It has been a while since my last entry, being busy with work and all, so I’ve decided to spend some time this weekend working on the basic framework for TheDirtLab.
I’ve already written some content for it in my past entries (scripts, that is), so at least it won’t be empty when it goes up. Hopefully I’d be able to publish them by the end of the day or early Monday.
I thought I put enough effort and attention to the main website’s design so far, so I figured I start working on the actual testing area’s theme. So here’s my second revision of the “laboratory” theme’s logo:
That’s Dirt the Lab in a lab-coat, presumably working in a lab, but I still have to draw in the lab, lol!
It’s 1:38pm (12:38am CDT) so I really should get to bed now, lest I risk not waking up in time for today’s work shift.
I was rearranging some stuff earlier today, I didn’t like how my alternate design turned out (the one with semitransparent content blocks partially overlapping with the top portion of layout). So I reverted to the original layout I made. I still have to work on the content area’s layout though.
Aside from that, I added two circular icons representing the major areas of the website. The first one being the home page and the second being this blog’s home page.
Also like previously mentioned, I coded in a little widget that grabs the ten most recent blog entries and displays their title and excerpt on the home page.
I’m still thinking what else to place into the home page though.
You might not have noticed, but I’ve retrofitted my website to follow the MVC pattern. What this means is that from now on I’ll be able to do my PHP/MySQL stuff on it, while keeping the designing part independent. This way I can keep writing scripts and whatnot, and not affect the layout.
As with any other MVC style websites I make, I start off with the global headers and footers. For that, I made a modified version of the original front page’s design to allow cramming of more content on-screen. I have made a test page using that view. So whenever I create new controller files, my constant parts of the layout will be kept, while the content for the pages change.
If you’re an coder and a designer, you might’ve heard of MVC architectural pattern (Model-Controller-View). It’s basically the separation of the program logic from the input and the presentation, allowing independent development, testing and maintenance of each part. In other words, if I only want to update the look, I don’t need to touch the scripts that involve the input and processing of data.
I’ve decided to ditch the “The Daily Random” concept since I already used that one before and it feels so old, so I’m going with my “TheDirtLab” idea as the main theme of my website, since I’m all about doing various coding junk! *lol*
Give me time and I’ll spruce up the front page with more content, and not just static content.
My next plan is to place everything into a PHP framework so I can work a lot easier within it.
If you’re interested on the technical aspect of the design, what I did was work with multiple “div” layers and set a picture as a background image on them. This allows me to overlay pictures on top of each other while allowing the background to be seamless and still be stretchable. This should work on any screen resolution.
I used JPEGs for the looped background images (the fence and the grass), while Dirt’s profile and the Title text are PNG images. The use of PNGs allow me to create an illusion of a coherent merging of all the pictures so I won’t have to make much modifications to the source images if I want to add more elements to the background… say for example I wanted to add a “dog house” into the background. What I’d do is to simply draw the dog house in photoshop, make the background transparent, save it as PNG and place it in its own DIV layer on the HTML code. It’s that simple!
The hosting package I bought includes 10GB space and 300GB monthly bandwidth. 10GB! I don’t think I could use it up by myself, lol. My dedicated partition for my local web-server on my computer is 10GB and after 6 years, I only have 3GB of website, PHP scripts and pictures in it!
Maybe if I had a camcorder, I could fill this space faster, hahaha! Hey, with your own 10GB space and 300GB bandwidth, why settle with low quality video hosts like Youtube, right?
Greetings readers (and lurkers), I am Chuck Cerrillo and I see that you’ve found my weblog. Please bear with me as I try to set everything up for the next few days, or *shudder*, weeks.
I have barebone plans for this website. You’ve already seen the blog (which you can view from the blog subdomain). I’m planning to open another section called “The Dirt Lab“, which is a wordplay on a testing area where I place all my junk, i.e. a dirty laboratory, and a black labrador I have named Dirt.
I hope you’d enjoy the content to come, because obviously there’s nothing much to see right now, haha!