Lo from San Francisco and across the Bay comes The Fog by way of the Golden Gate Bridge. But wait! It looks like… *GASP*! The Fog has stopped on its voyage. It may take a few days to brake through this powerful barrier.
What I'm trying to say is, when you're releasing something, you try to minimize your use of the word "delay" to zero times until after that release. The problem is that sometimes, words that describe such a situation must be used.
This is why it is my sad duty to report to you that The Fog will be DELAYED until a community-wide announcement can be made in public. Yes, The Fog will not be released because I have not yet had occasion to announce its release. I am very sorry for this delay, and I can assure you that I wanted to see The Fog released on time as much as you wanted to know what it is.
So you've heard the bad news now, what's the good news? The good news is that this is not a delay for an indeterminate amount of time. The Fog is now scheduled to be released on EITHER Friday September 7, 2007 OR Tuesday September 11, 2007. I say either and or because if I not able to announce The Fog on Friday, I will definitely do so on Tuesday.
Once again, I am very sorry for this delay. Rest assured The Fog will be here in just a few days still.
Many of you (meaning all of you) will be wondering just what is 'The Fog'. And what you want is a quick answer so that you can get on with your lives and end the mystery. But what would be the fun in that?
If you look at the task list to the right, you'll notice that I've almost completed The Fog. What you didn't know is that I have a hidden, secret task list stored in the safe confines of my mind. This storage system can be hightly secured in times of need. In order to activate this security, intense lack of sleep must be established, and the task list will be forgotten until the amount of lost sleep has sufficiently been recovered. Let's hope I won't have to activate the security system.
In all seriousness though, you came here because you were told about The Fog, and are (hopefully) interested in knowing more about it. So, let me present to you a few facts about The Fog that will, with any luck, leave you sufficiently mystified and have you anxiously awaiting its release.
Please visit this site for more updates as The Fog reaches its completion, and check back on September 5th for its release!
Well, I finally got around to checking Mozilla's development center for the Mozilla-specific CSS extensions. Browsing through the extensive list, I finally found the one I was looking for: -moz-margin-end. All Mozilla-specific extensions begin with -moz, and the margin-end property apparently is the same as the margin-right property in regular CSS. So, I typed that into my CSS file, pasted it into ExpressionEngine, fired up Camino and gave it a whirl. And what do you know…? It works! Mozilla support is now completed. Rejoice Camino/Firefox fans!
Sometimes a solution is so simple, yet it is not only the last one you think of, but it's also in the last place you look.
I've been working on my personal site, and setting up a contact form for it. Just like when I tried it with The Fog, the contact form didn't work. Then, I jumped over to my web panel for something unrelated, and decided to click the Edit button on the teddywing.com domain. I decided, why don't I change my PHP version from version 5 to version 4. Then when I tried the contact form again, it worked! Everything worked out fine.
So, I set out to do the same thing for The Fog. The problem was, the website didn't work. I got an error saying there was no input file. I then hopped on over to the ExpressionEngine website, and checked their documentation. Eventually I figured out that the site didn't work because I was running PHP 4. I switched it back. The contact form works only in PHP 4, and EE only works in PHP 5. The only solution was to find a different contact form.
I looked into a program I found out about a long time ago called Forms To Go. It turns out they have a demo version, and since I didn't know where else to find something that would supply a contact form that worked, I downloaded it and gave it a try.
I entered the HTML part of my form into the program, and set everything up for teddywing.com. And, what do you know? It works! So now I just have to create the contact form for The Fog, and I'll be all set. Once that's done, I'll set the Contact form status from solved to finished.
Also, I've found a useful website that'll help me get the site ready for Mozilla browsers. It's the Mozilla Dev Center!
Many web designers will probably tell you that browser compatibility is on of the things that gets the frustrated most. Someone who just browses the web may not think of this at all, but each browser has its own quirks, and different websites respond differently when viewed in different browsers. For some reason, I recently ran The Fog in the Camino web browser (Mozilla's Mac-friendly version of Firefox), and it didn't display correctly. You see, I had been using Apple's Safari to test the site, and although I thought that I had tested it in Camino, I guess I didn't.
