Mick's World

There hasn’t been a great deal of activity on this site lately and there’s a good excuse.

I’ve been busy. Busy working on client projects as well as a few of my own. So without further ado i introduce two new sites (well one new and one that’s had an extreme makeover), CruftBucket and my Online Portfolio.

CruftBucket has been running for about 2 months now and has grown rapidly over that time. The main focus of this site is to have a place to put a heap of interesting, strange and humorous findings from around the web.

The Mick Real - Online Portfolio was an existing site of mine which displayed client works and information specific to my portfolio. The new revamped edition has an all new look and feel, works more like a blog and features my websites, projects, client work and other information which relates to the web design and development work i’m involved in.

So check them out if you haven’t already, let me know what you think.

Well it’s the first of December. Summer is officially in, though it’s felt like it for the last few days.

Being December it also means that 24 ways will be back with a new set of tips each day leading up to Christmas. I really enjoyed checking it out every day last year and learning some great tips, but also having an enjoyable read.

So if you want to brush up on a few things or just learn some new skills check out 24ways.org and subscribe to their feed. Looking forward to seeing what they share this year.

Being a self taught geek there are some things that take time to pick up on, due to not knowing they existed. A couple of years ago i started to enter the world of OOP. It took a little while to get my head around the concept and it seemed that while i was looking for information on the topic there was so much stuff to consider, which added to any confusion i may have had.

Such considerations were things like: N-tier, MVC, Design Patterns. All of this at once on top of trying to concentrate on what OOP was, made for a lot of thinking. Either way after a while of looking through different examples and writing some code the concept of OOP stuck and MVC and N-Tier made a lot more sense.

Up until recently however i still didn’t really put much thought into Design Patterns. I’d read about them, but mainly when i was still trying to grasp what OOP was all about, so Patterns didn’t get too much thought.

Sometimes still i’ll just get on with writing the code and making it work, i don’t mean just hacking something together and hoping it works, but i don’t put as much though into the Design Patterns as maybe i should, or have been led to believe i should. Whatever the case there are a couple of sites that help to understand these concepts if you are stuck thinking about while designing or working on a project.

One of the first sites that i really read about Design Patterns and got a fair bit of MVC knowledge from was phpPatterns by Harry Fuecks. It’s a Wiki that has a lot of good examples of the Design Patterns specific to PHP.

Recently i came across another site dedicated to PHP Patterns, Patterns for PHP is another Wiki that has a lot of good explanations as well as code examples so that you get a bit more info about what the patterns are about as well as seeing the code that goes with it.

Both sites are great resources to have in your bookmarks for when you get stuck, or just want to expand your Pattern knowledge.

Before you get started on those sites however, here’s a good introduction at Dev Articles

The ongoing issue of cross browser compatibility that haunts web designers continues to piss me off whenever designing a new site from scratch.

As much as you get the semantics and the CSS working, there is always some small thing that just won’t comply.

When designing this site for instance there were a couple of things that just wouldn’t budge. A seperate section of CSS was made to overwrite the default stylesheet to target Opera and IE.

Things like the nav menu, search form and a couple of other things that wouldn’t sit in place without a specific portion of CSS dedicated to that browsers demands.

Having fixed what seems to be most of the issues, there continues to be a couple of things that are still getting to me. One of which has to do with the Safari browser.

I don’t have a Mac so i can’t test it, in which case i use Safari Test. Which i recommend to do your Safari testing if you don’t have a Mac.

The problem lies with the nav menu. In my attempts to fix the issue i have not been successful yet. I put together a little bit of JavaScript to detect the browser and then load a Safari specific stylesheet. In testing this i was able to get it to work with other browsers detecting them and loading the CSS. When it comes to testing in Safari however every time is a foiled attempt.

This is an issue that continues to bug me and i would like to put it to rest. I’ve looked around for Safari browser sniffers, mainly JavaScript, most of which seem over-complicated for me needs. I’m yet to try a PHP browser sniffer as this would also be suitable.

I will continue my quest to kill the cross browser issues for this site, however the epic journey ahead of me in making future sites cross browser compatible remains.

Hopefully browsers will increase their support and CSS3 will be launched. Only time will tell…

Started working on a couple of websites recently and have been rather busy. I haven’t done any programming in a couple of months, sp i was keen to get stuck into it again.

Last time i was programming some PHP it was PHP 4 and although a late move into it, decided to make the move to PHP 5. Making the move was much easier than i had expected and the features and improvements are of the new engine made it better to work with as well.

Aside from programming, while working on sites, i’ve re-visited the issue of displaying PNGs in various web browsers. In the past I’ve tried a few different techniques and i wanted to link to a couple of good ideas that I’ve found to display PNGs either correctly or at least with some transparency.

• A List Apart: Cross-Browser Variable Opacity with PNG
• PNG in Windows IE
• 32-bit PNG degradability in IE

The article from A List Apart is very good and offers a few solutions and why they aren’t the best way of displaying the PNG image, finally giving a good working solutions to the problem. The second and third links are both easy to use solutions that definitely come in handy when trying to get a PNG to work in IE.

I’ll end this post with a quote that i like to apply to many different things, in particular when working on a project.

Tis a lesson you should heed. Try, try again.
If at first you don’t succeed. Try, try again.

- Thomas H. Palmer