Archive for the 'Create a web site' category

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are a very powerful way to apply styles to an HTML page. It has the advantage of removing most of the formatting (styling) and putting it in a single location. However, in my first tries I tended to create a lot of styles which where very similar one to each other.

For example, I would write:

I wanted to improve and optimize all this. It took me several steps to get it. The first (nearly obvious one since it is described clearly in all CSS tutorials and books) was to group exactly identical styles (like ul and ol, in my example), leading to the following:

No big deal, but it is reducing the amount of redundancy.

After that point, I was left in the dark with trying to group styles which where not exactly identical and so could not obviously be grouped. What I needed was to understand that a style can be defined in separate (additive) declarations, like:

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Now, it becomes nearly obvious how to combine styles even when they are not fully identical: Group what can be grouped, keep the rest separated.

The final code for my example is then:

15 lines instead of 21, nearly no redundancy left (none except what I chose to keep for readability); This has been leading to significant simplifications of my style sheets. I hope it will be the case for you too.

Some time ago, most people would not even think about creating a web site. Today, it became so easy to do (see another post coming soon) that the only question is not how, but why. Consequently, I decided to give you a few of the common ideas that led most web site designers and bloggers (even amateur ones):

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• Initially, because you have something to tell. Of course, you should start only if people usually ask you about something and consider that you have something interesting to say about it. If it is not the case, you may be led by the will to become this kind of expert or reference person on an issue you like.
• Because you can. We do a lot of things just because we can, not for very complex reasons
• Because being recognized expert on a field may attract some interesting job that you could not consider in any other way. I remember that Tom’s Hardware was started by a medical student who had some understanding of technology and hitech gadgets. He moved from Medecine to Technology.
• Because -if you do it well- you may earn a neat income. Most blogs do not bring any money. However, some are quite a neat source of money. A few thousands of visits per day (easily reachable if you are persistent enough to produce at least 100 posts per year) will be easily monetized to a few hundred dollars per year with the help of Google AdSense or other polite/discreet advertising.

Of course, you need to spend some time to it. But, this is not a lot. For many people browsing the Internet is already a daily activity. Spending a few minutes to keep a log of your activities or researches would be easy. Spending a few hours a week to write about your hobby is usually a neat way to ensure that your knowledge is understandable and that you can share it with others. In some cases, you will even notice that some of your friends will go to your web site before asking you for details that will make the matter for further posts (I often re-use some of my emails into posts).

Will 2007 be the year of your web site?

You want your own blog? After all, it’s so easy. There are many solutions for this including:

• Create your own web site (preferably after reading my previous articles)
• Start a WordPress-based site in a matter of minutes on the WordPress.com server

As a matter of fact, with the second solution, you will find all tools already installed and you can start writing posts immediately.

After a previous post about the reasons there are not to use the HTML tables (and to prefer CSS tables), I want to come back to this issue with my own experience.

When I went to the fifth version of this web site interface (the one you see at the time of posting this article), I tried to build the site theme using as much CSS as possible in order to ease future migrations and to lighten the result by separating content and styles. However, it soon appeared clear that the 3-column organization (with footer) i sone of the most difficult contruction for CSS tables and it always creates problems of rendering on different browsers.

This is why I decided to choose the best of both worlds. Let’s clarify this position. HTML tables are very simple to build and are correctly implemented in the vast majority of Internet browsers (their definition is so old now…). I decided to build the basic squeleton out of HTML tables. But I limited myself to the structure only. All the styling and formatting is done in CSS tags.

This is a very powerful solution. Use one technique for what it’s best. HTML tables allow easy definition of columns, clear grouping, etc. CSS tags allow splitting content and structure, defining clearly sizes, margins, paddings, borders, cell backgrounds, colours, etc. This gives a theme that is very tolerant (e.g. HTML tables behave well when an image is sized erroneously big -a quite common error- and forces the column dimensions). But the styling is very flexible in CSS.

If you are interested, I invite you to check the sources of this page and the associated CSS file.

Going from one version to the newest for a software program like WordPress that I rely upon to operate this web site is not necessarily difficult, but it is always a bit safer to work smoothly, orderly and slowly rather than rushing into the dark.

