I guess I never thought of design block - typically as a writer, I think more of writer’s blog. But I found this party poker compoker texasparty poker downloadpoker superstar gratistexas holdem softwaredraw poker on linepoker freewarepoker on line multiplayerpoker texanopoker 5 draw,draw poker,draw poker goldtavolo multigicotori pokeromaha poker onlinetexas poker onlinepoker con bonus,poker bonus,bonus senza deposito pokerstrip poker online,strip poker game online,strip poker online gratislive action pokertexas holdem no limitstrp pokergiochi omaha poker in lineagioco poker in italianostrip pokerpoker online osxpoker gratis italianoper giocare a pokerstrategie texas holdemtornei pokergiochi flash pokeritalian pokergiocare a poker onlinegioca pokerstrip poker gametexas holdem,texas holdem freeware,texas holdem italiapoker roomgiochi online pokerstud pokergiochi poker da scaricaredownload live pokergiochi di poker da scaricarescommesse internetgiochi internetstanze da pokertexas holdem poker regolestreep poker on linegioco cartedownload giochi di pokergioco gratuitocasino o netcasino online roulettemobile casino gamesroulette americana great article on Cameron Moll’s site for how to handle the blank page. Actually they are great tips for starting the process of any new design. Pick and choose which ones work for you:

Overcoming blankcanvasphobia

I now have a small collection of tools and tips for designers and evelopers, so I’m going to use this blog to promote odd tips - tools to help with graphics, sales at various shops with effective tools and so on.  Keep watch - I’m going to try to get the first couple of things started NEXT WEEK.

I know some might ask why would I import from EE to WP. Actually, I like the flexibility of desinging in WP, I like the plugins and the ease with which I can dispatch spam. In particular, I relocated in January and in 2 days off line, got hit by a spammer with 1000 spam comments. I was furious. Since I only have Core EE (that is the free version), I had no good spam tools. And I wasn’t about to shell out over $100 for the paid version for my personal blog. So for me, WP was the way to go.

The downside? EE has no “export” function for anything but templates. This is something that was not obvious and not easy to find an answer to - at least not the last time I tried, which was more than a year ago. You can easily import your RSS feed from EE to WP, but you lose all comments. Now I’ve had my mom blog since 2002 and made a lot of friends. I didn’t want to lose their comments - that’s like slighting them - so I had to find a better solution.

Here is the solution step by step:

1. Of course, back up your EE blog - critical files, database, and key templates.

2. Make sure you are suing EE 1.4.2 or later, if not, upgrade. Yea, I know it’s a pain, but why are you using such an old version?

3. Read the wiki here: EE Exporting Entries. Follow it verbatim closely. IT’S CRITICAL THAT YOU REMOVE ALL WHITESPACE FROM THE CODE THAT EE HAS ON THEIR SUPPORT FORUMS. No blanks or spaces at all, just keep the line breaks as is. Replace “default_site” with name of your weblog. Go to the index page and select “view rendered template”. If you cannot view the index page, you’ve probably misnamed it. Make sure your comments are there completey written out. If it’s ok, then do view source, save as the default name (index.php). Note that you can export a max of 999 entries. If you have more you’ll have to go back and do this more than once and limit to older entries.

4. In Wordpress, go to Import and click Movable Type. Browse to your file. If your admin name doesn’t match you will be prompted on how you’d like to fix that. Select import. The wait can take while if you have a lot of imports.

Check your entries to see if it’s done properly. It should be, using this method. If not, go back and check things like the file name you selected, the white space on your code, the weblog name, etc.

One hiccup I got was that not all of my categories imported properly. Some did, so I don’t understand why there was a mixup. My posts were also reversed numbered (yuck), but that’s a database issue I assume.

I hope this helps!!

It’s been much too long since I’ve posted, but from December through this week, I have not only been relocating but also redesigning and recoding my business site, Art By Tech.

I used DIVs and CSS (except some tables in the portfolio, but I’ll be fixing that), and created this lovely plug & play sidebar - isn’t it cute?

First I defined a variable as the current page using $_SERVER[’SCRIPT_NAME’]. Then I check the name of the page and put the conditional include statements: no sidebar for index, sidebar2 for portfolio and contact pages, and my own lovely news sidebar for everything else. Simple.

The power of PHP include files is so incredible - old news I know, but I love to do stuff myself instead of using a CMS. I used them not only for my news & events sidebar, but also to create a dummy sidebar (with if/esleif/else statement) to fake out and eliminate the sidebar (but not the div) for the homepage and portfolio. Include files allowed me alternate style sheetsheet selection, navigation separation, and IE conditional comments. Not to mention the fact that all pertinent info is in an include file so you can access it.

