Tien Chiu

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HTML and CSS and Flash, oh my!

Just a quick note to say that I’m working on implementing the design for my new homepage.  It’s waaaay more complicated than I expected, and I’m having to tackle it in layers, learning the CSS and HTML as I go.  I’ve been sitting here with Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Web Design in a Nutshell (fantastic reference, btw), and a couple of HTML/CSS books for three hours now, trying to figure things out.  So far I’ve got one repeating background image and a page full of layout sketches.  Slow progress, but a fascinating puzzle to unlock.

Just in case anyone’s wondering, here’s the comp for my new homepage (click the image to load the full-screen version).  It’s a lot more complex than it looks – if you’re a professional web designer, I could use some hints about how to carve up and float the divs to get the right overlap.  Otherwise, I’ll work it out.  🙂

No time for anything else right now – my goal is to get this implemented by the end of the weekend, or at least mid next week.  Time for a crash course!

Final comp of my homepage

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About Drupal

Sherri commented, “I’m really curious about Drupal and a little confused with how you will use it with your website.”

It occurs to me that perhaps I have been mumbling a little too incoherently of late, so let me try to explain what Drupal is:

Drupal is a content management system, meaning roughly that it’s a way that many people can potentially contribute content to the same site. What kind of content? Potentially anything – a photo gallery, news articles, classified ads, forum posts – from the CMS’s point of view, it’s all content and what it does is organize and display it neatly.

WordPress (which is what I use for this blog) is a content management system that’s specialized for blogging. With Drupal, you get much more ability to manage users and the things they can do, and the kinds of content they can contribute. You can do news articles, you can do blog entries, you can do static pages (like most of the pages on my website), you can post in a forum, and so on. I haven’t really done more than scratch the surface of what Drupal can do, and I’m pretty darned impressed already. It is more flexible than the other content management systems I’ve seen.

Anyway, there are a couple of features I’d like to create for this handweavers’ resource site. the biggest one is to provide a place for people to post their projects (finished or in progress) so others can see and possibly benefit from them. I’d also like to be able to have one or more pages where people can post interesting links, somewhere they can post announcements of events. I’d like to create forums to discuss topics related to weaving. Let people rate and comment on weaving products. Classified ads. And oh so many more things that I haven’t thought up yet.

Anyway, the nice part of using a content management system is that it potentially handles much of the boring or troublesome stuff for you. Most CMS’s, for example, have some sort of unified login so you only need to log in once. They handle user permissions (who can edit what). Most of them have some sort of forums module so you can create discussion forums in about five minutes’ work. Many of them have a news module so you can have a news feed on the site, and let people contribute articles. They have blogging functionality.

My aim is to create a handweavers’ community and resource site, in somewhat the same way that Ravelry is a knitting community and resource site. It will never be as slick as Ravelry, mostly because they have one full-time developer and I have me (not to be mistaken for a developer, and certainly not working on the project full time), but I’m hoping I can create something useful nonetheless.

I originally thought to code some of this myself as a way to learn PHP and MySQL, but it was really too big a project to attempt on my own. With Drupal (or another CMS), I think I’ve got a decent shot at it.

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Misc web stuff

Got the first draft of the homepage comps from the designer this morning – looks great! I asked him for a number of tweaks and will hopefully be getting the second round tomorrow. I actually asked for two designs, one centered around text and the other more image-heavy – we’ll see what he comes up with.

I have looked some more at Drupal and Joomla and have decided that Drupal has serious potential for the handweaving resource site. It has customizable fields (which will allow me to do the project repository without much trouble) and an add-on module called “organic groups” which will enable people to create their own groups and have forums only visible to that group. I’m still exploring what else it can do, but I’m pretty certain it’s the right choice for the resource site, I just have to figure out how. Fortunately this dovetails nicely with my desire to understand CMS’s (content management systems) for work.

I just bought another used ultralight notebook from eBay, this one with 2 GB RAM and 2GHz processor. This will let me run Adobe’s Creative Suite 3, something I’ve wanted to do for awhile. Yesterday I stripped it down and reinstalled the operating system (just in case the previous owner left any spyware), this morning I installed the missing device drivers, and tonight I’m going to embark on the marvelous adventure of reinstalling the 10,000 programs I had installed on my old laptop. Creative Suite 3 promises to be a real treat – took over two hours and heaven only knows how many reboots to install it on my desktop and get it updated, but I did eventually get it done.

Anyway, if you don’t hear from me for a couple of days, it’s because I’m busy with configuring my new -to-me laptop. Although, I will probably post a screenshot of my new homepage once it’s ready.

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Ooo, this is interesting!

I’ve been reading up on Drupal, and I think it might be a key to resurrecting the handweaving resource website project.  It’s basically a way to manage user-driven communities without the overhead of having to do everything manually.  It’s almost certainly overkill for my website, though – I mean, I could use it for my website but it would be like using a laptop for a hammer.  It’s not designed for it and it’s probably silly to use it that way.
I have now hired a web designer and he will start work on my new homepage early next week (as soon as I can get myself officially set up on oDesk, which incidentally is THE coolest thing for hiring remote contractors).  So I could find myself studying HTML/CSS as early as next week.
Weaving-wise, I have not accomplished much this weekend, although I did get the warp properly hung in front of the heddles.  I had a bit of a panic trying to figure out how to indicate when it’s time to switch between warp A and warp B when threading off two sets of lease sticks (you may recall that I used two differently dyed yarns in the warp).  So I asked the weaving lists and they came up with a great solution: use figure-8 ties between the different stripes.  It took a surprisingly long time to set that up, get the lease sticks properly inserted, untwist the warp, etc. but it is FINALLY ready to thread.  I will probably start that on Wednesday – Monday is dedicated to processing 10 lbs of blueberries and Tuesday I have a conference call with China (work stuff).

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Decisions, decisions

I went out today looking for a book on Drupal (which is a content management system that I’m considering using for my website) and found a book on web design which intrigued me.  I’m now torn between paying someone else to do the design on my site and doing it myself.  I’m still leaning towards having a designer do it, despite the fact that (with this book’s help) I think I might actually be able to do a halfway decent design.  Mostly it’s that I want to learn about building websites, not designing in Photoshop – while the latter might be interesting, and would help me master Photoshop, there is too much on my plate to learn already.  So I think I will leave the designing aspect to someone else and concentrate on implementation.

I am now ready to thread up the loom and will probably start later today or tomorrow, after I’ve finished jamming my brain with information about Drupal and web design.