I started by updating all the plugins I use to enhance WordPress. After checking that they were compatible with WP2.1 or that they had a new version compatible with it, I went and downloaded them before installing them one after the other. I could immediately detect an issue with WP-Polls and I invalidated it after a few seconds to secure the quality of the visits (knowing that there us not yet any online polls, it wouldn’t create problems for the visitors).

Then, from a safe situation, I could download WordPress v2.1 and install it separately. Importantly enough, there are plenty of details about how to make a safe upgrade, right in the download page.

Following the instructions was fairly fail-safe and, apart from a minute of file uploading, there was no real impact on the operation.

Great news for the WordPress community of bloggers and web site designers: WordPress 2.1 is available for download. This is really a significant upgrade to one of the most successful blog-and-CMS software applications (the one I use for Roumazeilles.net). New features include (my own selection of the good things):

• A new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
• The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
• You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.
• The upload manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio.
• Comment feeds now include all the comments, not just the last 10.
• A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.
• Redesigned login screen from the Shuttle project.
• More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster.
• Our admin has been refreshed to load faster and be more visually consistent.
• Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Domas Mituzas from MySQL went over all our queries with a fine-toothed comb.
• Better internationalization and support for right-to-left languages.

It seems all great (and it is). However, I want to stress that existing WordPress 1.x blogs should not jump immediately into the new version. The main reason for being cautious is the unavailability of new versions of some of the plug-ins your site may be using. In my case, I will need a little more time for the transition.

Full details.

Needing to quickly install a web server on a Windows PC, I was drawn into looking for a free software suite providing such sevrices in a simple and nice package.

I already knew EasyPHP from Emmanuel Faivre, Laurent Abbal and Thierry Murail, three Frenchmen who put in a single tool box all the free open-source tools really needed for this:

• an Apache server
• the PHP language
• a mySQL database
• a few tools that makes nice complements to it:
• PHPMyAdmin
• SQLiteManager

It is always possible to grab them independently and to install them by yourself, but it’s such a pleasure to do this in a single simple move on your PC!

But, I was told that there is a competing solution, WAMP from PHPteam. After reading in the forums that WAMP seems much simpler to install on a Windows PC than EasyPHP, I decided to test WAMP.

In a few words, I can confirm the ease of deployment. The installation program is perfectly up to the level of what is normally epxected from a Windows pro installer. User choices are clear, well described and easy to understand, supposing that you know about the general issue (we are installing a web server, not yet another mini-calendar XP application…). And, there lies the only problem with WAMP (but it’s shared with EasyPHP): If they allow you to work with tools that are well known to a specialized public, don’t really believe that you could install your own server without first understanding the issues at hand with Apache, mySQL or PHP.

Nevertheless, the overall feeling I got from WAMP is even more favorable than with EasyPHP. Even better, in both cases, the support is very significant in several language (most notably in English and French). I know that this is a prerequisite for some of our readers.

You may have noticed a new logo appearing on our web site since the redesigned interface went online.

If your web browser supports it (Opera 9, FireFox, Internet Explorer 7), a similar orange icon may appear on the web address bar.

This is a feature that is good both for users and for web site designers. For the users, it provides a simple way to access to the information on our web site by allowing FireFox or Opera to directly collect the news from the web site without even opening the page. If you click on one of these RSS feed icons , your web browser should propose to subscribe to the feed. After that, you will be informed more directly about news on Roumazeilles.net even if you do not open the web site. You will never miss interesting headlines!

The RSS feed icon is a standardized way (proposed by FireFox) to easily point you to this fast access to the web site information. By itself, this is good news for the web designer because it gives a common recognition standard: I don’t have to explain (like I do here) the meaning of the icon, I don’t have to invent some explanation or title. It looks the same on all web sites supporting this feature.

Initially, it RSS feeds were created to syndicate content (to allow other sites to seamlessly include the content of Roumazeilles.net in their own pages). This is still possible (this is what is used by news management web sites like MyYahoo!, MyAOL, Google, or Bloglines), but it has been greatly extended by the creation of specific tools integrated in your own browser.