I have mentioned that I would be adding new tutorials to my website in the past so this may not necessarily be new news, but hey, nothing like a site update.
Most recently, version 3.6 of my website was released, a new version in the way the site is coded, making the site more consistent on the server side and easier to manage.
Very recently after, I started to work on a new tutorial on CSS. This is the first of many planned tutorials and will hopefully be finished by May this year. As well as this, I've had emails and comments stating that my PHP tutorial is good, but since reading through it myself, I find it a bit too short and have decided to extend it far further with a new section on Advanced PHP planned.
These are all planned for the CSS tutorial:
- Width, height, padding and margins
- Borders, box shadows, border radius and box sizing
- Colour, backgrounds and gradients
- Fonts, font families, font weights and styles
- Pseudo-CSS selectors
- Advanced pseudo-CSS selectors
- Adjacent sibling selector
- Child selector
- Descendant selector
- General sibling selector
- Universal selector
- Minification and combining CSS
- Optimising CSS
- Cross platform and browser compatibility
- jQuery and CSS
- Shorthand CSS
- CSS @ rules
- Precedence and specificity
- Server side generated CSS
- Introduction to responsive web design
- Tablet and smartphone friendly CSS
- Printer-friendly CSS
- Advanced responsive CSS
- CSS content
- CSS transitions
- CSS transformation
Bringing it all together
Yesterday I worked tirelessly to make my site more modular and many new fixes. On top of that, I have just made my site far more flexible and easy to update.
I'm expecting to be able to work on my site in a far better way now as well, keeping it far more flexible and making changes far easier. As a result I released version 3.6 just yesterday, 1st January 2015.
Happy 2015!
So 2014 has almost come to an end, and with that I've just done another of my summaries of the last things I did in the year.
Last meal I ate: Baked potato with cheese
Last thing I had to drink with a meal: Coke Life
Last place I went out to eat or drink: Goblin Ha'
Last film I watched: James Bond - Goldfinger
Last game I played: Pokemon Omega Ruby
Last song I listened to: In Dulce Jubilo - Mike Oldfield
Last person I have sent a text to: Daniel Graham
Last friend I have spoken to in person: Daniel Graham
Last TV programme I have watched: EastEnders
Last major purchase for myself: Mac mini 2012
2014 to me was not a very good year, university has been tougher than ever and my depression has managed to seep back into my life. As well as this, I lost the wonderful little Petro, who I still miss dearly. On the brighter side, we now have another rabbit - Sweep, who is turning out to be a lovely rabbit too. We also now have a hamster - Henry, who is also a lovely little fella.
On the website front, this site has been finished for months and was officially released as version 3.5 in May this year - the finalised design of the site. Since then only minor tweaks have been applied to the site.
Since I started my website, I've been putting in loads of little things that make my site more attractive.
In my eyes, CSS is one of the best things to come to the world, because with it your creativity can flow wildly and you can build sexy sites.
Anyway, enough about that and enjoy some of my favourite styles and features of my site. Each of these elements is entirely my own work - none of the styles are taken from others. This post will not be focusing on my blog although I created it.
Note
My note is used to represent something of importance that should be noted.
Code sample
My code sample is used to display code in it.
Data table
My data table is used as a table designed for holding data, rather than being used for any form of layout. The black style was inspired by the dark mode on my site.
The inline code sample
My inline code sample is used to put code in the middle of a paragraph of text.
The tooltip
My tooltip is used within an article or page to represent information that should likely be already known and is left out of the main body of the article. Hovering the text will make the tooltip bubble visible.
The image frame
My image frame is designed to hold an image. It also has space for a caption below.
The block image frame
My block image frame is different to my standard image frame in that it will take precisely 50% of the content space (minus padding and margins) and if another image goes to the side will begin floating to one side.
The photo gallery album container
The album container is a feature of my photo gallery that many find particularly nice. This is used to hold a front photo of a collection of photos.
Colourful lists
In Novemeber, one of the features I decided to build was a collection of different colourful lists. A few have said they are very full of character and bring some nice new design features to my site.
The floating logo
I've had loads of comments from people who like my logo, but also people liking the fact it floats over the page.
The lined document
This document style that looks like a lined piece of paper was designed for keeping notes on my site. I use it in the University section.
Whilst PlayStation Home may have been one of those games you maybe didn't think much of, it was a hugely popular game, racking up 31 million users (March 2013, according to Wikipedia).
PS Home was one of my favourite things on PS3 and sadly it's about to come to an end. On March 31st 2015, PS Home will be retired for once and for all. To some this is very sad.
I bought just a few things throughout the time I spent on PS Home, but those few things were enjoyed by myself along with others greatly.
Sadly, this is another PlayStation game service that is about to lose it's online play, just as MGS4 did a couple of years back (only two months after I bought the map pack for the game it was announced that it was to close - I was not happy).
I just wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas for 2014!
On Friday, two of my most anticipated games are set to launch - Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire and Super Smash Bros for Wii U. The excitment is now building up as the moment approaches. I can foresee my entire weekend being spent playing Super Smash Bros and all the time on the bus spent playing Pokemon.
I just wanted to express my love for these games and eternalise them in a blog post.
I've updated a few features on the site, particularly I've had to remove the snowflakes animation as it was slowing the performance of the system that was browsing the site - not good for usability!
I've also added a more friendly settings panel as pictured:
When the settings button is clicked this appears as a modal dialog like a lot of other features across the website.
I've also changed the search box, and whilst it looks the same, it is far easier to maintain and should appear better on older browsers, including old versions of Firefox and IE.
I am always banging on about a better web, especially through the Twitter Hashtag #BetterWeb, but the technology behind the web is becoming better and better. Nowadays things like being able to access system information such as the battery life are becoming a real thing - meaning that the native app may soon disappear to the already multi-platform web.
If you do not already follow me on Twitter, please do so that you can get my latest ideas for improving the web.
Just last week I was speaking to my brother about a new software venture that will involve us using a platform independent language such as Java to develop the software hosted on this site from scratch again. This would mean great things such as being able to use it on Mac OS X and Linux. It would unfortunately mean using Java, however - and many will know how I dislike Java.
However, in recent events, Microsoft has chosen to make the most shocking, but one of the best, changes to .NET Framework, which is the common language runtime (CLR) that all of my applications run in. They have chosen to make the language available on all platforms, without needing some external framework such as Mono to do this.
This will mean that soon I can get these applications up and running with the new .NET Framework 5 and working with all the main OSes. It will likely mean that after years of supporting Windows XP, I will have to finally cut the support.
