An amateur’s log
Today I decided to see if I could help Julia create a left sidebar for her law blog. I found Blogger Buster, which offered a most promising tutorial on creating a three column blogger template.
And yet, after following the instructions, I thought, exactly, here’s what I ended up with:
Harumph. Not three columns.
To be continued.
I think <div> is the key to what I’ve been looking for. (Like, how to create those web sites that look like blogs. Or blogs, even.) Mandarin Design (which is, I think, another of the sites Marcia sent to me) offers many nice ideas for using <div> to create design. I played around with it today but haven’t anything I want to show you.
So, ok, I went back to the tutorial. When I looked at the style sheets over at Zen Garden, I realized I could use some more basic syntactic understanding before borrowing from the experts.
Today I worked with boxes and positioning. So here’s what I’ve got now:
I have grown weary of learning CSS. Or, I should say, I have grown weary of building my own style sheet from the ground up. So today I visited Zen Garden, where graphic designers are invited to submit css designs. Visitors to the site are invited to look at the css code and to borrow pieces (but to avoid borrowing a whole style sheet without permission). So my plan now is to create my own Frankenstein style sheet from what I can learn there. I’ll no doubt continue to refer to the tutorial, but I’m feeling impatient (despite that watchword below: patience!).
I continued with the css tutorial today, learning to manipulate background images and change fonts. Here’s what I’ve got now:
Using the helpful tutorial Marcia pointed me to, I’ve now created a very, very basic style sheet. And when I say basic, I mean it has a background color and a header color. But it’s a start, and I’ll continue adding to it as I continue through the tutorial. Here’s the page created with it:
I think next time I would like to create a basic style sheet. This tutorial at about.com seems useful for that purpose. We’ll see.
Picking up on Collin’s recommendation of Eric Meyer for instruction in CSS, I Googled Meyer and found his site, which includes information on his books as well as links to CSS stuff he’s written for the web. I was happily looking around on his site until I realized that nothing seemed to be directed at someone like me: a real beginner. I found that at least parts of his book CSS: The Definitive Guide can be found online. I began reading it and noticed some inward contraction around my heart as I read the Preface, which included what were clearly meant to be helpful explanations, like this one:
Every word or bracketed group may be followed by one of the following modifiers:
- An asterisk (*) indicates that the preceding value or bracketed group is repeated zero or more times. Thus, bucket* means that the word bucket can be used any number of times, including zero. There is no upper limit defined on the number of times it can be used.
- A plus (+) indicates that the preceding value or bracketed group is repeated one or more times. Thus, mop+ means that the word mop must be used at least once, and potentially many more times.
- A question mark (?) indicates that the preceding value or bracketed group is optional. For example, [pine tree]? means that the words pine tree need not be used (although they must appear in that exact order if they are used).
- A pair of numbers in curly braces ({M,N}) indicates that the preceding value or bracketed group is repeated at least M and at most N times. For example, ha{1,3} means that there can be one, two, or three instances of the word ha.
Um, yeah. I don’t understand.
So I decided to turn to the nice tutorial provided by Web3Schools. There I found the thing that gave me instant comfort: a grammar:
The CSS syntax is made up of three parts: a selector, a property and a value:
selector {property: value}
Ahhh. I instantly felt better. The basic building blocks of this foreign language: selector, property, value. I have a starting point now, a foundation for learning.
In fact, I can no back and read that excerpt from Meyer with fresh eyes. Each of the bullet points deal with a “preceding value.” Ok–makes sense. These items modify the preceding value, like an adjective modifies a noun. Got it.
Learning grammar. It’s a wonderful thing to do before setting out to be a full scale rhetorician.
I’m saving links for the project on del.icio.us
F0r a very long time, I’ve intended to learn CSS well enough to more aggressively design blog pages and other web sites. Last summer (or was it fall?), Jenny invited me and a number of other people to join her in putting together an RSA panel on the amateur, in which each of us would actually document our learning of a new technology. And so I committed to learning CSS, titling my presentation, “Who’s Afraid of CSS?”
This blog will be a place where I document what I learn, as I learn it. The end product will be a wiki that offers CSS resources. I’m creating it in conjunction with the students working on projects in my English 4040/7040 class: Writing Web 2.0.