So. Having spent entirely too long designing a site for assignment 2 (I’m a designer, it’s what I do), I feel like I’m actually ready to start chopping it up into includes. I am not, quite frankly, sure at all why I spent, in the end, about 8 hours designing a template, but there it is, it’s done. And I managed to screw up the graphics. The outlines aren’t quite where I’d like them to be, frankly; if I decide to put this on my site (style is awfully bare) I will probably fix that.
That assumes, of course, that I get around to fixing the site itself.
On the plus side, thanks to CTN 161, I do know how to get pretty far with free images. On the plus-plus side, there were several of the same clock; the colours were wildly different, though, and since I’d settled on the blue and purple palette, I decided to black and white the smaller image. Some interesting effects came up with the whole thing; one of them was the crop on the header. Another was that I do not have the skillz to make a gradient go around a corner, though as I think of it, I suspect I know at least where to start. Like I say, I can probably get that to a more reasonable point pretty easily, but the assignment’s already a week late.
Obviously, I scrapped what I’d done before this – that’s factored into the 8 hours. I still have to verify this in IE, but I’ll do that tomorrow. I am hoping that it’s not too bad – IE 8 is surprisingly compliant, and I don’t think I’ve used anything that makes IE scream.
Then I just spent ten minutes changing the graphics again. At least I’m fairly happy with the outlines now.
Other than that, the troubleshooting assignment went fairly well. It took some getting into it – that totaled out at an hour and ten minutes – but I’ve seen a fair number of those errors before, over the summer. It’s actually a really nice error-reporting system, when it can report the error – certainly it’s at least as readable as the HTML validator, and it operates on the same logic. I get why there’s not a validator for PHP – too much that the user can do that’s not standardised – but I do wish it would return more errors. The ones where it hands you a line number to start looking on are super easy to fix.
I’m behind on the reading, but I’m hoping to get to that tomorrow after I do my brakes. I am a bit apprehensive about arrays – I understand them conceptually, and I like them, but having learned them in both Javascript and Visual Basic, I’m convinced that there’s going to be some subtle difference here. And yet, I covered those in the Headfirst book – I think it was around there, though, that I gave up on understanding PHP and just focused on doing it, which is terrible, but the book wasn’t teaching, and the problem with doing an independent study is that you may not have anyone mentoring you who knows anything about the subject you’re working on. Very frustrating.
So in a way I feel like I’m coming to arrays for the first time, at least in PHP.