I looked into what was happening, and found out that when the float: right; property is used, Safari makes the object touch the right side of the browser window, whereas Camino leaves a standard 8 pixel gap between the right side of the browser window. This is easily fixed by adding a -8 right margin, but then the object moves 8 pixels to the right in Safari, off the browser window. So you see, I need some kind of rule that keeps the look in Safari, and adds a rule for Camino.
When I discovered that I was running an old version of Camino, I thought that updating to the new version would resolve the problem. Well, no it didn't. So, I browsed the web to find out how I could add browser-specific CSS rules, and came upon a site that said I could make a separate CSS file and have Mozilla browsers like Camino and Firefox use that one instead.
I've found the answer to my problem. Now, I just have to read that article, make some modifications to the site, and The Fog will display correctly in Mozilla browsers! Browser compatibility is a tricky thing.
I've finally finished the Staff, About and Contact pages on the site. I've been getting some of the smaller things done, and here we are. Now I have to tackle the larger tasks. Drat.
Well, seeing as how I'm having trouble with the contact form, I've decided to move on to some of the other, slightly easier things on the task list. One thing there that I've been meaning to fix for a while now is the favicon. I couldn't get it to work when I tried earlier, and a search through some of the EE support databases revealed that EE had no special requirements for favicons, so I just added a meta tag for a shortcut icon. This fixed the problem. The only difficult task was then uploading all the pages up to the server again. I hereby declare this task … Fini!
Okay, so I've resumed development on The Fog. And, I've started out with one of the most complicated (I think) tasks on my list: creating a contact form for the contact page. Now, I've tried to work with these forms before, and even downloaded a selection to try to use in the Fedora.
Now, I've tried three PHP forms on the Contact page, and none of them seem to work. I'm going to keep trying, see what's wrong, maybe try another form script, but eventually if nothing works out, I'm going to have to head over to the ExpressionEngine forums again because I think that it might be a problem relating to EE.
Anyways, I've changed the status of the Contact form in the task list to "frustrated". I'll keep you posted on how this situation develops.
I actually did this a while ago, but I realized I hadn't updated the blog. Well, I updated the backend for The Fog. In case you haven't been following the earlier posts, The Fog runs on a Content Management System (CMS) called ExpressionEngine. This was updated not too long ago from version 1.5.2 to version 1.6.0. So, I had to perform the update. Anyways, everything went smoothly, and although it took a little longer than I would have wanted it to, the update probably took the same amount of time it would have taken someone else to do it.
For more information, visit this blog post.
Oh, and by the way, I've almost finished writing out the text for the About, Contact and Staff pages. I just have to type those into the computer, and get a form working for the Contact page.
What's this post all about? Well, I wanted to let you know that The Fog is finished. I know that there are still a few uncompleted items in the task list, but as of now, I declare The Fog website finished, and thus no longer in development. Development will resume in August, before the school year resumes.
Even though development has paused on The Fog, I'll still be doing work on it, just not as much as I was when I first started. I know it's a bit difficult to understand for the uninitiated, but everything will reveal itself in time. What I am going to be working on is currently on a private task list, conveniently stored away in OmniFocus. So, as for my work on The Fog from now until August, I'll be looking forward to setting this OmniFocus project as "Completed".
I'm sorry that there hasn't been much interaction up to this point even when I added the comment function, but I'll blame that on a lack of publicity. Until next time!
I recently decided: 'I need to finish the header for The Fog.' Now, I thought I'd tell you the story of how that went.
I opened up a new Photoshop document, and typed out "The Fog" in three different fonts. I grabbed a few letters and combined them all in one text area. Then, I selected my newly combined text using the magic wand tool. I then made a work path of my selection, and modified the path to my liking so as to alter the letters in my header. I realize that type face creators and graphic designers might get angry at me for doing this, but this isn't just text. It's a header and I wanted it to look just the way I had envisioned.
After I finished the modifications in the text, I added a de-opacitized image to the background. I had some problems adding gradiented layer masks using Photoshop, so I exported to PNG and brought the file into Fireworks. From there I did pretty much the same thing and got them to work. If you're curious about this, I always reserve Photoshop for images, and Fireworks for mostly web elements.
Finally, after playing around and testing and re-testing, I uploaded the file to my server and it'll be ready for when The Fog comes out.
