Thursday, January 13, 2011
Migration Complete
The safety3rdblog.com officially no longer exists - navigating to any of the pages there should now automatically redirect you to the same page on the new site: http://www.tellthemabout.com - fun times! It will give you a lovely message explaining what's about to happen for five seconds first... then you'll be redirected!
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Tell them about...
... that bus ride across India... that party on the beach in Thailand... that girl you met in the Greek Isles... the steak and red wine asado in Mendoza... scaling Kilimajaro! Tell them about your trip, your adventure!
It's a little catchy, right? Let's hope so - I'd decided that since the website had undergone a semi-professional looking face-lift recently, it might be nice to come up with a slightly more professional, catchy even, maybe, URL, so, voila, we now have: http://www.tellthemabout.com/ (in addition to the old safety3rdblog.com address). For now both URLs will continue to work, and give you the exact same site to play with, but, eventually, I plan to deprecate the safety3rdblog site and just redirect all the traffic to the new site.
It's a little catchy, right? Let's hope so - I'd decided that since the website had undergone a semi-professional looking face-lift recently, it might be nice to come up with a slightly more professional, catchy even, maybe, URL, so, voila, we now have: http://www.tellthemabout.com/ (in addition to the old safety3rdblog.com address). For now both URLs will continue to work, and give you the exact same site to play with, but, eventually, I plan to deprecate the safety3rdblog site and just redirect all the traffic to the new site.
Exciting Transparency!
Welcome to the world of images with transparent backgrounds! I have not exactly mastered them yet (as I don't really have the software to do them properly as of yet), but there's a few now on the site - the page icon (up in your browser's address bar) is now appropriately transparent, and the main navigation menu has just earned a logo next to the Home link... That last one, of course, brings up more questions than it solves - if I replace the Home link with it, will that confuse users? If I don't, where should it link? I also need a different image for the Antarctica/Quark Expeditions trip page... that's being harder for now!
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
not so much working on the website...
as experimenting with little things that I learn, so, today, I read a little more about CSS positioning - not so much new, but a good, better-organized recap of things I had learned before via imitation. Armed with my newly sharpened element positioning skills, I've updated the Contact Menu to always position the photos in the center (only really affects the 'Crossing the Circle' pages, as Oliver's picture is horizontal, while all the rest are vertical) and added a 'Back to the Top' control to the bottom of the News Feed (ok, politely borrowed from the Quark website...). I've looked into making that one float, so as to always be there at the bottom of the page, but the simple 'position: fixed' doesn't quite do it well enough, so just a fixed 'Back to the Top' button at the bottom of the page - fancier positioning coming later... maybe!
Monday, December 27, 2010
minor updates, additions, and adventures
Update: Wow, I can't believe it's been almost 5 years since Theo, Cyrus, and I set off on the Mongol Rally for the first time in 2006! We kept a blog back then too - it's linked on the site, but, unfortunately, not all the pictures had been stored on blogger, some lived on my fotki.com account, which has since expired, so the pictures had gone poof! They've now been replaced - yeah! Seeing the LADA again was a wonderful bit of nostalgia... Reading my rant about the difficulties of importing a vehicle into the US was laughable now that I've actually done it!
Addition: The adventurists' themed Rickshaw Run page (here) now has a filter too. This filter also does not work, but it's now there, ready to be enabled!
The ambitious Adventure: This one didn't quite succeed, but if you look at the Crossing the Circle trip, you may note that the background is a little different - it used to just be all gray under the icebergs picture at the top. Now, there's still the icebergs, floating in Antarctic waters at the top, but the rest is filled with said Antarctic waters. Or at least that's what I want - what I got is a step in that direction, but looks a little too choppy still, so some more work is still required, but I'm pleased that setting up the layout for it was easy, now just need to find a photo editor that'll make the Antarctic waters merge a little more smoothly...
Addition: The adventurists' themed Rickshaw Run page (here) now has a filter too. This filter also does not work, but it's now there, ready to be enabled!
