www.NewVentures.ca

One of the things I learned a long, long time ago, is that if you are tired or have been working on something for too long, take a break, or wait till tomorrow to finish it. It has been a very, VERY painful learning process for me and by now I would have thought it would stick, but it hasn’t 🙁

Last weekend, for a short period of time, you may have noticed that my original left hand menu or as I call it sidebar had disappeared! This was yet another case of not paying attention to lessons that I had learned.

I had noticed from time to time, that the visual editor in WordPress randomly places it’s cursor at different spots within a document or theme that I was editing. To be blunt, it’s an annoyance. But thanks to the undo feature that I am able to call up through Firefox it usually remains just that, an annoyance.

As you may recall, I had recently spent a lot of time studying and evaluating just how all the PHP and the CSS file worked and managed to get my blog looking pretty close to where I wanted it for now. Well, on the weekend I wanted to make just a few very minor changes to my left hand menu.

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I’ve just printed off a type of electrostatic sign for my wife’s car. She is a member of Kiwanis, and every fall they put on a haunted house called Skreamers. It’s a fun event for all those who like to create that sort of thing, as well as those who like to be scared by it. Personally, it’s not my cup of tea, but I do help out when my wife volunteers me 😉

So this year I thought I was going to get away with just having to help out with some of the emergency wiring in the building and perhaps aiding her in the updating and creation of new outdoor signs (the 4 foot by 4 foot type). Helping out with the wiring was a “no brainer”, but I found the creation of the signs to be kind of neat.

Harley runs a great computer store called Bloom Microtech. He is also one of the most avid volunteers I have ever seen, which is a great thing for Kiwanis. One of the tools his store has is a special plotter which connects to a regular computer. The advantage of this plotter, and I assume the software, is that instead of plotting out graphs and the like, it actually cuts out letters, words and symbols on a special plastic paper that allows entire words to then be picked out and placed on those plastic sign boards you see everywhere. The result is an excellent and affordable sign, made without the help of a professional printing company. Needless to say I enjoyed helping with the signs, just so I could get a better look at the technology at work!

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Well, my wife was away for the weekend, and while I could have taken on all sorts of tasks and outstanding “things” that needed to be done, I decided to catch up on one of my personal interests “Babylon 5“.

This year, as a gift for our Anniversary and my birthday, I received DVD sets of the entire original Babylon 5 series, as well as Babylon 5, The Movie Collection which included all the TV movies created to date. What an exciting gift it was.

I have always been a major fan of Babylon 5, not because it was Science Fiction , although it surely helped, but because it was a rarity in Television Programming. It told a story over a complete 5 year span and from the very first episode there were activities and comments and characters that would play an integral part in an episode three, four or even five years down the road!

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Wow, with a lot of work and experimentation yesterday… apologies to anyone who may have experienced some of the oddities … I now have a second column on my blog that I can put ad’s on to or point to some of my favorite commercial sites (like Ferrari Coffee). I also was able to modify the new column so that it accepted “widgets” as well.

It certainly wasn’t easy at first (recalling my rant from yesterday), but after about 4 hours of studying the code that worked; then looking at other themes that had two columns and how they worked; things started to make sense.

I had decided to stay within an 800 pixel maximum width for the content & graphics portion of my blog. I thought that this would cover most of the community out there and still give me enough room to attempt a second column.

After a lot of experimentation within the style sheet I was able to find the right parameters to adjust. The text area itself had to be shrunk down by about 50 pixels less and my original sidebar was easily reduced down to 130 pixels wide. After the margins were adjusted, and the main content page itself expanded to 800 pixels (which as I think of it might be an issue for the scroll bar – something else to check later…), I now had enough space for another 130 pixel wide sidebar on the other side.

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I thought I should give you all a heads up that I will be playing around with my template a bit today. While reading and studying is good, nothing beats actually doing it to understand how things are working.

None of the content will be lost, you just might see some extra items appearing on the page from time to time. Please ignore it if you can 😉

I am starting to get a real appreciation as to how things work with CSS/stylesheets and PHP isn’t half as intimidating as it used to be thanks to the two great books that I mentioned earlier.

<– Stepping onto the Soapbox–>

When I was managing a development team, a long long time ago, I used to insist that the team leader ensure that comments were numerous and clearly written, so that the next programmer who came along could understand/modify/continue what was already done without having to jump through too many hoops.

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