Big Giant Crayon Blog

We have just finished updating the www.naturligliv.com (brodpod website), to show the NEW 30% off Summer Sale that has just been announced.

So if you have been thinking about getting a Brodpod, then there is no better time than now, just go on over to www.naturligliv.com and buy your Brodpod’s

Enjoy Your Summer

So a lack of posting was brought to my attention, I have no excuse for this.. All I know is work is moving and things are arriving faster than they can be gotten rid of, As for me I’ve recently finished a placement at a production studio and am back to working full time repairing computers.. and in-between all that I am working on the new PPSD.

At the minute all I seem to be looking at is red blocks of code that are vastly made up of forms and jQuery; honestly I Am making progress, be it slow but it’s progress, I’m learning a lot of jQuery JavaScript code and along with some fantastic HTML hacks I’m getting to invent my own tags and code.  The only problem I am having with the whole process is the vast amount of code that’s now showing up in source view, this just allows people to see how I think, this may not be a good thing for nosy person.

On a lighter note sailing, weekends away and racing seem to be dominating my free time, I’m hardly ever not working in front of a pc as the rest of the time I’m away, and I seem to be getting more appointments to my phone now, which is starting to become a Tad annoying, but it’s all good, I’m going to continue putting in scary hour days for the rest of the month and then go on holiday.
So that’s me all talked out, back to more Forms and jQuery.

Say no more really: http://www.bringdownie6.com/

So yesterday I went out and purchased one of the new HTC Magic phones powered by Google’s Android system, I had been toying with the idea for a while about getting a new phone, and when I saw the new HTC Magic phone with Android I knew this was the phone for me .

After a week of research and checking I must say I did not find anything I didn’t like about them, and now with using one it really is a great wee phone and they come bundled with all the Google services which makes getting on-line and running quite scarily quick.

But on continuation of the Design by Standards spelle I must say having a full browser on a phone is quite an interesting feet, flash doesn’t seam to play nice but it rarely does so I’m not too fussed about that, after browsing through some of the sites we’ve worked on and playing about I must say that standards do matter and they are totally cross platform, be that an Apple PC or a mobile phone, standards are used to make websites work in any browser and I approve.

Ok, so, here’s the deal – we’ve all been waiting pretty anxiously for the new Wolverine movie (I have at any rate, and i know most of the people in my household have been too). So naturally, we all elected to go see the (in)famous movie. Yep, that’s right, I said (in)famous!

To make a long story short, never, ever read or trust reviews. People had been preaching, based on the leaked version of the movie, that it sucked. What’s all that about?! Seriously! First of all, you have to be pretty damn bored to actually want to watch the unfinished cut of a movie that’s out in 3 weeks… Secondly, how on earth can you base a review off something unfinished?! You wouldn’t take a spoon and eat half-finished food! (maybe except cookie dough, but hey, no analogy is perfect). Anywho, so yeah, I’d read that the movie sucked but went with it anyway cause I’m a die-hard Wolvie fan and have been ever since i was about 12. Turns out the movie rocked.

It was so FRIGGIN AWESOME! It was entirely the most awesome thing i have seen in ages, and really, it’s not fair to compare it to movies like The Dark Knight and Iron Man, which were both spectacular in their own way, but for those of us who love the cuddly little beserker fur-ball, it was everything it had to be. Gambit was awesome too.

‘Nuff said i think. If you have doubts about the movie, go see it anyway… Just don’t expect an epic drama like Titanic or a complex plot like The Usual Suspects. It’s an action movie. Live with it. It has adamantium claws and mutant powers for Pete’s sake, what more do ya want?

When we first discovered the W3C standards for HTML/XHTML/CSS we were curious as to how hard it was going to be to develop websites to a standard.  Surely it would be easier just to code things as quickly as possible, get the website up and running and then move on.  But the W3C standards showed us some valuable insights into web development, and future proofing.  We started early on in www.purple-pixels.co.uk, by following the standards, first we started with HTML 4.01 and later XHMTL.  The validation pages have, many times, found errors quickly and easily, sometimes helping us considerably tracking down coding mistakes (we all make mistakes).

Designing and developing websites to the W3C standards has also helped us considerably, when new browsers are released.  So far, touch wood, with the release of Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3 and Google Chrome (v1 and the beta for v2), NONE of our web sites needed any changes to work with the new browsers.  We have put this down to our clean and W3C standard coded websites.

This brings me onto my next advantage of coding to the W3C standards.  SEO, from what we have discovered if you follow the standards, it also helps search engines find and read your site.  And it doesn’t make it any harder for the users to read the site either, which isn’t really a bad thing, considering that, usually, users are the main reason we make websites.

Purple Pixels have just finished the holding page for a new customer’s website www.westcountrywood.co.uk. The full web site is coming soon.  Been testing some of development on the www.ppsd.co.uk and monitoring the user base on www.eclipse-photos.co.uk (they have had a LOT of users this month so far).  Anyway, that’s all from me for now.

So back to more PPSD development.
Only problem with today’s short work on making the sidebar work, was the slight foresight that we may need to fire an SQL array into it, and with saving the structure into poor variables then that kind of messes with my plans.

So after some brainstorming and swearing I came up with the idea I could revamp a piece of code I wrote that fixed PHP attempting maths, and make it work with words…

I was then graced with the find of the “.=” building item which allows me to continue to add data into a created variable after it has been declared, so now I am able to fire all my SQL array pieces into a single variable and have it output as if nothing has changed.

while($MenuDsp = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
$MenuOutput .= $MenuDsp['NAME'];
}

How I do love these finds, this actually makes printing arrays easier..

Well would you look at that, things look different.
We managed to find a theme that suited our needs and with lots of changes and code tweaks it’s looking like this.
That seems to happen when I get a bored and have a notion, but it’s an improvement anyway, and with the addition of Permalinks things are looking all round better here.

Anyway now I’m done playing for the night I think I’ll go make the changes to the PPSD I originally planned.
Watch for the wee tweaks over the next few days though as they are bound to happen.

Please bear with us, as we are changing theme, this shoudn’t take too long, but it will be well worth it.