₦airaland Forum

yes sir. I said pricing. But not to worry, it's not something you can't afford

It would be the equivalent of the money our elders give us when we are about to leave for the village, what they call, "take for groundnut"

Just asking Afam

I actually agree with what you have said. I just wanted to hear you say it

I typically buy books from amazon that have +ve ratings associated with it. Even if the book has 4.9 stars, I want to know what the person who gave it .1 stars has to say because that could be the very reason the book doesn't apply to me. That is another reason why I tend to take what is on the wiki with a grain of salt.

Having said that, if I happen to know of someone who commands respect in any particular field and that person decides to publish a book (physical or electronic, it doesn't matter), there is a good chance I will read it, regardless of what any one else says as again, the person commands respect in their field and I see no reason why I couldn't at least give that person the benefit of doubt.

Bottomline is, and again I am sure you will agree with me here, even if it is the owner's manual, you always have to verify for yourself that the material is correct as opposed to being gullible. Even owner's manuals are known to make mistakes sometimes.

and what of if, as many indeed are (at least based on my experience), it is hard to understand and someone else who managed to gain an understanding of the material, including developing additional material built upon the original manual, happened to publish something in a way that a lay man could pick it up easily, are you saying someone couldn't learn the material at a faster and better pace than if they were to read the original manual/tutorial?

@ebenz1,

I am usually not the type to comment on posts like this but this is different. It would be nice to acknowledge the source of your post. It just so happens that in flushing out ideas on how to attract people to a website I am currently working on, I read the exact same article and have the source to prove it.

So, will you provide the link or should I?

Don't get me wrong here. Sharing knowledge is good and pasting articles from other sources is equally good. What isn't good is posting it and making it seem like it's your own idea. You might hate me now for it but in the long run, u'll end up thanking me.

@Afam,

Though I am with you in the sense that pipmaster is just marketing his product, when you say something like this:

For web design, your best route is to follow the in built help or tutorial pages of the authoring tool you prefer.

For web programming, your best bet is to visit the website of the programming language you are interested in. There are tutorials, forums, issues that you will find invaluable.

Wouldn't you say tutorials are a form of Ebook? After all, what is an Ebook?

I know, I said I wouldn't be writing another series so as to focus more on my upcoming Ebook (7 of 15 chapters have been written. Stay tuned for details on how to purchase your copy. I am even thinking of organizing a seminar). However, this learning things is in my blood and I get ideas of what to talk about all the time. What's more? This particular lesson won't be in the book.

How many times have you been to a website where they have some "cool" flash effect in the header that keeps playing over and over. Then you click to the next page, flash plays again. You click to the next page, flash plays again. How many pages can you withstand b4 u say, "to hell with this site. I am not coming here again"? For me, it's usually 2-3 pages. I noticed this on a particular site I visited this morning, hence this post. So I have decided to take off my developer hat in favor of a researcher hat in order to find a possible solution to what prodgalson termed "flashterbation" many many posts ago.

My solutions hover around having the flash play on the home page but just displaying a static version of the same flash (what the last frame looks like with everything assembled) on subsequent pages.

Please note:
I don't claim to have THE solution but claim to have A solution. Feel free to chip in as well.

Solution 1 (good):
Have the flash version on the home page and the image version on subsequent pages.

Disadvantage:
I would imagine we all code with includes in mind. I have includes for my header, footer, nav section and anything that repeats itself more than once. If you have 5 different versions of the same thing for example, making updates will be a pain as you would have to do so 5 times

Solution 2 (better):
Have one include for the home page and another include for the other pages with the static image.

Disadvantage:
Bad from a maintenance standpoint. Imagine having to make a change. You would end up repeating code at least twice. Imagine further a situation where you are no longer in charge of the site and/or someone else is hired to make a change in your stead. If th person doesn't know anything about your site's architecture, the change(s) will be implemented only once.

Solution 3 (best, at least to me):
Have one include for both the flash and static versions. You set a back end (say, in PHP) cookie with an initial value of false. You then set the cookie to true once the page loads. You then check the value of the cookie on subsequent pages. If the value is true, display the image, else display the flash. To reset the cookie, I would imagine you could call a javascript code snippet on unload, setting the cookie back to false (yes, you can mix back end code with your javascript code).

