Well, I made a lot more headway with Wesoteric than I expected to this past week -- the site's almost ready to go live. New colors have been selected; a header graphic has been created. Fun fun. All that remains is to add some stuff to the sidebar and add a quote of some sort to the main content bar, and of course import of all of my Blogger posts, and we'll be set! It's kinda funny how on Monday I was complaining about the impossibility of all of this stuff and now I've pretty much got it covered. I've learned a lot about browser behavior (at least Mozilla and IE) where CSS rules are concerned -- enough, I think, to conceivably convert SC to a table-free layout, but I'm not going to do that anytime soon because I'm still quite satisfied with the way it looks now and I see no need to go changing a bunch of code just to get it to look exactly the same way it looks now. But if/when I decide to do a new layout for it, I'm game for a CSS layout. (more...)

Okay, I'm actually starting to enjoy this now that I kinda understand what I'm doing here. Following a link from the lovely Tina, I downloaded a few themes created by Theron Parlin and have been examining his code as compared to his output to figure out how/what he did to achieve certain effects. Borrowing some code here and adjusting values there, I ended up with this result -- and I've gotta say I'm pretty pleased with it. Note the sidebar pulldown menus! Fun fun. 🙂

I'm still a little confused about the purpose of those links at the bottom, though, which I left in for now but will probably eventually remove. I get that they're used for validating the page's XHTML and CSS, but why are they there for all to see and do? For that matter, why are they there in the first place? I think it's kinda weird.

And now I must be off to the bookstore. Ugh. But in less than 24 hours things may be looking up! *fingers crossed* Ja ne, minna-san.

So I totally meant to cheat and use tables for the mock wesoteric layout, but I ended up playing around with the divs some more and read up on CSS tricks and "hacks" and actually kinda got something that mostly works in both Mozilla and IE. Like with this blog here, there's a two pixel difference that I don't see any getting around, but ah well -- them's the breaks. Feel free to check out the page in your browser and tell me what you see -- it should look kinda like the Scary-Crayon main and content pages without all of the graphical splender. Don't start frequenting that place just yet, though. As you can see, we're still in a testing phase, and the full "post" on there is yesterday's entry here -- I just posted it so I could see how a full post would look. Anyway, the layout over there will change quite a bit -- different color scheme, the addition of graphics, more template tweaks, etc. -- but this is a pretty good indicator of how the Scary-Crayon blog will eventually look, assuming I don't decide to just keep the page uniform and paste the post PHP into the current layout. Which would certainly work!

But for the time being, I must rest. G'night, minna-san.

(Pasted from another entry...)

So after installing WordPress on the new domain, I spent the better part of the day mucking with divs and PHP and CSS templates and other design-related crap only to rediscover what I should've remembered from way back when I first started this blog and then later when I attempted to convert SC to a primarily CSS-based layout -- for reliable cross-browser compatibility, tables are still the way to go. Now that I've settled on a table-based layout, I just need to decide on the design specifics for the new wesoteric.com. Implementation should go fairly smoothly then, but man I wasted a lot of time today! Ah well, at least I picked up a bit of PHP along the way... that include function should come in handy for future endeavors. But damn, this WordPress is complicated stuff! I dunno how Tina does it. 😛 Fooling with endless lists of variables and values and specifications that you didn't create and/or set and therefore have little idea how/where they are used -- or, for that matter, if they are used at all, let alone if you require them for your purposes -- is pretty mind-numbing stuff. It's enough to make me want to try coding the Scary-Crayon blog from scratch -- it'd be pretty difficult, true, but at least then I'd be mostly aware of what was going on. Anyway, the SC blog will be on hold until I've made more headway on wesoteric.com.

With Monday morning comes another two-hitter from Scary-Crayon: A Crayon Haiku #27 and Dusty Plastic HELL: Hot Flash #32. Enjoy!

So after installing WordPress on the new domain, I spent the better part of the day mucking with divs and PHP and CSS templates and other design-related crap only to rediscover what I should've remembered from way back when I first started this blog and then later when I attempted to convert SC to a primarily CSS-based layout -- for reliable cross-browser compatibility, tables are still the way to go. Now that I've settled on a table-based layout, I just need to decide on the design specifics for the new wesoteric.com. Implementation should go fairly smoothly then, but man I wasted a lot of time today! Ah well, at least I picked up a bit of PHP along the way... that include function should come in handy for future endeavors. But damn, this WordPress is complicated stuff! I dunno how Tina does it. 😛 Fooling with endless lists of variables and values and specifications that you didn't create and/or set and therefore have little idea how/where they are used -- or, for that matter, if they are used at all, let alone if you require them for your purposes -- is pretty mind-numbing stuff. It's enough to make me want to try coding the Scary-Crayon blog from scratch -- it'd be pretty difficult, true, but at least then I'd be mostly aware of what was going on. Anyway, the SC blog will be on hold until I've made more headway on wesoteric.com.

Get some sleep, Wes.