Category: Technical Blog

Tableless css gallery

You can see all the code for it here dnevnikeklektika.com

I was scratching my bean yesterday because I really wanted to jazz up my dad’s site’s catalog pages with some thumbnail pictures but I had put so many dumb divs in those pages already that I was tired of moving everything about when I added something new.
This is the pain of div-itis and it is a problem when you realise you simply can’t just squish in a bunch of divs in order to position all your content.You may as well stick with tables if you’re going to use divs like tables,I guess.
I had done just that because I was trying to get that awesome css float element to work with these pages and it was a short cut of a sort to just div it all up.
My pages still needed some work and it looked very plain and dull,despite a day playing with positioning and color.
I’d started to put in a few lightbox linked photos but with all the divs and whathaveyou,the padding and margin and etc,the word wrap was stopping at the bottom of each image if it was a certain size.If there was a lot of text it was fine(duh).Anyway, it just looked cluttered when I was done and in the end I was grateful for dull and plain…
I googled css thumbnail gallery and found the site I mentioned above.
I took his advice(I think he’s a he) and kept each thumbnail at 75px by 75px.I used my lightbox linked images that I already had.I can see now that these images are a little small to use in a lightbox so I am going to link them to some larger ones tommorrow.
See the coolish results here catalog thumbnails

Strange it’s ended up this way.

I’ve been working hard this past month on a big project-designing a website with an integrated CMS and adding into it a shopping cart and an AJAX powered slideshow within which the client can also switch what pictures it shows.
For the experience and also to learn a lot I decided that this very project would be my feetwetting into the world of obeying particular standards and also keeping my ears and eyes open to the desires of a client.And I tried hard to do this without inserting too much of my own design sensibilities(I like white pages and colored font headings not that you could tell from the way my blogs look 🙂 )
I worked for free,too.And I never once minded that I wasn’t going to be getting paid.After all I answered this ad from the Craigslist section “Barter”

The job required loads of research and testing and for the CMS even more testing.Testing testing testing!

Anyway once I found doop I was all set I thought until I was asked to make some regular
HTML pages.The client didn’t actually know he was asking for more pages–he just requested a way to showcase some products in such a way that the shop couldn’t(within my powers) be configured to do so.Good old fashioned HTMl pages to the rescue.

So I had to find a php script that would let my client edit plain HTML files.
I did with a script called EasyEditPHP.
I tried to track down the website that hosts EasyEditPhp but I can’t find it just now.
But here is the link to doop.You really should check it out.It’s quite, quite awesome.

My client’s last CMS was mysql powered.But I could tell from the way his old pages looked that the CMS provided wasn’t jibbing too well with the overall page design,I.E.: if he uploaded a pic it would be smack dab in the center of a page.This was because he didn’t use the rich text editor’s options for image placement within a document–which told me the new pages would have to have the HTML for pictures already built in.I also positioned everything with CSS.In short I tried as hard as I could to make this image placement as much of a no-brainer as possible for him.
Both my CMS’s show the html of a document-and EasyEditPHP shows all the source code for any document.I pictured myself 4 years ago when I first saw code and so I knew I needed to softsoap the experience by adding on top of all the work a handbook with detailed explanations of how to use HTML with images.

So just when I had finalized the project(short of getting a hold of the new shots of the products that this was all for, I got an email from the client asking me if I had deleted his mail program!

Well I went and looked at his shared cgi-bin and it was empty.I knew my client didn’t know how to access his files with FTP and I knew I hadn’t accidentally arsed such a big file myself.

So the only other person was the original creator of the client’s website.But he wasn’t some total fool who would do such a thing.
I figured(actually just as I am writng this) it was just a matter of an upgrade coinciding with my client’s rare usage of this program.I guess the webmaster was just assuming he could make changes without alarming anyone. This seems to have been the case after all…the program is called dadamail and it is a beast of a thing.I tried to upload and run it on my other site but wonders of wonders–no running.It’s mysql pm’d to the max.It uses many perl mods that my other hosts configuration has left out.Really, the least they could do is upgrade all their IIS clients to this latest version…They really don’t do much for their customers.grr. Another story.

I wrote to both of the involved asking how this misunderstanding was working out and I hoped to get some kind of answer.After all, I was under suspicion of deleting an important file and I didn’t want it on my head.