Advantage:
All the code resides in one include.

Disadvantage:
Reliance on javascript - users may turn this off although in this age of AJAX, I doubt this would be the case.

So that's it folks. Anyone have a better solution? In the end, the aim is to prevent the flash from playing more than once so that pple like me who are easily distracted by moving objects on the screen can concentrate on the main reason they went to a site - information gathering, etc.

Let's LEARN something.

@omnipotens
change? na obama?

I am in the process of writing an Ebook. 20 chapters. 20 short lessons. 3, based on lessons on here, already written. I will alert you all as to when I am done, pricing, etc.

Thanks,

@webemarald,

Stay tuned. That tutorial is on its way

@Omnipotens,

Thanks for the compliments. I am a slow learner and as such when I am teaching others, I like to break it down.

As for the "other stuff", you took the words right out of my mouth. After part 4 of this series, I am going to put these and other lessons in an E-book and offer it for sale.

@All
Stay tuned for details.

Since tundewoods has stolen my thunder by taking away from me "part 3", I will skip to part 4.

Many atimes, I will see sites that have their contents "bleed" through their DIV tags, for those who use CSS. In particular, this problem tends to present itself in FF and not IE. There is a reason for this:

In FF, once you set the height of a div to say, 600px, that div will never be flexible in height which means that if content is more than the 600px height, it bleeds through that DIV. In IE on the other hand, the 600px is regarded as a minimum height and so if the content is more than the 600px, the DIV expands accordingly. However, if the content equates to a height of 595px for instance, the height of the DIV remains the same at 600px and you will notice the 5px (in this case) gap.

How to fix the problem as a cross-browser solution?
You could declare your style such that it looks like so:

div {
min-height: 600px;
height: auto !important;
height: 600px;
}

The "!important" part is a FF hack and IE 6 and below will ignore this line and use the "min-height" and "height: 600px" lines. The min-height just means exactly what it says, it's a minimum height.

Caveat:
Note that the line with "height: 600px !important" comes before the regular line "height: 600px". This is on purpose. For the "!important" rule to work properly, you must declare it before its equivalent IE counterpart.

Did you find this useful? If so, I will post more.

Thanks

My measure of success is quite simple:

At the end of every month, regardless of the number of clients I have or the money I make, do I have enough money left over after paying my bills to set aside towards my "6-month rainy day"? If yes, I am successful.

If you do what you love, then it doesnt and shouldnt matter how much money you make or don't make.

First off, I must say I like the layout of the site.

So I go to the page and see this in the header:

Did I hear you say yes?". Hold on a second, before you give that answer. Does CSS mean anything to you? What about XHTML? Can you do clean Website interfaces without utilising JavaScript and Flash? Do your designs validate correctly? Is your Markup light? How well do you optimise your images? Ever heard of Cocatenated Images? If your answer is still "yes" after all these questions, then the information below is for you.

I then went to register, and fill in only my email address, captcha letters and agree to the terms (which don't exist, but I digress). I click submit and get the customary "thank you page". I then go to the page of contestants and get a blank name (as I didn't enter any first or last name).

Questions:
1)Am I to trust a competition that specifies a premise (above) that they themselves aren't following? Just curious. This isn't a bash, just a well deserved question.

2) None of the left nav items are working. Doesn't this go to the trustworthiness of the site? In other words, y bother putting up such a site if functionality isnt complete?

Every site he brings fro review, we say the same thing and he reacts the same way, each time.

@hanen
At this point, I am getting a "hint, hint" moment, given the fact that there is a pattern. I will put it in a proverb and hopefully, you will get it (culled from "Things Fall Apart":

The hunter asked the Eneke bird why it was getting harder to catch him. The Eneke bird replied, "since you hunters have learned to shoot without missing, I have learnt to fly without perching"

Heed the bird's advice

@uspry1

You know, I have actually thought about that. It's all about finding the time. But trust me, Lord willing, it is in the works and I will alert you all when I do get one going.

Thanks for the encouraging words.

Thanks uspry1. I knew I was going to shoot myself in the foot on this hence the clause in my last paragraph above

Thanks once again. Some threads to me are just not worth clicking on and I was tired of going to the NL home page just to click that link.

