WEB DESIGN BLOG

Took Thanksgiving week off of work. Spent almost the whole time on the new-and-improved F1POOL. Almost done. http://teamwishbone.com/F1POOL

Started working on the SPEED Insider F1 Pool for next season. This one will allow me to enter picks into a database, and automatically calculate and post the results. Using pjjTextBase for the database engine. This tool is a surprisingly compact relational database that utilises a pipe-separated text file to store information.

Evaluated the http://php-development.ru Multi-Level DHTML Menu. I was previously using AnyLink CSS menus, which were clean, lightweight and fast, but lacked multi-level dropdown menu support.

Decided on using the FCKEditor for my site. It has many more features than Whizzywig. For example, it can create forms, image uploads, allow you to design styles in an XML file, smilies, fully control the properties of any object, and a button to edit in full-screen mode. The interface is fully configurable through a JavaScript config file. It makes use of IFRAME tags, which is a bit odd. This will have issues with anyone using McAfee Privacy Service. It also has an API for the most common server-side scripting languages. It still has a couple of issues that I'm working through, but all in all, a good change.

Evaluating the FCKEditor for WYSIWYG editing of my websites. Currently using the Whizzywig editor. It's good, but has the occasional issue of getting it's starting and ending tags confused. Also, one big issue is that it doesn't allow you to change links once you've created them. You have to delete the link and re-create it. If you just hilight the link and re-do it, you get nested tags.. Not good. The FCK editor seems to take care of this better. I'm hoping that it will work with styles.

Even though being in the computer industry for many years, I had never delved into web design. I had a general idea how HTML worked, but had never actually written anything. My start came when my wife started her photography business and needed a web site. Since I am the "computer guy" of the household, it was up to me to figure out how to do this. I picked up a copy of "HTML for Dummies", pulled up Notepad and started to work. The end result was a horrid-looking (by today's standards) site for my wife's business.