Month: May 2003

CSS

Rob More

Been playing with CSS today for the message board system on BritLore. I want to take some code that Sixes wrote to display a list of message boards with unread threads on them. So I thought I’d be good an reuse all his code. There was no problem with the PHP side: that was easy! The CSS however…

Basically it comes down to how little advanced CSS I know! This is especially true of the positioning model and how multiple styles get agregated down to the final style applied to a given element. I’m quite pleased with the final result as I ended up with less than 10 new lines of CSS :)

Unfortunately we discovered that that SQL statement that generates this list takes a variable length of time between 3.5 and 7 seconds to run… and I called it again… I think I’ll have to do get the results from the first run through of that function.

Driving

Rob More

The contract is up on the flat in Stratford, so I’m back at my mother-in-law’s during the week.

Except this week! We are having additional network connections installed at work and so I’m working from home Thursday and Friday :)

The Day Before

Rob More

Today is the day before Jon’s birthday! As I’m at work tomorrow, we started the celebrations today and let Jon open his big present from us. It’s a safari animal set with plastic animals of elephant, giraffe, lion, tiger etc. Jon was thrilled! So thrilled in fact that he totally ignored the television in preference to his new toys!

Park

Rob More

We all went to the park today. The park was a big one in Beckenham with a lake and lots of ducks and geese! Jon had feeding the ducks – well throwing bread in their general direction anyway! He did lots of walking and as a result slept too long at lunchtime :)

The consequences are of course that he went to bed over an hour ago and he’s still awake! Maybe he’ll have a lie-in in the morning :)

More Movable Type

Rob More

Spent all evening last night setting up Movable Type. Took a bit of time, but I think that the end result is OK. The idea of nested template modules is similar to the way Nucleus works and makes life a lot easier for organising the site.

The entire site is styled using CSS to position the various content sections. We did however come across one problem. How do you vertically centre text in a <div>? In the end I put in a table along the lines of:

<table width='100%' height='100%'>
  <tr>
    <td valign='middle'>My text here</td>
  </tr>
</table>

But surely there’s a way to do it in CSS?!

Movable Type

Rob More

Been playing with Movable Type for a friend. Wasn’t as easy to set up at this one though :)

I’m toying with using it here, for the pingback facility which I think is quite cool and I’m not sure if I can do that with this blog system. Depends if I can be bothered to do all the faffing around though!