This all started on Monday or Sunday of this week and I haven’t heard a thing from either of them.I am giving my client the benefit of a doubt but still–we were writing pretty consistently back and forth fairly often(45 emails in a month) and so this silence is telling.

And by the way–the mail program is back in the cgi-bin wonder of wonders.

Wither Thou,Thickbox?

I can’t get ThickBox to run on this new site I’m working on. I know it’s my thickheadedness in figuring out the path(I have a mental block with paths)to the script,but why then am I able to do anything else?

Why am I able to get greybox and lightbox to work?

I’m trying to make something rather small like a minigallery for this new site but even though thickbox woulda been awesome-no luck.

More CMS Love

I told you I’ve been collecting and testing out various CMS’s and trying them out on 2 different server environments,right?

First, for that special little challenge of nothing working-I load it up to my dad’s host and start opening every script file included in the package and looking for session_start(); which means I then have to paste into every page that uses
session_start(); my session save path.This path is to an actual folder that will record and stash every blasted session id that gets generated by the script!This means that every once and awhile I have to delete that folder or it will bloat up to a million stored ids.Awesome!

When I’ve gotten that bit out of the way, I then try to get the CMS to do what it’s supposed to do:make php pages(I use php powered CMs’s because me likey). By “make” I mean create the page.
By “doing what it’s supposed to do”,too, I mean let me edit stuff in a created page and let me upload images and store the damn things to a folder the script makes for me.

Ideally things will go, unideally they won’t or the image upload won’t work.Or I won’t be able to figure out the correct path to something.
I have tried out and successfully ran the following CMS applications:

  • Doop
  • dokuwiki
  • daily
  • Pagemanager
  • Siteman
  • EditThisPage
  • fancy
  • cutenews
  • editPoints

I have failed at the following:

  • justVisual
  • LemonCms
  • cmssimple
  • modx
  • moodle
  • phpcms
  • spaw

I mentioned that I loaded these for the most part only to my dad’s retarded host.
Purehost runs php v. 4.3.0 with gdlibrary one.
They trust nobody so there are many built in restrictions and for the most part you’ve got to be pretty tenacious to get anything more complicated than a contact form to work.
You do not have access to php ini so there goes a lot of options right there.You can’t use gd library 2 functions so there also go even more options.You can’t even have a mysql database connection because this is really only for Purehost’s unix platform customers…although they will happily set one up for you
and charge you 5 bucks a month for the priviledge,too.Outside database connections also won’t fly(I of course tried this first).
In short Purehost has a very hostile environment to work within.
And all that session id saving is so backward-I can’t even begin to tell you by how much.

For that added touch of sheer frustration,any package I run will take forever to load.By forever I mean slower than dialing up an mp3 file.This usually means your save_path folder is bloated but it doesn’t always mean this and so you just have to close the page or close the browser and wait.

And since I am also designing web pages, this lull in waiting to see my results after closing the editing window can drive me so crazy I end up yelling obscenities and just shutting my project down.

I know that the culprit is Purehost and not my P.C. because I have been able to try out 3 different hosts besides Purehost and the wait time is negligible, comparatively.Meaning that for instance the exact same blog as this one on Purehost that I set up for my dad takes more than 5 minutes to appear.This one takes a fraction of a second, thanks Troywolf.com.
Even my rinky-dink angelfire site comes up instantly–all html and javascript no php allowed.
I guess the purpose of this blog is to let you know that before you badmouth a particular tool or application and tell everyone it doesn’t work-make sure you have tried to run it on at least one other host first.

I listed above all the cms that worked but I left out the rich text editors tinymce and fckeditor because technically you are suppoed to be able to turn any text area into an editor, but I was looking for something really a lot simpler.Basically I just wanted image uploading/ &page-management/creation/deletion but fckeditor is so heavy and so is tinymce- I loaded them but was afraid of them!so I didn’t use them.Fckedito’rs flaw for me was the abilty to save the page you made–I couldn’t figure it out! I’m not giving up on tiny mce-it’s got a lot of cool functions I just need to spend time finding out about all of them.

I’m not a total dullard as I was able to turn a text area into a tiny mce editing point–but that was as far as I got with it.