I would like to suggest that the link, "Mark all messages as read" be added to all boards, other than the home page. That way, we don't have to click to the home page to start clicking away.

There are lots of new posts/replies to posts that I would rather not click to and I am sure I am not the only one to think that it would be a matter of better usability if the above link is added to all boards and not just the home page.

If this link exists somewhere else, I apologize for the assumption that it's only on the home page.

Thanks,

@tundewoods,

I look forward to your lesson. It will be very elaborate I would imagine and the DB design will be the most interesting.

In the meantime, to borrow from your "yab" on my lessons (part 2) thread, you remind me of shows that say, "don't touch that dial. we will be right back, after these messages"

LOL @tundewoods, funny you mention that.

I actually was thinking of that very show as I was writing this up. Hmm, perhaps some TV/Radio station would mind experimenting with a show teaching web design/development?

(rubbing chin)

As some of you might be aware, the very first line of code in your (X)HTML files should be the doctype. They come in many flavors. Here are a few:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

Now, I won't bore you with details and would advise you check the w3c site and/or google for more information. However, as an explanation, I will explain what the above 3 mean and why, in general, specifying a doctype is very important. Focus on the bold portions please:

#1 and #2 declare that the document will be validated against the strict interpretation of HTML and XHTML respectively. #3 basically declares that the document will be validated against a loose interpretation of XHTML which means that it will overlook things like using tables while still enforcing things like making sure all tags are opened and closed. For the most part, sites today are validated against #3 as not all browsers are web standards-compliant. You can also define your own doctype but that is beyond the scope of this post.

Why is specifying a doctype important?
Because it is important that, especially if you are using a web standards-compliant browser, the document gets "interpreted" properly. Where no doctype is specified, "funny" things an happen. This is what is known as the browser entering "quirks mode" which is another way of saying that the browser will fall back to some default mode. In IE for instance, quirks mode means that your document will default to being displayed as though you were using IE4, not something you would want of course.

Conclusion:
Always specify a doctype. #3 is preferred as it ensures the minimum required to guarantee that your sites, even without testing, will appear and function properly on a PC, PDA, Screen reader, etc. I have developed many sites over the years and taken for granted the importance of specifying a doctype only to appreciate it as many years later, not one of my sites has been found wanting on a variety of devices.

Did you find this lesson in learning of any use? If so, let me know and I will post more from time to time. Otherwise, I will stop.

Thanks,

I will definitely post something else. I guess I will call such lessons, "The Letz learn something series"

Y the name? Marketing is all about being catchy. Based on the name I chose, even if i were not to post a thing for 6 months and/or someone was looking for someone to do a web project for them, chances are, they would remember my name more than any other

So, my question is this - Where are these websites these people have designed or developed? Are they on the web? If yes, where, if no why claim that they have done so?

At the risk of sounding sarcastic or like a smart aleck, those websites are out there in cyberspace and all you have to do if you really want, is google for them. You use the right words and you will find them. Nothing is hidden in cyberspace. Yes, worse case it will be on page 50 of the search results but it is there for any to find.

Granted, some websites (like financial institutions and security agencies) would not want the information about the developer displayed on their websites for various reasons. I have developed websites where I charged for them not to have my "powered by justwebservices" displayed at the footer area.

And I am sure some others have done same.

I for one choose (my prerogative) not to share my info publicly. That however doesn't mean that if you were to know the right keywords to enter into google for example, you couldn't find out anything abt me. I however invite people (and some people have done so) who are curious to contact me directly if they so wish. I also give such pple the condition that they not share it publicly. Whereby they do and I find out, I will stop such a practice. I am personally not the type to blow my trumpet. I am not into the "do you know who i am?" or "do you know what kind of sites I have developed" mind set. It's just me. I am sure I have lost and/or stand to lose from my attitude but if so, hey, I guess that is my lot in life.

All,

Is this what this forum has resorted to: ad hominem attacks? Is this the benefit of joining this forum?

@tomaagy
Thanks for the compliments. I am motivated to put up more.

I am from Ijebu Ode but am not there currently. I should be back in a few months. Will keep u posted.