If there are any regular readers of this blog (or should I say readers minus the regular), you may have been wondering about my lack of activity recently. I did want to talk about this, but it took me a little longer than I anticipated to put out a post on my personal blog about it. I recently replaced my internal hard drive, and have been transferring all of my files over to the new one. Read about it here.
Yesterday (or should I say this morning), I added a comment function to this development blog. You can access the coments and make your own by clicking on the link to the right.
I've been thinking about adding a user-interaction method to the site for a little while now to see what you thought about it. Then, I remembered I was going to set up comments for the Team Chanowitz Blog using a service called HaloScan. So, I signed up for a new account, added their code to the blog page, and we now have comments!
Oh, and if you would prefer to have comments for every post, then just drop me a message in the comments section.
Well, I've finally got all of the search pages working, even if one of them doesn't work exactly the way I want it to. But I suppose that's okay. I've also renamed some of the titles of my pages to fit their content. Man, if only I were using that easier way to publish all this stuff. It's so hard to keep having to go though the ExpressionEngine Template system to update each and every page.
Now that this one huge piece is complete, I think I'll sit back and relax watching pre-recorded episodes of the Daily Show!
I decided to add my task list to the right of this blog page to make it easier for you to see it, and so that I didn't have to keep adding it to every blog post. As you can see, I finished the RSS/Atom feeds. Progress is happening, stagnation has stopped. See you next time.
It turns out, I neglected to add pagination to my pages, so I had to go back into all of them and paste the code for it in. I realise that some of you may not know what pagination is, so here's a link. Needless to say, it took more time than I would have liked.
More updates to come as I add RSS and see how the search function works.
Things are going well. Really well! Here's an update on my progress so far:
What does this all mean? It means that The Fog website is almost completed. I'll have another update in a few hours. Cheers!
Well, thanks to Sue's help I've gotten my inspiration back for The Fog, and have spent the last few hours working on some of the pages. The archives page is finished, I'm happy to say, and the second secondary page seems to be pretty much complete as well. After I've had some sleep, I'll take a look at how to create my categories page.
G'night
Well, I had just installed this new software called Symphony on my server last night, and just now I was going over the documentation wiki to find out a little more about their templating system. As it turns out, it uses two languages which I am unfamiliar with, and as such I decided to abandon the idea of using Symphony for The Fog. So, I returned to my ExpressionEngine control panel and took another look at my secondary pages. Looking at the bookmarks bar in Safari, I saw the bookmark "EE help", which I created a couple of days ago to give me quick access to a forum post I made on the EE forums concerning my problem. So, I clicked on it to see if anyone had responded.
As it turns out, someone had responded to my inquiry. It was Sue Crocker, part of the ExpressionEngine Tech Support team. She told me that I needed to include the parameter dynamic="off" for my sidebar and footer content weblogs to be displayed. This is because EE wasn't displaying the content that didn't refer to its URL, as it displays certain content dynamically. If you want to read more about this EE parameter, I'll refer you to its entry in the docs page. To see what exactly Sue Crocker said, visit this page in the EE forums.
Thanks again Sue!
Getting frustrated about what to do with my ExpressionEngine problems, I downloaded Drupal and installed it. As it turns out, Drupal's theming system is reasonably complicated (at least more complicated than I was willing to learn given that I already configured EE). So, I uninstalled the software. I also tried downloading Joomla!, but their download links were broken so I never got around to it. Long story short, I'm back to ExpressionEngine, and trying to get advice on the EE forums. I'm still taking requests for advice or help if you know anything.
The secondary pages refuse to display with the content that they are intended to play, and I just can't figure out why that's happening. If any of you readers have ever used ExpressionEngine or Pmachine, or maybe some other type of CMS, I need your help. Please email me at tedwing at gmail dot com. Thanks!
I've gotten some coaching on how to modify the type for my header, and think I'm up to changing some pixels around. Once I get past the main idea I want for my text, I'm thinking I can go pixel-by-pixel in opensword's Pixen. Anyways, working on my header sure beats finding out why my pages aren't displaying correctly. Aaaaazoot!
