Where have I been?

I realize that I haven't posted for two weeks, but I have an excuse - I have had a ton of homework and stuff for all my classes, especially Euro. Man, when they said 90 minutes every day for Euro, they weren't kidding. So, I suppose I should enlighten my blog readers to just what I've been up to lately.

I haven't tried any more translations, though I have read some more Strugatsky works. Monday Starts on Saturday is particulary recommended ... if you can find it. For some reason or another, English Strugatsky translations are rare and expensive, usually costing somewhere in the twenties range (USD), if they're available at all.

I am doing rather well in school, though I may not be doing so well in Euro. Nevertheless, Euro is undoubtedly my favorite class. I just took the PSAT today, and think that I did very well. Also, I'm the Vice President of my school's Chess Club, with meetings at lunch twice a week. I'm in charge of maintaining our school ranking system, for which I use the ELO Calculator that I conveniently made with Mgccl this summer. I'm currently ranked number one, but I swear, no data tampering involved ^_^

For some strange reason, I suddenly have this fascination with old stuff, from antique books to vinyl records. Since my family rarely eBays [yes, it's a verb!], I guess I'll have to take my chances at local garage sales - if I have time that is.

I still haven't gotten a guitar, but in the meantime I got a new hobby - digital photography - to help fill the void. Photography is fun =)

Realizing how old and pointless my old personal site is, I've started developing a new one, using a mixture of PHP and HTML. Since, as I mentioned before, I don't really have a lot of free time right now, I can expect this project to take me a month or so, if I don't give up halfway that is. You can view a very early test here.

Finally, I'd like to mention a very interesting online game that I found: Cosmic Encounter. Oddly enough, this game is based on a boardgame that one of my friends has. Who'd've guessed that a board game designer would also happen to be a web programmer? Anyways, be sure to try it out - it's incredibly fun and addictive in its own way.

Whew. That was one long and rambling post, two weeks in a nutshell. I must have used just about every one of my labels for this. ^_^

Changes

I showed the PrestoSoft team my website design, and they liked it for the most part. However, they forced me to make some changes: use less blue, make the default font bigger, and other things. In my opinion, the site now looks a lot worse, but you can judge for yourself.

The old site

The new site

See H1 Run, Run H1 Run

Today my programmer friend and I had the task of replacing all the headings (which used a custom style) with customized H1s and H2s, on the PrestoSoft site. Now, HNs (as they're officially called) are tricky little beasts - they always screw up the table cell they're in. Nothing seems to fix this, neither valign nor margin nor spacing. We were trying different things for perhaps an hour, until we found a very simple solution on the macromedia.dreamweaver newsgroup: Add the following to your stylesheet:

h1
{
padding: 0 0 0 0;
}

Turns out the problem was with padding all along! Who'd've guessed?

And if you ask, "What's the point of using H1s and H2s anyway, when you can make your own styles?", it is believed that Google's algorithm (no one knows for sure - it's Google's secret), as well as those of other search engines, places a higher priority on text inside H1,H2,...,H6 tags. It's kinda weird, but that's (supposedly) how Google thinks it's get the most relevant content. Personally, I think that it's useless, and makes life harder for us web designers...

Bullets -> Lists

Exhibit A:

• The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

• multiline text multiline text multiline text multiline text multiline text multiline text multiline text multiline text multiline text multiline text


Exhibit B:

• The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.


• multiline text multiline text multiline text multiline text multiline text multiline text multiline text multiline text multiline text multiline text

What's different about these? The first uses bullets, while the second is an unordered list.

Sometimes in web design you get a site almost done when suddenly you realize that one aspect of the site is wrong (in this case, bullets, which do not offer some of the features of lists). I spent a significant amount of time today going over the PrestoSoft site, replace all instances of A with B.

Redesigning Prestosoft.com

A friend of mine is a software developer, and this summer I am helping him redesign his site.

Fortunately, all the design work has been done for me. Kudos to Blue Cherry Graphics, will, and the rest of the guys at Design Outpost for designing the new logo and site template!

What is my job, then? you may ask. Well, the site template that we were given is a simple HTML file, while the site is based on custom ASP scripts. My job is to merge the HTML template and ASP scripts into a functioning site.

This is not that easy, however, and I've had to rewrite a significant portion of both the ASP and HTML.

Today I was able to convert the main page:

The old ASP site











The HTML template










Final result



As you can see, the page looks almost identical to the original HTML file, but adds the features of the old site, most notably, ASP scripts that customly generate each page.

However, this new site is still far from perfect: Search doesn't work, some fonts aren't right, and the bottom of the News box is missing.

And of course I still need to add about 40 more pages...