Death by powerpoint

Check out this amazing powerpoint presentation* on making amazing powerpoint presentations!

* no, you don't often get to say that.

Little boxes, made of errors...

The standard styling for error boxes (at least with v1.2.6) looks ugly as per below.

The red doesn't go all the way around the actual box for form fields. Yuk! This is a result of the field in question going into a span that is styled - not the actual form field. Stylesheet code as below:

.fieldWithErrors {
  border: 2px solid red;
  background-color: red;
  padding: 2px;
  display: inline;
}

To make it look neat and pretty (as in the below image), use the following code instead:

.fieldWithErrors input, .fieldWithErrors textarea, .fieldWithErrors select  {
  border: 2px solid red;
  display: inline;
  padding: 2px;
}

Kill the ugly duckling!

For years, now, I've had a "tradesman's website"... you know, how the tradesman comes home and doesn't want to do *more* work, so they let their own house go. That's what my website has been like now for a while. I've suffered brief bouts of inspiration, followed by a flurry of new stuff - only to get caught up in what I was doing at work and not want to do any web-development once I got home :P

But that's gotta change - and the old styling is really not cutting it for me. So the first thing I've done is to get some graphic desgin done... I'll be getting the first look at the result on Monday and have been really looking forward to it!

I've never had to brand myself before, and that's essentially what I'm doing. I've worked with branding for products, companies and services, events and concepts - but never for myself. I had a chance to chat about what I like, how I see myself being portrayed and even a few of my favourite hobbies (eg calligraphy) and now I'm really looking forward to the results.

Fixed-width suffocation

This blog was getting strangled by its own fixed width. Yick. So I've just updated the layout CSS to remove the set-pixel-width sections. Unfortunately this also required mucking about with the background images (quick application of gimp and an upload to my own website). The parchment background doesn't look quite so pretty without its "slightly burnt" edges - but at least it won't repeat said edges over and over.

If I get more inspired later I'll update the layout to include the left/right edges individually. Right now I don't have the brain-space to figure out how do that in an elegant way.