LULUL touched this site like, 2 times in 7 years.
Recoded ASPX to PHP
It’s crazy to see the code there from 7 years ago.
TABLES EVERYWHERE.
SPACER FUNCTION EVERYWHERE.
INLINE CSS EVERYWHERE.
I didn’t really understand CSS at the time.
Choose Your Theme
Archive for the ‘Archives’ Category
HordeRockCafe.com updates!
Wednesday, February 20th, 2013 at 3:26 pmI’m moving….
Wednesday, February 20th, 2013 at 1:40 pm…to a new hosting company…for my websites…. (sorry if that’s anti-climactic!)
I’ve noticed uptime problems with my website. It’s pretty rare, but frequent enough that it’s bothering me. Originally, I was just dealing with the issue – I wasn’t aware you could domain transfer easily. Back in the day, domain transferring wasn’t common. Most hosting providers kinda “locked” you in with your domain. But that’s not how it is now (I just wasn’t aware of it).
So I’ve moved horderockcafe.com and kotobishoujo.com’s domains to a new hosting company, from IXWebHosting to MediaTemple. MediaTemple has served me well recently regarding some work things and I’ve been pretty impressed with them. I’m going to gradually transition my products over. First domains, and then hosting all together. I can simply have the nameservers point to my old hosting until I’m ready with the content on my new servers.
Hm. Looking at domains, I pay $75 for 5 domains with IXWebHosting. $7.50, $7.50, $20, $20, $20 oddly enough. That’s going to change to $60 ($12 each) for 5 domains.
But hosting currently costs me $131 (yearly), down from $144 a year ago and $151 before that. This new hosting will cost $200 (yearly). But I think that $70 is worth it if my site’s uptime and speed increases. I am a web developer after all and I use my websites quite enough for the $70 difference.
Anyways, that’s my plan! Hopefully I can get rid of all the hosting companies that have disappointed me in the past: GoDaddy, Brinkster, WebHost4Life, IXWebhosting (though it wasn’t terrible…).
Edit
ARGHHHHH!
I just purchased new hosting and migrated 2 domains over…and I realized…MEDIATEMPLE DOESN’T SUPPORT ASP.NET.
Which is kinda okay, since worldofwarren.com, seasaltfishandchips.com, and kotobishoujo.com use PHP. warrenshea.com is static and horderockcafe.com is asp classic…so it can be converted to PHP quite easily.
But what bothers me is that switching is going to prevent my ability to do ASP.NET…unless I do it locally, which I don’t like. Okay, it’s not a big deal. In the last 3 years, I’ve really seen and loved PHP…so I’ll stick with that.
okay. DRAMATIC EPISODE OVER.
Other worldofwarren.com updates!
Wednesday, February 20th, 2013 at 1:27 amJust realized that I should also blog about my other changes to worldofwarren.com. After all, it’s awfully rare to do updates to this site…
Also..I wanted to bring up my Feb blog post count up >_<
- Removed div tags with id “header”, “footer”, “navigation” and replaced it with real HTML5 tags.
- Also cut down quite a bit on the CSS naming/names. Removed unnecessary code that I thought was required for specificity…but now find better ways to find elements (CSS 101…taken again cuz apparently I failed the first time). Swapped some ids out and put classes in. Made names shorter which meant I had to change CSS and JavaScript references to those items
- Updated the JavaScript to use jQuery a bit more for retrieving and modifying DOM elements
- Removed some “clear:both” div tags and replaced it by adding the “cf” class to divs, which is a clear-fix…um…fix. Got that from responsify.it
- Was planning to include Modernizer into this…but decided not to. Don’t really see a need to cater to older browsers, not worth the bloat. Should include it on my warrenshea.com
Tomorrow: Responsive layout for kotobishoujo.com OR PHP MVC admin tool
Responsive Layout + worldofwarren.com
Wednesday, February 20th, 2013 at 1:04 amAbout 5 minutes after my last post, I realize…I can’t really do a fully responsive layout with all my themes. Some of the themes will work with a responsive layout (gmail, google+); some (megaman, naruto) will not. So I’ve decided not to support multiple themes on mobile devices, much to my girlfriend’s dismay (she likes the megaman theme).
As such, I’ve been able to create a responsive layout that will occur upon using the Google+ Theme (which is the default theme).
Going to my site on a variety of resolutions will now show different results. Breakpoints are:
1000px, 768px, 480px.
It looks like:
Click the picture for a bigger one.
It was pretty easy. While it’s not the proper 16-grid responsive layout that I originally wanted to do, this custom responsive layout serves its purpose. If not for my multiple themes, I’d definitely want to properly do this. Not sure if I should be doing it for my warrenshea.com site. Its current layout is so much a part of the site…I don’t know if I can/want to mobilize it.
Anyways, feel free to check out this site on your iPhone or Android! I’m very happy with the results. Having the navigation in a dropdown; having the search at the top will really make going to my site on those drunken nights at the bar when I bring up something from my life easier. That’s the main purpose for this responsive layout, to make my site more usable when i’m drunktarded.
Also – two resources I found useful to do a responsive layout:
- Responsify.it – a good place for a responsive template. Rather than use some person’s template, I found (and asked around) that it was better to create your own to understand and eliminate bloat.
- Viewport Resizer – The best thing ever! Saves a bookmark to your bookmarks which, when clicked, adds a small viewport toolbar to change the viewports of your webpage but stay on the same page. You have to see it/use it to believe/understand it. But this thing is AWESOME.
Another domain! Sorta…
Tuesday, February 19th, 2013 at 6:10 pmOkay. I finally have a DEV/QA environment. Sorta.
Originally, I was going to put WAMP on my local machine…but then I would have to export the database (which is huge) and load it onto my machine. Didn’t really wanna do that, since I’m not touching the database, just the code (at least for this project). Also – I don’t like local development when my computer has a much higher chance to crash than the server where my information is being stored. And they do backups.
So my new dev environment is dev.worldofwarren.com
Note: It looks exactly the same (from a Google+ theme) but its code is different
No longer will I have that line of code at the top of my site indicating it’s being worked on. No more working on the production environment on the fly. I generally don’t mind as my changes are quick but this time, they’ll take a while.
I’m working on a responsive layout for worldofwarren.com (and some of it’s themes). It’s not very hard but has some fundamental structure changes to the code including a 16 column grid system.
I’ve also taken the structure of the code and improved it based on my current skills. I understand CSS a lot more than when I did this site, 2-3 years ago and my changes reflect that. I’ve been able to cut part of the structure by 10%. I did find that with my understanding of CSS, my CSS code has actually become bloated, following this structure. So as I’ve acquired more skill, my code for specificity has become too specific – and it needs to be minimized. So I’m trying to do the same with CSS with less code. Tricky for one such as I, who fundamentally opposes the principles of “less is more”.
In the process of building a simple CRUD + Login tool in PHP at work. Going to use an MVC Framework with it…maybe eventually build my own PHP Framework like some people I know.
Photography is going well. 10/43 statues done. 25% of the way isn’t bad :) Gonna keep on truckin!