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

Cheers and see you there !!

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!

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…

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.

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

Ah relieved!… finally my website works on IE6. A big problem solved…

Problem:
Login and signup script not working in IE6. (works fine in FF & Crome).
On clicking the submit button, nothing happens, not even an error msg.

What was wrong?
The problem was that I was using images as submit buttons in the HTML forms and not checking form submission as per IE6’s liking!

Solution: HTML allows us to use images as submit buttons

In FF and Chrome (and may be other browsers as well which I dont use), if we want to check if submit button is clicked and run a specific code, then this serves the purpose

if(isset($_POST['submit'])) {
//code to be executed
}

But IE passes the co-ordinates of click as submit_x and submit_y instead of just submit=parameter..

so to make sure that the form functions in IE, change the above code to

if(isset($_POST['submit_y']) || isset($_POST['submit_x'])) {

}

This solved the problem in my case

Doing some more G tells me that even if we check just one co-ordinate its fine.
But now I have already changed it, and I am too tired to change it back again to something else… so I’ll let that be..

Thanks to: Webmasterworld forums, Google

For those who are regular visitors to web development forums such webmasterworld, it doesnt take much time to realize that there are some people who know CSS and then there is a bunch of developers who are CSS freaks.

Initially CSS seemed pretty easy to me.. ‘a tool to remotely control the happenings in HTML files’… but soon I realized that there was more to it.. actually much more….

This is how my CSS progress has been so far…

1. Jan 2009 – No CSS, Just HTML! Result – utterly lame web pages.
2. Feb 2009 – Started using CSS for styling paragraphs, headings and tables. This was the time when I used tables heavily until…
3. April 2009 – When I figured out CSS can do much more. Used it for positioning … but only absolute positioning that led to cross browser compatibility issues needless to mention our GREAT BROWSER, IE6 which blew up things like anything!
4. May 2009 – This came as a a revelation. Started using float lefts and float rights and understood how to style web pages without breaking the flow
5. May 2009 – woohoo! Learnt how to create a Navigation menu using CSS…

Still facing a lot of Cross browser problems. But with every CSS blunder I make and every time I fumble and google, I cannot help uttering these words aloud .. CSS RULES!!! because it feels like secrets are getting unfolded one after another..

The CSS journey seems to be pretty long …. or am I on the path of the freaks…

PS> I know no developer reads this blog yet, but considering that someone eventually will

]]> http://digitalburp.wordpress.com/2009/05/11/css-rulez/feed/ 2 naiquevin http://digitalburp.wordpress.com/2009/05/06/ie6-fix-edpart-i/ http://digitalburp.wordpress.com/2009/05/06/ie6-fix-edpart-i/#comments Wed, 06 May 2009 03:44:44 +0000 Vineet http://digitalburp.wordpress.com/?p=12 ]]>


Imagine a scenario…
For past one and a half month you have been working hard on your website, creating graphics in Ps, accurately positioning them along with all the other components using CSS and adding 100 lines of new code everyday… and then one day you read something about cross browser compatibility issues and open the website in IE6 just to see how it works there.

The feeling will be nothing less than what you will experience when you forget to use Ctrl+S and power cut occurs..

Two weeks back, I had a similar feeling when I noticed that IE6 doesn’t like my neatly made PNG images that use transparent backgrounds.

So I ‘googled’ to see if I can get any help and to my surprise it showed 368,000 results.

But only one fix yielded results. The one I found last night at http://www.twinhelix.com/css/iepngfix/demo/

It was pretty easy, just paste the code in the header and it works beautifully. Although someday I would like to take a look at what the .htc file actually does, I guess this is not the right time to get into such details.

But now I realize that this was just one of the problems…

Other than PNG,
1) Browser doesn’t respond to links styled using CSS properly.

2) And the biggest blow is that the login script doesn’t work! It calls the same .php file but nothing happens.. not even an error msg..

Hope, I ll be able to fix these problems soon. Off to ‘google-ing’ fixes now…

Edit: Both of the above mentioned problems are solved. Please check the ‘CROSS BROWSER’ page of this blog for the fixes.

]]> http://digitalburp.wordpress.com/2009/05/06/ie6-fix-edpart-i/feed/ 0 naiquevin