Apples and Allys

This was a nice day. I've been inspired to shoot lately, so I've got a few new posts coming for you. I was just going to post everything together at the same time, but I've since decided to split them up. This is Ally, the one you all know. Idn't she purdy working so durn hard?




Speaking of working, I know that things haven't changed much over at rhymeswithmilk.com, but that doesn't mean I'm not doing anything. I blew through the PHP tutorials at w3schools, so I now understand basic syntax and functions, but I'm still unsure about how to implement them to make awesome websites. Most of facebook is run off of PHP if I'm not mistaken, and I'm nowhere near being able to understand how any of that stuff works (okay, I understand that I have to start a little smaller than one of the largest and most complex networking website on the planet, but I don't even understand the small dumb ones either). I have therefore started to do some more textbook-style reading to help get a grasp of the breadth of PHP and its uses and how to utilize them, etc. I see w3schools as more of a reference manual whereas a textbook does a better job at describing its complexities.

And while we're on the subject of geeking-out, a few days ago I was checking out a photoblog that I frequent that had recently gone through some major overhauls. As I was navigating around, I noticed that there wasn't a link in the header—or anywhere, for that matter—back to the blog's homepage, and that nothing short of furiously clicking the back button could return you there. I commented on one of her posts to suggest this and she replied that she had tried, but it messed up the whole header layout. Everything shifted off from center. Having recently re-acquired my CSS skills from designing RWM.com's stylesheets from scratch, I decided to have a look at hers to see if I could find the problem. If you notice, blogger templates put their stylesheets at the top of the html file defining the site, thereby making it easily and publicly viewable. I copy-and-pasted her blog's html code into my code editor and went to town. After only about 10 to 15 minutes of fidgeting, I realized that all you had to do was change one 0 to a 25 and a separate 25 to a 0. Easy-peasy.

I emailed her my findings and have yet to get a response/see her header turn into a link. I might have creeped her out a little by unsolicitedly "fixing" her blog. I guess that could be a little weird to some people, but I was pretty proud of myself for figuring it out by myself.