Puck’s Blog

Got a friend her own blog on my secondary site (the URL is a sort of in-joke, btw, not a porn site) and she’s already got three entries up there, which made me realize I’ve been slacking off here, especially in posting anything personal.

My workload has increased lately, what with the Alderac server being moved which then screwed up the online store so that credit card purchases are causing a Fatal Error (gotta love that term) as well as not one but two other site codings I’ve had to do in the last week!

Unfortunately I’m under an NDA for both of those and can’t talk about them at the moment, but they’re both very cool and both have really allowed me to play with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) Layout techniques.

What is CSS Layout, you ask? Well, imagine if all your HTML did was mark off sections of text and give each one a title or type, and then you had a separate document that told you how each section or type of section was laid out, how the text was formatted and what images it might have as a background. That’s what CSS Layout is, in a I’m-probably-not-explaining-this-right sort of way.

For an excellent example of just how cool CSS is, check out CSSZenGarden.com and click through some of the multiple designs for that project. The HTML code, the “guts” of the page if you will, is identical, but the CSS that tells your browser how it gets laid out, what fonts to use, and where things are positioned makes for an amazing array of layout choices. It’s very powerful, and very cool.

It’s also quite complicated, and can be annoying to get working properly on the three major browsers (IE, Mozilla and Opera) but this past week has led me to a few breakthroughs so that I’m confident with using it.

And now I really want to redesign this blog. Moveabletype already uses CSS Layout, but to a pretty simple degree. I learned enough several months back to come up with what you see here, but now that I’m more confident I want to do something really cool.

Whenever I get time…