Opera presents Speed Dial...

I'm a Firefox person. I have been for the last 3 years. It started when I was visiting several sites at once using IE6 and my taskbar had more browsers running that work apps! After some discussion with a few friends, Firefox was recommended. I gave it a go, and was amazed. Within a few weeks, my work PC, home PC, laptop & several other systems i had control of now used Firefox as it's default browser.

Then my girlfriends brother told me about Opera. A similar browser. He kept telling me how Opera was better, blah blah! I nearly beleived him, and for a month at the end of last year, Opera was my main browser! But it just didn't feel as good as Firefox. It was slightly quicker, but had less features!

Never-the-less, Opera have just released Opera 9.2 and it comes with a rather nifty feature which I'd love to see on Firefox.

When you open a new tab in Opera, instead of showing a blank page, it'll show 9 boxes which render 9 user-defined websites! Clicking on either of these thumbnails will load the site in the same tab!

I think it'd be perfect for web-developers who run several sites at once. For instance, if they crack open a new tab, and it shows the developer their own websites, which would tell the developer whether they're websites were online or not!

I'm sure it's got plenty more uses, but that's all i can think of at the moment. I will have a play around with Opera at a later date, but until then, Speed Dial is a nice addition to a nice browser.

Check out the screen cast here!

Get fed!

So over the last couple of months, I've become increasingly obsessed with statistics. More importantly, how many people are visiting the various sites I control & maintain.

Google Analytics is perfect for this, and gives me more than enough information when it comes to finding out how many people read my sites. What it doesn't provide however, is RSS feed statistics. It doesn't tell me how many subscribers read my pages without visiting the site.

For this reason, I have setup a feedburner feed on this website, and others that i control! This will tell me exactly how many people read my feeds!

So if you read my RSS feed on this here website, please update your feeds with my new feed address, or simply click on the RSS feed on the right! My new feed address is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/mrqwest

Thank you & good night! :)

I'm still here...

Just thought I'd say that yes, I am still here. It's all been very quiet on this page, but very hectic in life. Work's extremely busy at the moment. On top of that, the SunRunRally has started to take off (check out the site!). And I've also been drinking copious amounts of coffee whilst trying to do a million things at once!

Having said that though, I've tweaked the design a little here. I've changed the fonts & various related bits as I think it looks a little nicer.

I've also discovered TextPattern, a free, PHP-based advanced Content Management System. As hard as it looks, it's rather easy to use once you get used to it! And the host of plug-ins available are quality! It doesn't have the following that WordPress does, but wordpress also needs more resources, and to me, textpattern is just as good! It has it's problems though which I may go into at a later date.

I've re-jigged the ClubTrinity.co.uk website so that now uses TextPattern as opposed to Coranto. I wanted a MySQL backend & the ability to comment. I couldn't really rely on CGI after previous bad experiences. I also put the SunRunRally website onto TextPattern too!

And it's this platform that i'll be using on my new site that i'm currently developing. It'll purely be a portfolio for my works as i have no place to showcase! But I've been working on that for the last 7years!! So it wont come any time soon!

Never mind. Oh, and the car has hit 100k miles and it still works! The CV Joint has gone again though!! D'oheth!

All your BASE are belong to us

Years ago, I was asked to help construct & build a music website which had the potential to be pretty big. The site was called ukgarageworldwide.com and it already had an installed user-base. It started as a mere forum, but as the users grew, the need for real content became apparent.

I was called in after winning a design content to create a new header image for the forum. Looking back, it was horrible, but it gave me experience.

Anyhow, I got to work on the design, with help from one of the co-owners, Jess Jackson. After the initial site design was done, it was then down to me to create the pages, include the content and work out the structure. This proved quite difficult as articles would go into the articles folder, contact details would go in a separate folder too yada yada. Now this seems pretty simple, but at that point in my life, I had no clue about CSS, yet Jess had created a CSS file for the pages. In hindsight, I didn't really know much about web-design and all my work was done in the WYSIWYG view of Dreamweaver. I never really learnt from that.

Now back to my story. When I had done an article, i placed in the article folder. And then when i viewed it, all the styles had gone. This was because the style tag in the meta part of the header was calling the CSS file which was in a different location. This taught me about the "../" that you need to put into a link if you'd like to reference a separate folder on a higher level of the tree.

This still confused the hell outta me, and in the end, i would have images that looked like Morse code.

src="../../../../../../images/header.gif"

So knowing about the BASE tag back then would of been really really handy.

The BASE tag goes into the meta of your header (Between the <head></head> tags, and generally looks like this:

<Base href="http://www.yoursite.com/">

Once that's in between your <head></head> tags, then any link or image you reference on that page can include your BASE tag. As an example, here's the current tree of a site I'm re-developing at the moment.

Home > Events > UK > Event 1

Now I'd like this split into separate folders for clarity, so the folder structure would look like: yoursite.com/events/UK/event-1. My images would be under yoursite.com/i. If I was currently on the 'event-1' page and i wanted to add the header image, I'd have to reference it like "../../../i/header.JPG". But after including the BASE tag into the <head> and referencing the home page URL (in this case, <Base href="http://www.yoursite.com/">), then i could just call images as if I was in the root. I'd call "src=i/header.jpg" and this would read from the BASE URL, and put it together.

"yoursite.com/i/header.jpg"

If i had known about the BASE tag when I was developing ukgarageworldwide.com, then it would of stopped plenty of headaches & late nights trying to figure out what folder i was trying to call from!

The BASE tag is your friend!!!

(note: Don't know what 'all your base are belong to us' means? click here)