Web Design

Well, in the past few days I have been doing quite a bit of work on setting up various things on the interwebs. The week starts out innocently enough as I post my comic up and decide, "Hmm. You know what, I wonder how easy it is to update the site's look by swapping to another template." So, I opened up the layout tab, BACKUP the site's current configuration, just incase, and start looking through the templates. After a couple tweaks and what-nots, I decide that none of them are close enough to what I want, so I attempt to revert to the original state.

Nope. Blogger starts spitting out some errors, and in desperate attempts to copy-paste and tweak the page back to how it was, I completely destroyed the site's layout. -_- Colors are all different, boxes are where they shouldn't be, and my eyes were bleeding as I stared at my new ugly site. So, I had to do something.

Fortunately for me, I already had my real site designed and awaiting launch. I had a test page setup here, to see how it all looked. Designed in Photoshop, and hand coded by yours truly (with A LOT of help from Mr. Phillips, Justin) I decided that if I was gonna fix the site, I might as well go all out and make it look like it's suppose to.

Tuesday comes, and I'm about 50% with the restorations. After plenty of copy-paste the basic layout of my site is finished, and I had 3 main tasks to setup. My navigation bar, footer, and my Archives page. Navigation bar was already made on my site, but for some reason something was getting messed up. It was probably the heavy Javascript used in the table of links I made, so I had to look for an alternative. CSS is what everyone is using nowadays to make sites. It allows for your website to have a consistent and clean look throughout all your pages. It seemed that navigation bars are also recommended to be designed with CSS, but I wasn't completely sure how. However, after following some links I found a nice program called CSS Horizontal Menu Generator, which as the name implies, generates horizontal menus in CSS. :P

So cool, that's done, and now I have some added rollover effects and everything for my bar. Next came the footer. The footer (and the main post section of the blog) have a nice little Javascript that applies rounded corners to the box. Niftycube was the script, and my previous attempts with it worked out fairly well. Unfortunately, when I tried adding the rounded corners here, the footer was splitting up. I never know why that happens, but as it happened before, I knew what to do. I copy and pasted straight from the example page, and slowly tweaked that second footer into my main footer. Turns out, it was the Paypal button that was ripping open the footer (at least in Internet Explorer and Opera, Firefox looked fine). Oh well, took it out and put it up somewhere better.

Last came the nasty section under my comic, which contains my archives. Blogger has these widgets that you add to your blog. One of them, as you can see on the right of my blog here, is the Archive Widget, which has every year, and month in a neat drop down style menu. In addition to THAT, my comic blog has a small section with the Chapters individually split up as well (A simple list of links). My problem was trying to get these things OFF the main site and into their own page. Unfortunately it seems Blogger does not support widgets in your average post. So it was time to look for some more Javascript that would hopefully be able to hide the section, and toggle it on and off with my Archive button in the navigation bar.

Well, right now I have a working toggle button, unfortunately, the section is NOT hidden on page load, which kind of defies the purpose of the button. >_> Oh well, I'm sure I'll figure something out, but for now I am glad to see the page has come along quite nicely. Now, if only ComicCMS would come out with their new version so I can use my actual site for everything instead of depending on Blogger...;)

T-Minus 7 Weeks

7 Weeks till this year is over, and we are marked for 1 year of living here in Barranquilla. Time sure flies when you think you're gonna die. LOL...just kidding. ;)

Anyway, as usual I am overloading myself with a bunch of games I just can't finish. I've progressed some more in Phoenix Wright, I'm in my second case.

I also got Contra 4, a really cool side-scrolling shoot em up with this Rambo type dude. It's frustratingly hard, and I've failed all attempts to pass the first level, but it sure has me intrigued. :P

Haven't played Metroid in a bit, but I think I'm about 1/3 done with it. That's been without about a month of having the game. :P So I gotta do some major catch up and finish before year's end, as I got a copy of Battalion Wars 2 and Super Mario Galaxy heading over here! :D

College in January...-_-

Super Post

Oh boy, I've been postponing this post since I got back from the US...so excuse this extremely long post. :P

Ok, so...the United States was awesome. From what I remember the things I missed most were the foods, seeing as how my sweet tooth has not had it's share of stuff while being here. Donuts, sugar cookies, and gumdrops. God how I miss those delicious sweets! Gumdrops here suck, sugar cookies don't exist apparently, and I've only found ONE store here who sells IMPORTED donuts. What the heck...

What else. It was nice to see all my friends again, I've uploaded most of my photos (of the youth group) in Facebook. Interestingly enough, I only saw my friends 2 days out of the 2 weeks I was there. That kinda sucks...but then again it's not like it was an actual vacation. We were doing so many errands, it was pretty boring actually. Oh well, one day I will save up to visit by myself. I wonder though if I should visit FL for a week, or perhaps to do some semi-cross-country trip going state to state seeing friends from my tournament in real-life. HMMM. Thing is, I can't expect my Floridian friends to come and hang out everyday since they have lives. (A good thing ;P) Which kind of sucks since despite me being able to drive and everything over there, I believe that's the main reason I never saw many of them. :P OR I could totally be an anti-people person and not even know it.

All right, so on to my usual video game chatter. I am now in possession of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Also, while in Georgia, me and my dad bought Wii Play. That, and a nunchuck at Brandsmart so we are now at a complete 4 Wiimote+Nunchuck set for the Wii. I'm about 30% done with the game, it's really good. Graphics are slick, I'd say past Halo 2, gameplay is great with a lot of puzzle solving and shooting mixed up, and a great storyline too. Wii Play on the other hand sucks. Though it came with a Wiimote so it was like paying $10, which it just might be worth. My favorite game on their is a game where your Mii is racing with a cow made of some apparent woven material. Video here below:

On the DS side, I'm still stuck at Mega-man, and I have the new Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations to keep me busy, and also Call of Duty 4 if I feel like shooting stuff. Call of Duty 4 is not that great. So far the only good FPS I've seen has been Metroid. Oh well.

Last but not least, I'd like to share this cool podcast I've been listening to for a while now. The God Journey, which as the sites states:

facilitates a growing conversation among those who are thinking outside the box of organized religion. One listener tagged it as "two real brothers talking about life," and you can also view an introductory video that captures what The God journey is all about. By sharing their own journeys, searching the Scriptures, interacting with their listeners, and examining current events and cultural trends, they hope to encourage others on their own spiritual journey. Their purpose is not to attack people who see it differently, but to inspire those whose spiritual hungers cannot be met in the conventional expressions of Christianity and yet want to live more deeply in Jesus and be part of the church he is building.

Every Friday you can check out a new one, they are awesome! :)