GodSpeed Media Microsite Design Rev 1.0

I collect and publish a lot of photos and videos at GodSpeed Car Club events. This is all starting to get very spread out so as a project I've started designing a GodSpeed Car Club Media microsite using HTML 5 and CSS 3.0 to keep up with the times.

I'll go through a few of the links I've used for this but first, behold renderings in Firefox (version 3.6.8) pictured on the left and Safari (version 5.0.1) pictured on the right. This is how it was designed and how it is supposed to look. We do not live in a perfect world which leads me to:

The massive load of fail that is Internet Explorer (version 8) is pictured on the left. Do me a favour, people. Please use a REAL browser. I have yet to come up with a solution to fix this. Setting the background-color property does not fix this unfortunately. More research, experimentation and testing will have to be done... Or Microsoft could make a proper browser? But seriously: more work.

Resources used:

• HTML5 on W3Schools
• CSS on W3Schools
• RGBA colouring [The Basics of CSS3 from WebDesignerWall]
• Footer at the bottom of the screen [How to keep footers at the bottom of the page from Art and Design by Matthew James Taylor]
• Gradients [Quick Tip: Understanding CSS3 Gradients from NetTuts+]
• Resizable background [How To: Resizeable Background Image from CSS Tricks]

More to come...
I also had a lot of trouble lining up all the floating images in this post... But here it is now!

Linux Trial #???

I was going to write up a big long article about how I've installed Linux on a test machine to attempt learn things and then go into great details about my past experiences with Linux but no... I've decided to go in another direction. I will say briefly that I now have Ubuntu Linux 10.04 installed on a HP d530 (P4 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, GeForce 7600GS, 40Gb HDD) at work. If I discover anything groundbreaking with that then I will say so. So, a linux trial has been started and that's all I'll say until something exciting happens with that :)

Eavesdropping - Graphically Speaking

I had the privilege of being part of a meeting with some graphic designers, who for the purpose of this blog post will remain unnamed, the other day for a project that they are undertaking for some people that I am associated with. Could I be any more vague?? :P Anyway, I managed to pick up a few things from this meeting. Some of these things are only terms but every little bit counts!

So, what did I learn? Well, to my understanding:

• Signature - The logo is usually like the signature
• Branding elements - The design features that stand out as being part of the organisation/product/group/etc
• Photography: Hero shots - The best photo (used as a branding element?)
• Photography: Weak photos - When the photo subjects aren't looking directly at the camera or lack emotion
• Child/parent links with landing pages - These are terms that relate to the menu system of a website. I've heard these terms before but noted them down anyway as I often forget them. No idea why but that's why this blog is here!
• eNewsletters: Unsubscribe - Legally eNewsletters require an unsubscribe link. If they don't have this they will often get caught by spam filters too. I didn't realise it was law to have an unsubscribe link, I thought it was just common courtesy. The spam filtering aspect makes sense but I've never really given much thought to eNewsletters before.

I'm sure there are other things I've picked up but there you go for now. Just jotting down some thoughts/notes, really. It may sound simple but hey, I'm learning here :P I don't know it all (far from it, actually) and this is just another step along the way :)

To What Point and Purpose?

Now that I've started this so-called 'blog' it's time to set some direction!

What am I doing here? What's it all about

-Fran Katzenjammer, Black Books s02e03 - The Fixer

What this blog is
So really, what am I doing here? What's this whole blog thing about? Over the years I've learnt a bit. I'm talking about technical things here not general life experience... Although I'm sure I've got some of that but at only a fairly young age, I don't think I've got anything to blog home about. So, this is here to share some of those experiences so that I remember them and hopefully others will learn something too (yeah, right... but hey, I can dream!).

What this blog is NOT
I said when I started and I'll say it again:

I don't know it all and will not pretend to know it all. My content will be expressing my opinions and be based on what I know (or think I know).

I'm NOT aiming to be up there with the best of the blogs or be on the bleeding edge of the latest and greatest as it happens. I'm not aiming to offend anyone although I'm sure that will happen at some point seeing as the content is largely opinion-based.

This is a rather boring post so I'll keep it short and sweet. Enjoy!