In my 2005 design, I used include files and a kind of complex if/else statement to select the appropriate header image for different sections. The problem is that when I got into that, the design took forever to deploy as I am so finicky about photos.

I probably should have used case for all this instead of if/else. Something to try in my “free time” (ha).

Not much else, but this has inspired me to do more in-depth, serious programming with PHP. I visited Friends of Ed today - a fabulous publisher - to see what was new for CS3 (in the budget with a Mac for 2007) and found this:
The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP

It’s coming out in July and it’s costly, but it’s EXACTLY what I’m looking for. I’ll have to download some other ebooks from them in the meantime.

Sweeeeet!! (Or should I say “Suite”?)

Do you love tabs? Do you love when they are integrated into sites in a cool way? So do I. And until I developed the tabs on the homepage at YP4, I thought you could only use PHP to develop like this. How wrong I was!

I started with a script that has served me well in the past, the scroll script from DHTMLCentral. This utilizes JavaScript, which I try to avoid due to accessibility standards, but for modern browsers and savvy audiences, I don’t worry about it too much.

I had to do a bunch of research because thanks to the propriety CMS used by Plus Three (ARCOS), I could not break the tabs up over different HTML pages. I had to chop things up a bit and changed it from an actual scroll. Normally, you would put the menu at top, create layers with CSS for each menu, create a sort of window through scripting where you can view the layers, and when you clicked the link, viola! Your window shows the appropriate layer.

First thing I did was get rid of the menu at top.

Now, I resumed working on the script just as Thomas Brattli had written it. I had to insert it into a table, AND insert tables into each div to get the styling right - mostly thanks to width constraints. There was, as you can see, QUITE a bit of styling that figured into the layout. The divControl layer, for example, did not have hidden visibility as usual. The layer divContScroll needed to be positioned relative, not absolute, and I could not use clipping properties at all.

In addition, after every table (there are 3 here, one for each tab title), I need to add a div layer and create a special class, tabMenu. Each of these layers fixed alignment issues, which were pretty complicated given the position of the tabs. You can view the tab styling itself here.

Finally, for some reason I could not get the “onload = scrollInit;” to work in the JS file, so instead I added it to the body tag. Not ideal, but it worked. Go to the site and peak under the hood if you like!

This was another challenging coding project I was asked to do. You can see the results at YP4.org. As you can see, the top menu requires images, each a different width. The height remains the same but because of the offset text on rollover, using text to trigger the menu was not an option. I did a bit of research and found this really old gem of a tut by Eric Meyer. I decided to try it, since nothing else was working. The difference was that when I created the transparent gif, for each menu item I changed its width in the img tag to match the width of the actual image. Then I set the nav image to be the background image. So these are triggered by transparent gifs. For each and every menu item I created, I followed Eric Meyer’s directions at the link above. I ended up with this:

/**(SET THE FIRST ONE JUST ONCE)**/
li a img {height: 52px; border-width: 0; border-right:1px solid #e9e9e9;}
li a#about {background:url(../images/nav/nav_about.gif) top left no-repeat;}
li a#about:hover {background: url(../images/nav/nav_about_over.gif) top left no-repeat;}

Remember that I had to define the background image and hover image for each one of those ID’d links, 6 in total. Not the most economical coding, perhaps, but it did the trick. AND it allowed my Son of Suckerfish menus to work very nicely underneath it.

The caveat to this this trick is that it ALSO required some extra coding for the Suckerfish menus to work properly. This code allows the top level “over” state to remain on when you are mousing over the drop downs. Again, this has to be repeated for every link.

#mainNav li:hover a#about, #mainNav li.sfhover a#about{
background:url(../images/nav/nav_about_over.gif) top left no-repeat;
}

EVERYTHING on the top level menu is an image, except for the grey border on the left which I defined in that top line of CSS. The next trick was to match the shadows AND borders for the drop downs, which is completely rendered with CSS. The only image I used here was to help me create the shadow that underlies the whole drop down - a small red triangle.

Welcome to Code Remedy, the new blog by Art By Tech Web Design. I’m Gina Badalaty, CEO, Project Manager and Lead Designer. This blog is all about coding - solutions to problems, thoughts on techniques and trends, and other general ideas. If you’re a developer or designer, read or comment here.

Coming up first: a several part series on Son of Suckerfish menus. I recently developed some complex menu systems for www.cops.cc and www.yp4.org implementing techniques I had not seen in combination with Suckerfish. I’ll share my tips on getting the best out of these wonderful menus.