The ambitious Adventure: This one didn't quite succeed, but if you look at the Crossing the Circle trip, you may note that the background is a little different - it used to just be all gray under the icebergs picture at the top. Now, there's still the icebergs, floating in Antarctic waters at the top, but the rest is filled with said Antarctic waters. Or at least that's what I want - what I got is a step in that direction, but looks a little too choppy still, so some more work is still required, but I'm pleased that setting up the layout for it was easy, now just need to find a photo editor that'll make the Antarctic waters merge a little more smoothly...
Sunday, December 26, 2010
updating the updates
A fairly minor change today - after the IE episode last week, I went to check all the rest of my pages using IE and promptly discovered that the Rickshaw Run page, styled to fit with the adventurists' templates was busted too.
The menu bar really wasn't rendering properly here at all, but this gave me the reason to go in and rewrite the entire page to actually fit in with the rest of the site's new template, and fix up some broken CSS in the process. Somewhere along the way, I even had the email/password text fields working correctly (default text clears when you click on it), but that got broken somehow, and I didn't really feel it was important enough to go back through and re-visit. That page is mostly just there as a sales pitch to the guys in Bristol so that they use my code to run their adventure tracking systems, so, I feel, for now, the look and feel is more important than the Log-In functionality!
The menu bar really wasn't rendering properly here at all, but this gave me the reason to go in and rewrite the entire page to actually fit in with the rest of the site's new template, and fix up some broken CSS in the process. Somewhere along the way, I even had the email/password text fields working correctly (default text clears when you click on it), but that got broken somehow, and I didn't really feel it was important enough to go back through and re-visit. That page is mostly just there as a sales pitch to the guys in Bristol so that they use my code to run their adventure tracking systems, so, I feel, for now, the look and feel is more important than the Log-In functionality!
Bug fixin' - stupid IE
December 20, 2010
Well, there's lots of bugs still, of course, but most fall into the 'unfinished features' category, so I was ready to just ignore them for a while. But then, my dad pointed out that the links on my menus don't work when using Internet Explorer... This seemed rather unfortunate, so I figured it probably deserved some immediate attention, so by the start of last week, I rolled out a new update, where the links code had been simplified, in such a way that it would now work with both IE and Firefox. It works on Safari too, and I really need to verify on Google Chrome...
As an aside, a lot of the current design has obviously been borrowed from the adventurists, them of the Mongol Rally, Rickshaw Run, etc. fame. It's an excellent starting point, but I definitely need to, at the very least, update my background images, before they decide to sue... I had imitated their menu layouts also, and with my dad's discovery, found that nothing happens when you click the picture links on their menus [in IE] either... Which is less than perfect, but we're all working on things! Well, my menu code is now different from theirs, so there's that!
And if you want some technical details... Apparently, in Firefox, you can put a <table> inside of a link (<a> .... </a>) and it'll work just fine, just the way it, I believe, should. In IE, most everything works correctly to - all the link styles are applied, the hover effects kick in, the cursor changes as appropriate, but then you click, and ... absolutely nothing happens, Way to be IE! Well, using tables for layout is bad anyway, so it is, actually, a change for the better.
Well, there's lots of bugs still, of course, but most fall into the 'unfinished features' category, so I was ready to just ignore them for a while. But then, my dad pointed out that the links on my menus don't work when using Internet Explorer... This seemed rather unfortunate, so I figured it probably deserved some immediate attention, so by the start of last week, I rolled out a new update, where the links code had been simplified, in such a way that it would now work with both IE and Firefox. It works on Safari too, and I really need to verify on Google Chrome...
As an aside, a lot of the current design has obviously been borrowed from the adventurists, them of the Mongol Rally, Rickshaw Run, etc. fame. It's an excellent starting point, but I definitely need to, at the very least, update my background images, before they decide to sue... I had imitated their menu layouts also, and with my dad's discovery, found that nothing happens when you click the picture links on their menus [in IE] either... Which is less than perfect, but we're all working on things! Well, my menu code is now different from theirs, so there's that!
And if you want some technical details... Apparently, in Firefox, you can put a <table> inside of a link (<a> .... </a>) and it'll work just fine, just the way it, I believe, should. In IE, most everything works correctly to - all the link styles are applied, the hover effects kick in, the cursor changes as appropriate, but then you click, and ... absolutely nothing happens, Way to be IE! Well, using tables for layout is bad anyway, so it is, actually, a change for the better.
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