This blog is no longer here!!

Which means that I wont be updating this blog any more ….
The new location is this.

Cheers and see you there !!

Browser wars and fighting with IE6

you always break our coolest toys!!!

.. hehe

…Actually I am really missing the ‘making-stuff-work-on-IE6′ aspect of web designing, now that I am more into coding…. nevertheless its great fun, whether its designing or development!

Learning curve at KodePlay.. it doesn’t get steeper…

I just started working with a web development start up, KODEPLAY as a developer. It has only been 2 weeks here but the amount of learning that I have had in such a short duration is some thing I had never experienced so far in my life!

If you are interested in knowing what the learning curve so far was like, read on..

1. When we (me and my boss) met the day before my joining to set up my machine, he asked me which IDE I would like to use… I was like..IDE?? whats that? At first, mistaking it for an editor, I said Notepad++. Then he downloaded eclipse and set it up for PHP…
   OOHW! so this is how real coding is done.. welcome to development…
2. Zend Framework – Initially it was seriously overwhelming to even think of working on Zend framework and the MVC pattern. It took me some time to figure out what goes where and where to write what code.
3. Although I was quite familiar with OOP concepts earlier, that was just limited to the theory and playing around with a few classes and objects. I never felt the need for an OOP approach since I was working on small to moderate projects. But in case of bigger and complex ones, OOP is the way to go!… Its definitely a time saver as it saves you from a lot of duplicate coding.
4. Jquery – Frankly, I had no idea that such a thing even existed, although I was familiar with Javascript earlier. But while I understood that a library would make life easier, the fact that it required me to remember a new syntax was a turn off initially. Thankfully it didn’t take me long to over come this and realize what a kickass tool it is.. takes UI to a totally different level.
5. Ajax – The project that I am working on presently heavily relies on Ajax. This is not much difficult to grasp if you are familiar with javascript. XML can be learned on the way…
6. The most important part in my opinion – to work on other peoples’ code. I think reading code and understanding it helps you develop an ability to build the structure of the code in your mind before typing out anything.

I short, before joining I knew languages and I had made my own website using this knowledge (which can be found here). Still I wondered why did it looked amateurish. Just two weeks of work has given me the answer. It all comes down to one thing, you have to make yourself aware of what all things are possible and ideas will come naturally. And for that, it is important to be open to learning new things such as platforms, frameworks, libraries etc. Even if it means you have to break your head on other peoples’ code, all the effort is worth it…

My first website goes live..and I am so excited!

Finally I managed to put a substantial work online. My first website Noise OK Please has just been launched. This is an online community for musicians and their fans.

One special thing about this particular project is that no platform has been used. All the code has been written by me. Apart from this, whatever you will find on this website is my own work (Except the avatars. The southpark avatar comes from sp-studio.de). Of course, I have used a lot of references for accomplishing the task, such as books and no need to mention the greatest resource of the present day – Google.

One may ask, why did I try to re-invent the wheel? Its because the main intention behind this project is to learn though hands on experience.
Other than that I wanted to have my own work to show it to recruiters so that they can offer me some cool jobs! .
As the number of users increase, I will be re-building it on some platform.

The website may seem like an internet startup in the first glance. But as of yet, business is not the first thing I am looking at.

There still lot of work to be done yet.
Some things in the pipe line are ..

1. invite facility to let users invite others to join the community.
2. An interface to search users based on various criteria.
3. A JavaScript powered WYSIWYG rich text editor to post on the wall.
4. And much more..

I would also like to mention a few references that helped a lot

1. webmasterworld forums where professional developers were kind enough to answer my silliest of doubts.
2. A beautiful book called Head First PHP & MySQL.
3. Online tutorials from w3schools

PS>If you stumble upon this blog post please take some time to look at the website and give me an honest feedback.

PPS>If you are a web developer, your feedback and comments are extremely valuable.

HTML link color problem solved

Problem: Some browsers show links in the default color in spite of being styled in CSS. On hover the CSS styling works.

Problem faced in: Google Chrome and IE6. No problem in FF

Solution:It is pretty simple by the way. There are two ways to resolve this ..

1. Dont use a:link ..

   ie. instead of

   #menu a:link { .. }

   use,

   #menu a {..}

2. And the other way is declare the colors for all the states of the link
   

   #menu a:link { …}
   #menu a:visited {..}
   #menu a:hover {.. }
   #menu a:active {…}

   Remember the order. Its very important .. (Mnemonic – LoVe HAte)

Many thanks to: A certain CSS freak at webmasterworld forums