I've spent the last hour or two trying to set up the comment area and comment form. I was trying to make these checkboxes default to "unchecked", but couldn't manage to do it for a while. Finally, I logged out of the CP, and checked the site. The form looked fine. The problem is, the secondary page that the form is on is messed up. It should look like the homepage, but the content from the two outside columns isn't appearing. Hey… I think I just gave myself an idea. Thanks blog! But I don't think I can develop it just yet. I've spent waaay too much time in front of this computer screen.
I've had to change a few things around on the index (front) page, and unfortunately the same alterations had to be made on another page that I had already started. But now I think it's going to work out and I can keep working on the secondary page. The only problem is that I'm not sure if this page is going to display what I want correctly. I have to check the included EE template to see if I'm using the right tags for what I need, or that I'm linking to the page correctly.
That's all for now. More will come soon.
Welcome to The Fog Blog. The purpose of this blog is to document my progress on a project that shall be known now only as "The Fog". At this stage, I'm working on web design and development.
Well, I suppose I can tell you that I've completed my install of ExpressionEngine. This I did several days ago (maybe on the 26th or 27th of May). It wasn't too difficult to install, and the video tutorials helped out a lot in working out a design. I learned that it accepts HTML and CSS, so I decided that all I needed to do was lay out my site in standard XHTML, and then port that over to EE. My layout was simple enough.
Initially, I decided to go with a two-column layout, one for the navigation bar/sidebar, and another for the main content. I started out with the header. For the header, I wanted a repeating background that extended the full width of the browser window. The problem was, I kept getting white margins on the left and right sides. After more trouble than it may have been worth, I fixed this by adding negative margins on the left and right sides.
Everything was working fine until I decided that I wanted a three-column layout. Well, I figured out what width I wanted it to be, and decided to make the outside columns fixed-width, and the center column liquid width (so that it changed width based on the size of the browser window). I set it up just the way I wanted it to be, but the third column appeared underneath the middle column layout. I managed to fix this by altering the top margin.
Then, I decided to create another div (divider, or content area) in the middle column and right column to get an idea of whether or not it would work when I inputed the code into EE. Well as it turns out, it didn't work. The columns didn't line up. So, after about a day and a half to two days, I worked on resolving the problem. When all hope seemed lost, after Dave and Craig on Wednesday night (and Thursday morning), I tried a few things and rearranged some of the code. Finally… it worked! All the columns worked out fine.
Later that night (or morning), I put the code and CSS into a page in EE, and decided to create some weblogs for my content (that's what they call databases in EE). When I viewed the content with the newly-created navigation bar links and footer, the text in the nav bar and footer were all off, and for some reason weren't obeying my CSS rules. I tried for about an hour and a half to two hours to try to fix the problem, changing around my CSS and some of the HTML tags.
The next day, I wondered if maybe it wasn't my code that was the problem. Maybe something in EE was screwing things up. So, I decided to take a look. My first stop was the Custom Fields area in the Admin section of the Control Panel. Here I realized under the "Default Text Formatting for This Field" area you could set the formatting to Xhtml. 'Maybe that's what's screwing up my layout', I thought. So, I created a new Field Group and decided to change the setting to 'None', instead of Xhtml. Well, it turns out I couldn't create a new field group with this same field. Then, I wandered into the Edit section to see if anything could be done. I opened up my footer post, and saw that there was a formatting drop-down menu underneath the footer content field which was set to 'Xhtml'. I set it to 'None', updated the post, and viewed the layout so far. And what do you know? It worked! So, I changed the setting for all of my nav bar posts, rearranged some of my CSS and voilà. My layout was complete. After so many long hours it was finally finished.
But let's not be too hasty. It's not completely finished. Oh no, far from it. Well, if this were a standard HTML website, I would have not problem creating new pages for my content. This is, however, an ExpressionEngine site, and in order to make my vision work with EE, I have to input EE's own tags into my HTML. The hardest part now is learning those tags, and figuring out how I'm going to implement them into my site, and which ones I want to use. This may sound simple enough, but it's a whole other thing I have to learn. I've already gotten started on one of the primary pages, but there's still quite a bit of work ahead.
I'm sorry for the length of this first post, but the idea for this blog had only come to me in the middle of my project. You can understand I had to fill you in on a lot of things (problems and glorious fixes) that had been going on. Keep visiting for the latest updates to… The Fog!
Comment on The Fog's development by clicking on the link below.
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