BubblesSOC

I have to end my obsession with Design Snack… it’s raising my blood pressure! The members downvote BEAUTIFUL sites such as Soap Media, Renegade Zen, Simply Jazzmin, and Draft.Media with little or no explanation and then turn around and vote positive on PAGE-BUILDER and table-riddled sites!

I had a conversation with one of my mentors recently on my ‘webdesign skills‘ and I came to the realization that I care more about code than pretty graphics. To me, code is as much an artform as a painting or a photo. And I find myself getting very offended when someone says, “People flaunting the fact that their website is valid XHTML and tableless CSS are stupid…” I’m sorry, but I’m quite proud of the fact that I take the time and effort to create a clean, original, and accessible website. Anyone can open up MS Frontpage, drag and drop a few pics, then call it a webpage but very few can pull out notepad and cook up a large website from scratch using PHP, XHTML, CSS, etc.

Sorry about that rant… I just had to get it off my chest. Any thoughts?

Perfection : Design Gallery

Finally, my summer web project is complete! (Well, 90% complete ) I coded it from scratch, so I’m very proud of it. Please check it out and let me know what you think!

Edit: Are my anti-hotlink images popping up?

Just when I thought I’d learned all I need to know about webdesign (not literally), I come across mod_rewrite – which is quite useful! I still have the hardest time comprehending regular expressions, so I’m just using it in its simplest form. Rather than typing profile.php?id=1 every time I want to access a member profile I can use profile/1 instead! Neil Crosby can explain it better than I, so I’ll leave the job to him. Btw – if you are using an .htaccess file to protect against direct linkers, you are using mod_rewrite!

Speaking of direct linkers, I made a new hotlink warning image:

(I stole the ingenious idea from Jem )

Look what I found! Poor Coco is going to have a whole wardrobe soon…

Here are the sites that I have designed so far:

• University of Alabama Philosophy Department
• McNair Scholars Program
• Bruce Kim
• Studio by the Tracks (temporary address)

I’m very happy with the way the Studio design turned out

Clearing a float container without source markup.

Looks like I’ll be renovating my skins again. I’m still using the <br class="clear" /> to clear my floating elements.

I recently held a contest at my webring, Oh My Cuteness, for the members to create new image codes. I’m so excited because I received a ton of beautiful submissions! Today, I chose the Grand Prize and Runner-Up:

Grand Prize: Anh –

Runner-Up: Janet –

If you have a cute site (that meets the requirements), then you should definitely join! Don’t worry about dead links in the ring because I check for them every night (with the aid of a script, of course … I’m not THAT much of a computer geek! )

I wanted to integrate my 404 page into my skins, but I needed it to be a .php file instead of .shtml (which is the default filetype I believe). So here’s how I did it.Open your existing .htaccess file. If you do not have one already, create a new file and save it as .htaccess. Add the following code to the file:

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.bubblessoc.net/404.php

You can change 404.php to anything you want. It can be error.php or mysiterox.php. And of course, you use your URL instead of mine

I’ve also integrated custom 404 pages for my subdomains as well using the same method. This is useful if you have hostees who want their own error pages. Just make an .htaccess file for each of your subdomains. Otherwise, the root .htaccess will take precedence.

If you want to display the name of the page that issued a 404 use:

<?php echo $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] ?>

Pretty nifty I think.

I was googling my site in pig latin and I found a topic on a CSS message board with a link to my site:

interesting site HB with regards to this bug and some other computer stuff.

but some weird erm, stuff on there.

sometimes it’s just so bizarre to get a intimate insight into a person’s life.

I especially liked the part about the ‘virtual quilt scene’ Oh well, maybe they found my article helpful!

I just finished a new layout for my toplist, Cute Top 25! It’s the first new layout since it began in 2003. I had a hard time with the CSS. As always, Internet Explorer wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do Oh well, I think it turned out pretty good.

Edit: New layout for my webring, Oh My Cuteness as well!

Don’t forget to donate to the victims of Hurricane Katrina!

Edit: Webring script complete!

Wow, I’m on a roll! I just finished my new toplist script and now I’m back to working on the script for my webring. If you were a member of the old Cute Top 25, you will need to resubmit your site and pick up a new voting link. Also, be sure to let me know if you run into any bugs. I hope this new script will help me out with broken images