Two things I wish I had taken in undergrad before gradschool

09/24/2010

There are many courses I wish I’d taken in undergrad prior to enrolling in gradschool. Some of those courses include programming (specifically Java and MATLAB), SCUBA diving course, and additional math courses. But by far the one course I undoubtedly regret not taking is…

New laptop; Which brand, type, model?

09/18/2010

A few weeks ago I purchased a brand new Lenovo ThinkPad T510. I’ve had a ThinkPad T43 for quite a while, so I decided to upgrade. Given Lenovo’s (who acquired IBM not too long ago) reputation for quality and reliability, I obviously decided to stick with the ThinkPad line. Boy was that a mistake for the T510.

First day of grad school

09/07/2010

As some of you may know, I am currently attending graduate school, and today happens to be the first day. Therefore, I just wanted to share some of my thoughts on the subject, and perhaps getting them out in the open will help me deal with the situation in some way or form.

Is it important to have valid xHTML and CSS?

09/06/2010

People frequently ask for their site to be validated with the W3C validation system. Therefore, we, as proficient web designers, work very hard in order to accommodate those requests. I’ve decided to write a small post on why having a valid website is useful both for us (web designers) and for you (the clients, end-users, general public).

The print CSS stylesheet

08/30/2010

Have you ever wondered what happens when you select to print a website? Does it just print what you see on the page? What if you have a website with a black background, that’s going to be a LOT of ink. Think there’s a way to change the way things are printed?

Learning xHTML and CSS – day 25 of 30

08/25/2010

Yesterday’s post was about a two-column fully modernized, table-less, div-based site using standard CSS2 and some CSS3 definitions. Hopefully, one of these days, I’ll get around to do a screencast about building this type of site from scratch, go over all of the necessary steps as well as some troubleshooting bug issues. However, today’s post will review some of those things. Scroll to the bottom to see the upcoming website designs!

Learning xHTML and CSS – day 24 of 30

08/22/2010

Today’s post is very very very short. I’m going to show you an image of a site I just built. Each section has its properties written in it. Your job is to hopefully replicate it as best you can. Tomorrow I’ll share the xHTML and CSS code. So here we go, our first real live useful website from scratch.

Learning xHTML and CSS – day 23 of 30

08/21/2010

Today’s post is really a continuation of yesterday’s post and a conclusion of CSS3 (for now). Today we’ll look at text-shadow and box-shadow CSS3 style definitions. We’re on the home-stretch of building a website from scratch. I thought I’d change it up a little and introduce a new method.

Learning xHTML and CSS – day 22 of 30

08/20/2010

These days CSS3 is everywhere. What is CSS3? Well, everything we’ve been working with thus far has been xHTML (or HTML 4) and CSS2. With today’s rapid technological advancement, a wide variety of features and designs are easily integrated using simple CSS3 style definitions. So how do we do it? Continue reading to find out.

Learning xHTML and CSS – day 21 of 30

08/19/2010

As you know (if you’ve been paying attention), we’re now past the CSS positioning tutorials, where we concentrate more on website aesthetics and functionality. Today we make a simple feedback button that when clicked opens up your default mail wizard (typically Outlook) to send an email to a predetermined address. To make this button interesting, we use a new CSS property that we haven’t talked about yet called background position.