Archive for On the Web Design Front

I’ve been working on a fully fluid-width, XHTML Strict, table-less, three column child theme for WordPress’ Twenty Ten default theme…

And in the process, discovered a bottom margin bug!

I submitted the bug to a Trac ticket HERE and also documented the fix that would squash the bug flat and make Twenty Ten render the way it was supposed to which I will share here in my blog.

The Bug (in short):

The margin-bottom: 20px that is applied to the footer div triggers a well known CSS bug causing the 20px margin to be applied to the adjoining/bottom margin-touching wrapper div instead of the footer div.

That bottom margin you see at the bottom of the page where the end of the content wrapper should be touching the bottom of the screen?

That’s the bug.

The Fix (in short):

To correctly apply the 20px margin-bottom to the footer div and not accidentally to the wrapper div, the wrapper div needs to be given a 1px padding-bottom and the footer div needs to be given a 19px margin-bottom.

The padding applied to the wrapper where it touches the bottom of the footer container will trigger the margin-bottom to be rendered correctly for the footer and not the wrapper as the padding will add some ’separation’ between the two containers.

Another fix is to add a 1px border to the bottom of the wrapper and leave the 20px margin-bottom on the footer.

The border adds ‘content’ to the bottom of the wrapper which triggers the margin-bottom for the footer to be rendered correctly.

Why the Bug Happens:

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After my last Bulletin Board update, I think my Bulletin Board is going a bit… overboard.

I initially created the Bulletin Board post to serve as… well… a bulletin board for people to catch up on the most recent administrative updates without having to dig through my blog.

I still like the idea, but…

Look at how long the Bulletin Board post is getting!

I don’t want it to take up a third of my blog page, but that’s exactly what it is doing. On the other hand, I also still want to serve up my most recent administrative updates all in one post block area.

Ideas?

One of the more feasible/do-able ideas I was considering is to code a WordPress-specific PHP loop that would list posts from my Administration category and then display the list in the block that I currently label as Bulletin Board.

This would offer visitors to my site a listing of all the most current administrative posts while also cleaning up some textual clutter.

The downside would be the necessity to alter a theme file in order to insert such a post as the Sticky Post I am using now would be replaced with a permanent ‘post’ that posts according to a PHP loop.

Hmmm…

~ EMG

I have read several articles that discuss this same topic…

but the conclusions drawn and suggestions offered by the other authors don’t really go into any sort of detail on WHY they concluded and suggested the way they did.

For that reason, I decided to write up my own thoughts regarding ‘turning a WordPress powered website into a website and not a blog’.

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Sharing some (old!) thoughts…

about the ‘ease’ of WordPress theming:

NOTE: This is an excerpt and add-on to an old post of mine that I made in the forums a long while back. The original topic was in regards to people asking for very basic XHTML and CSS help in theming, which prompted a bit of a discussion on how WordPress IS a five minute install, but whose theming is NOT for the complete newbie.

“Well, if WP would make it absolutely clear PRE-installation that in-depth theme customization and/or Theme Development/Design is best left to the savvy front-end web developers or, at the very least, to the people who have -some- sort of front-end knowledge, then maybe there wouldn’t be so many people flocking to the forums with the ‘Help me theme my WP because I don’t understand CSS or XHTML!’ issues?

Just a thought?

The impression I’m getting is that everyone ELSE is getting the impression that WP is easy-peasy to custom theme by oneself when it isn’t easy-peasy without having at least some working knowledge of what goes into WP theming.

For the record, I like WP how it is and have no complaints myself, but I actually do front-end stuff and what appealed to me the most was the ability for me to dig into WordPress on my own and make it my own.“

EDIT 1: And it would seem that Bob Dunn at Cat’s Eye shares similar sentiments on WordPress being an ‘answer to all our prayers’. Have a look HERE!

EDIT 2: I will clarify my own thoughts in a later post.

~ EMG

As a change of pace from my last grumpy post…

I’m going to give a happy shoutout to the folks over at Carbonmade.com!

I recently came across the free (you can upgrade and pay for more space and more features) and advertisement-free online portfolio website called Carbonmade at Carbonmade.com and decided to give the site and its portfolio application a test drive on a basic free account…

and what a test drive it’s been so far!

Just so everyone knows what’s going on at Carbonmade:

Carbonmade offers two levels of accounts – the Meh and the Whoo.

The Meh account is the basic free account that everyone signs up with and with it comes an allotment of 5 Projects (think of this as 5 folders/major categories that you can label however you want), and 35 images. You can also link your portfolio to a Google Analytics account to track how your portfolio is doing in terms of views and the like.

If you upgrade to their paid Whoo account, the numbers and features get bumped up to: 50 Projects, 500 images, and 10 videos. In addition, you can get your portfolio linked to your own domain name (you have to own the domain name yourself already, obviously) and you get priority customer support.

Now.

For myself, I already host the majority of my own online portfolio on my own domain name because I do front-end web development and web design stuff and it’s a good way to show off my skills and so I decided (so far) to stick with the Meh account and use it to showcase my absolute favorite and most recent pieces of work.

If you visit http://graffitimaster.carbonmade.com, you’ll see that I used my Projects to divvy up my work samples into 4 categories (yes, this means I have 1 Project left to use) and if you click on them you’ll see that each category houses a number of screenshots of related work samples.

Additionally, you might notice that when/if you try and right click on the images/screenshots in question, it doesn’t pull up the portfolio image.

Pretty nifty, huh?

Yeah, I thought so, too.

A couple of major reasons I’m digging Carbonmade:

• Nice, clean, and simple layout options for the portfolios
• Easy to use interface for portfolio, Project, and image arranging; image uploading; tagging/labeling; editing the About Me page; and editing pretty much anything else that can be edited
• The display method for the portfolio images
• Great customer/user support!

After all of my recent grumblings about customer support, experiencing a polite, super quick and to-the-point answer from the Carbonmade team – thanks again, Spencer! – is really what helped to clinch my positive opinion for both the Carbonmade application and website AND the people behind the project.

Carbonmade’s mission is to give people who need online portfolios a no-muss and no-fuss way to display samples of their work.

With their easy-to-use interface, clean and sleek portfolio layouts, neat method of displaying portfolio contents, tiered account levels to suit both the light and heavier users, and very satisfactory customer/user support, I think they have more than delivered.

For me, at least, some of the features I ran into while on my Carbonmade adventure came as a very wonderful surprise.

Maybe for you, they will, too.

Cheers to you, Carbonmade!

Thanks for making my day!

~ EMG /

In some ways, Emotiomental Graffiti doesn’t look like much.

To be sure, it really isn’t all that complicated of a website compared to a lot of larger, more media-heavy, and more complex sites.

Running off of the (absolutely kick ASS) WordPress application (version 2.8), Emotiomental Graffiti is, for the most part, a smorgasbord of valid XHTML Strict coding (my work), WP-specific PHP hooks (their work; I just hitched it all together), and a crapload of CSS (my work).

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