So, I don't know about you all but I have been very frustrted lately when at a cyber cafe. I try to open many naija-based sites and it takes forever. So I have been motivated to come up with a tutorial, if you will, on things you could do to speed up your sites a little. For this "tutorial", I will be using the site: http://www.basepointconsultants.com/

Please note: I am not deliberately picking on this site developed by one of us for fun-making or bashing purposes. It just happens to be the first site I found. Also, this isn't to say I am a saint though I am within 95% at the very least of practicing what I am about to preach.

Let the LEARNing begin (for more: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/):

1) There are 17 separate requests to the server, 15 of which are images. Needless to say, a navigation system using CSS rollovers (yes, you can set backgrounds with CSS rollovers) could have eliminated 12 of those images (that is 6 for regular state and 6 for hover state).

2) The largest image is almost 30K (http://www.basepointconsultants.com/home_r1_c1.jpg). I probably would have created a DIV with a black background, made the textual parts actual text, and for the blue gradient, used CSS to position it absolutely to the right. As for the "base point", I would have made that the background of the DIV.

3) There are 16 separate calls to a spacer.gif file. CSS margins/paddings could have taken care of this.

4) Separating the JS and CSS code into separate files would also help reduce the load time of the pages

5) Addendum to #4 above: Going for a table-less layout would have further reduced the load time on the pages.

Anyone have anything else to add?

Again, I am not bashing the owner of this site. I am only trying to highlight areas of improvement that would have resulted in reducing the load time of pages on the site significantly. As I find other sites and have the time, I will probably give another Nairaland seminar. Until then, your comments/suggestions/concerns are welcome.

Again (I know, second time), this is a LEARNing exercise and not a bashing exercise.

Thanks.

@webguru
1) The word you are looking for is, "developed" not "designed".

2) Coding a site via notepad isn't the issue here because whether you use DW or notepad, the results will be the same. It's not like on a site *developed* via notepad, a flash object zooms in and out of sight with the verbiage, "this site proudly developed with notepad". Having said that, I happen to use homesite which is as close to notepad you could get.

3) If you want to know more about me, professionally, that is, send me a mail. That's all you have to do. I am not too big in the "let me show the whole world what I am capable of" department.

A lotof the time, Ill use code view

The words in bold come together to form the key phrase my friend

@hanen
Nice try I retort with this question, "what happens if your brand new toyota, full of computer chips and gadgets, develops a computer glitch? better yet, suppose you had to close a million $$ account, your car was down and there was no one or no public trans to help you in sight? what then?"

When it comes to coding, you have to understand what is happening. Sure, you can click and drag and get a site up and running in 5 minutes but again, at least based on some posts on here, what if something goes wrong and you can't fix it because you have no idea what code lies underneath?

There are many instances where I have had to write some code and didn't have access to an editor. This has happened a lot in cafes. What do I do? I pull up cPanel on my web host, click on "code editor" and make my changes.

Again, at the risk of sounding like a uni lecturer, coding in notepad isn't mandatory but is necessary.

@omnipotens
Little mistakes are okay, at least by me. you learn from your mistakes. What is bad is when you can't do it at all. Who is above mistakes? Certainly not me.

If you look at mambe's post again, you will see he hasn't specified that it has to be mistake-free

@omnipotens
I beg to differ. A good "webmaster" should be able to do so in their sleep. That is why I don't advocate the use of DW for beginners. Code in notepad, and you can code anywhere. Why do you think so many of us here have asked questions about their code that boil down pretty much to a lack of basic understanding of underlying code?

@mambe
Your question reminds me of a situation where I come to you and say, "teach me french". That would be a tall order. What I should rather ask is, "mambe, how do I say 'He is not here. He is in France (i know it is, "il n'est pas la. Il est a nice" but i digress )"?

My point? Give a specific assignment, probably a short one and ask pple to paste their code for review. As a matter of fact, I have one:

I want a website with 2 columns, the left for navigation and the right for content. Widths don't matter but I don't want it done using tables.

Now, that's better

hmm

Given some of the personal responses on either this or other posts, I would hesitate to get innocent family members involved.

Let's stick to the meat of the matter please. Webmonk, thanks for your response.

@omnipotens
My thoughts exactly which is why I had tried to refocus our minds on the actual topic of this thread