Sean’s Blog

So I was designing my site in Firefox and on Ubuntu thinking the beautiful things I was creating were universal. Then after hours of design, I went to have dinner with my parents and I was excited to show off my progress…and it looked like crap.

My mom runs Windows XP in 800×600 resolution and at 8-bits of color. It was almost like going back in time to Windows 98, but it really made me realize that I need to consider all configurations when designing my site. Especially since the majority of people surfing the net still use IE.

Things that were supposed to be transparent weren’t. Menus were lost. Divs didn’t line up. It was a disaster.

So I went home and booted up my old Windows machine (guess it’s still good for something). I quickly looked up some fixes, applied them, and used my Windows machine to verify.

I guess the moral of the story is: hang on to your Windows machine…at least until everyone else wises up.

I decided a while back that my site design sucked. I finally had some time where I could really get into the nuts and bolts of my site design. So I had a go.

I really wanted the site to look like a piece of paper on a backdrop, desk, wallpaper, etc. And I also wanted it to have a sort of drop shadow effect to give it an element of depth.

Played around with a few backdrops, but ultimately I decided upon paisley. I love paisley.

Check it out at www.seanchon.com!

Honestly, working on this website is like opening Pandora’s Box.

I think I finally have the blog to a point where it’s not terribly plain. I opted against using an RSS reader to populate the posts as it’s very linear, and instead decided to write my own navigational functions using the Zend/Google PHP API to give it the feel of blogging software that is currently available. I’m embarrassed to say how much time I spent on that page as it is not obvious what lies beneath the page, but I am proud of the work in progress.

Also, I have been learning about cookies and thought it would be fun to give my website an alternate theme. So it has been implemented. There might be a bug or two here or there, so if the site behaves funny for you, please let me know. If you go to my site (www.seanchon.com), you’ll notice an option on the top left of your screen. There are two themes right now. I might try to incorporate some more, but it’s kind of a pain in the ass honestly, as you need to compare multiple stylesheets to avoid conflicts.

Anyway, it’s late. I should be sleeping, but I got carried away.

Oh, and please give me feedback about how the page looks too. I am using Firefox on Ubuntu…so I don’t represent the average web surfer.

Thanks!

Not sure if there’s anyone out there still reading this…

I am posting partially to test my blog integration at www.seanchon.com, so don’t mind the post if it’s a bit boring.

I’ve optimized it a bit to run faster. It is still a little slow, but I think that is because it is pulling live data from Blogger (Google). I am pretty excited with its progress as this is the first time I’ve worked with the Google API. Thus far it mainly retrieves and rearranges data, but I am now working on getting comments to display on my site as well as being able to post from my site in addition to the Blogger site.

Oh…and life outside of programming. There really isn’t one…for now.