With Wings As Eagles: Craig P. Steffen's Blog

On to Chapter 4: a CSS adventure

2010 December 30 00:56

This has been a great Christmas break so far. It's been great for the usual reasons, seeing family and giving presents and so on. This trip has been fairly unique, however, in that I've actually brought a bunch of stuff to do and I'm actually doing it. A year ago, I divested myself of blogger and set up virtual hosting on which I was going to deploy a blog software that I would run and configure myself. Well I got the hosting part set up, but the blog software has failed to materialize.

I ran pivot for a while, which was reasonably good, but I ended up having the same problem with it that I had with blogger, in that it was too hard to get it to really do what I wanted. I decided to design and write my own blog software, which would be optimized to be simple but configurable. That's taken a while to get going.

I'm writing the software in php and perl. php I know reasonably wel, and this has been an opportunity to get to know perl better. Frankly, the constant switching back and forth between the two language has gotten annoying enough that I might just get sick of it at some point and switch the web front end to perl and have the whole thing be the same language.

Anyway, once the front end works, then I have to format it in some way. I've read about CSS and web standards, and so I want to build the framework so that it has areasonable baseline configuration. I don't want to have stupid flash animations or frames or any crap like that, but I don't want it to look like a 1997 geocities page either. So I'm going to try really hard to build it in a reasonable way. So having gotten the core code framework going in a reasonable fashion, I'm now working on the formatting. What you see on this page is where I am thus far. Not very nice, and the title has a questionable color, but this is a proof-of-concept that the CSS stuff works like it's supposed to. I'm slowly chewing through the reference library that I brought with me:

I have the front-end scripts working displaying the entries. I now have it including CSS definitions. Now I'm going through and using the books to figure out how to use CSS to position the elements, so that I can get a sidebar set up for archive links and navigation and so on.

The other thing that I've been working on is resurrecting an old Christmas present. A few years ago I asked for and got a Frogpad keyboard.

This trip I've gone through all the typing exercises, so I can type all the standard letters. I'm trying to work through the symbols, which is much harder because it involves some of the several shift/modifier keys on it. We'll see, but it's a good start, and maybe I can become actually adept at it this time.