More CSS menus September 13, 2007

CSS menus are more tricky, and much more time consuming than they look.

My aim tonight was to get add some nice effects to the menu on my online cv (formerly known as my website). I wanted to add a ‘hover’ effect, so that the menu buttons change colour, and text is highlighted when a user points their mouse at them.

That’s going to need a little more work, as I’ll need to create some new images for this purpose next week. (And that means going up in the loft to find my copy of Photoshop, which needs reinstallation after a recent Windows reload).

For this evening, what I managed to do was to create a basic hover effect – the link text changes colour. I’ve also added some navigational items to the menu, so that users know where they are on the site – not that it’s all that difficult to get lost with only 6 pages, but it’s the principal I’m concerned about.

There goes July July 31, 2007

July 31 and it is only my second post this month. My lack of communication is entirely due to being away from everything online for two and half weeks. (Taking my playstation with me for the second week of my holiday doesn’t count, as that doesn’t connect to the internet). Since I spend most of my working life, and a lot of my leisure time connected to the net, I consider this a good and healthy thing. I enjoyed it too.

I don’t like blethering on about my holidays, so I’ll restrict my blethering to details that may at least be useful and/or of interest to you.

We picked up a canny little gite in the Languedoc region of Southern France on the Gites de France website. The website is pretty good, but there’s limited online booking facilities on it, so you’ll need to dust off your copy of “Tricolor French for schoolchildren that don’t see the point of learning it” if you want to bag yourself a gite. We were very glad we did, and had the pleasure of spending a week at the Domain de Bridau, pictured below.  (Staying on a vineyard reminded me very much of a classic Comic Strip Movie, Mr Jolly Lives Next Door, directed by Stephen Frears: “Living above an off licence – what could be better?”)

Knowing nothing of the region, we had randomly selected Beziers as a place to stay, but couldn’t find anywhere to stay, so we ended up near Pezenas. It seems fate was on our side as Pezenas is a beautiful place to lounge around. It has an arty, historical kind of vibe to it, and lots of nice places to eat and potter.

After popping back to blighty, and doing a quick jaunt around Blackheath with the lads, we were off to Cornwall for a week and a bit. The only useful tourist information I can offer is that the best pasties to be had in Bude are at Pengenna, and in Padstow at Morris’s. (Based on the results of my pastie survey, that is). That’s not to say that we didn’t go out and have fun in Cornwall, it’s just that I want to get you used to a certain kind of ‘information’ on this blog that you won’t find on others.

So, back to life, back to reality.

Curved corners cracked July 4, 2007

There is hope yet for my career in web development. The ‘curved corners using CSS’ technique is in the bag. What’s more, I’ve added a nice border round my box with curved corners.

In the end, I used the Webcredibles’ approach, though I had to adapt it slightly for my site. To get a full understanding of the issue, I found two articles on A List Apart incredibly helpful and well written: sliding doors of CSS and creating custom corners. Thanks chaps!

Thanks also to Andrew who offered me help on this.

I’m off on my holidays in a few days, but think I will spend a little more time doing some funky CSS stuff on my site, before moving on to a new subject. I’m not sure what yet, but PHP skills seem to be in demand at the moment, so I’m considering applying myself to that as a subject for the next few months.

Evenin’ May 8, 2007

No promises, but this is what I think I might write about:

• lovely food, probably cooked by Mary and me, washed down with some lovely booze
• why I hate Walker’s crisps
• my struggle to put my education to good use in the IT business
• how to wind up BT – forever
• my latest consumer campaigns
• wild and crazy music
• online gaming
• living in Bexley, which is in Kent and South-East London, strangely
• working in Lewisham (maybe)
• yogurt fights, chair racing, elephant shaped flower-beds, why mice are irresistibly attracted to me and other stories from my creatively mis-spent, but not wasted, youth.