I been up to recently? Well, since my last entry, i’ve only been on 4 runs (3 of which have occurred since Sunday) and it’s safe to say i’m struggling! Starting to get back my fitness, which is quite useful considering I have another half marathon in 24 days…
Other than that things have been relatively quiet… well, almost…! Social scene has been a little up and down. Went to Fabric and then saw Gym Class Heroes (about 2 weeks ago). Fabric was good (it’s a big club in London) but i had to leave early. Gym Class Heroes were awesome, even if the review in Kerrang made them out to be crap… After that we’ve done one night out in Hertford where we were kicked out of the bar we were in. Whilst at the time it wasn’t very funny, looking back it really was and we still had a 3/4’s decent night! Things have been quite chilled though. Oh, a few of us also went to a night called U3 where 5 unsigned bands from 3 local counties performed at our local civic hall. We saw the 2nd and last band but the rest of the bands we missed. It was a really good night, and i hope more nights like that come around!
Two of the girls from work have been cooking for everyone (if we chip in some money for the food) and last night was Greek night. After their successful Mexican night, I had high hopes and wasn’t disappointed! They did very well with the main course and dessert! We are all taking turns making themed food, although I’ve already made a paella for people in the past (and paid for it all!). I’m going to try and get some ideas for what I can do. I think i’ll pick my brothers brain on the subject seeing as he is a chef and has worked at some of the top restaurants in London (The Chapter group, The Ivy [lots of famous people go here] and now The Aurora). Incidentally, he should be appearing on TV in the near future as they filmed Celebrity Masterchef at his restaurant and he was working with one of the contestants [judged the show Strictly Come Dancing apparently). That will be really good to see, i'm very proud of how Calum has progressed with his cooking. I'm proud of both my brothers - Jamie can be my legal honcho [had his exams recently which went well apparently!] and Calum can do all my cooking… Not quite sure what i’m going to do with my life yet!
To less social related news:
I’ve been doing lots of work on a client website recently. Unfortunately for me, it’s not a new project, and i’m taking over from work done by a previous student who took over the site from the company who originally designed the site. I’ve not done any work on the sections the previous student did, but i’ve been working on the site as a whole this week trying to get it to validate to HTML 4.01. How painful is that? It was failing miserably! It’s written in ASP, which I had never done before, so I’ve basically been learning a new language for the last 2 months (having had to learn JSP when I started my job - although I had a decent background in Java previously) but I can’t honestly see why they’ve done things the way they have. They use text files for everything and we are slowly making the site database driven. Thing is though, there are fundamental flaws in the structure of the site which I would love to address but can’t really until my boss gets back from holiday!
I’ve also been helping one of my other bosses with coding using DIV’s and CSS as he usually uses tables. It’s led to some interesting problems and some very interesting discussions. It usually revolves around the fact that he could have done it much faster using tables with me arguing that that is the wrong way to do things and it should be structured properly etc. etc. He’s stuck with it and comes over asking CSS questions which sometimes lead me to look into and research problems (or even to get a hold of Seth to help me out as happened recently!).
I’ve also been using jQuery recently. I had been using moo.fx previously, but because ZetaBoards uses jQuery as it’s JavaScript framework, i decided to take a look at it and it really is very good. I’ve only really scratched the surface and done basic things with it, but it’s very nice to use. It did cause me a problem today with IE throwing an error concerning a script taking too long and did I want to abort it, but i was trying to do things to 500-1000 rows of data, so that’s probably understandable. For the previously mentioned client, I had to make a RSS News feed ticker tape getting data from the BBC Health RSS Feed. I found a nifty ASP script that pulled back the data for me and then using some JavaScript and jQuery I put together a slide-down box that reveals the news excerpt. I was rather happy with this functionality (there were space issues hence the pop down box) although I guess there are other ways that it could have been done.
That’s probably enough rambling for this evening.
Oh, one last thing… I bought a ticket for the V Festival in the summer. Looking forwards to that - should be pretty good!
Tags: Merck
Comments
Yeah, my point exactly. After working on something recently, getting <div>s and <ul>s with CSS to work the way they should was a real pain. In several frustrated moments, I was thinking to myself that I could do it with tables in a few seconds flat. But tables are ‘bad’.
IMO, CSS can be really inflexible. I’ve had lots of good ideas for designs in my head which should be possible (and you could do it with tables), but because CSS was being a pain, I had to make last-minute changes and not bother.
Still, if you do things without tables, you get a much nicer base structure - especially if you turn off all styles (eg. by going to View > Page style, then choosing ‘No style’ in Firefox). To me, if a page is still nice and readable and structured well when all styles and scripts and stuff are turned off, it’s a very well-designed one
You might find this article by A List Apart interesting.
Whenever someone complains that “tables are faster”, I just like to point out that, sure, it may be faster to do the design in tables. But will the site load faster?
No–CSS-driven designs are much faster, and less costly for bandwidth. And what about maintenance? Table sites will quickly get clunky and filled with so much code that you have to wade through it with a snorkel just to get to the problem. CSS is easier to organise and maintain.
@Matthew - yes, sometimes I find CSS annoyingly inflexible, but that is mainly due to various browsers rendering it differently. The structure of the page is what I usually try and get across. However, I don’t think I have a complete grasp of CSS-based design which doesn’t help matters. Sometimes I do nasty implementations just because they work. (additional div’s etc.)
@Tachyon - i’ll give that article a read. Unfortunately i know that any argument i make regarding bandwidth and speed will fall on deaf ears as we are working on Intranet sites mostly (i’m the only one really doing Internet sites). However, the maintenance argument is very valid and they often hear me moaning about trying to fix a problem that is incredibly difficult to track down due to the abundance of tables.
So, Rory,….how are we doing academically ? …….exams ?………….
Uncle Malc.