The Olympics have already begun in Beijing. Much has been said about how wrong it has been for the IOC to award China the Games and what a poor political muck-up the Chinese have created with their grand opportunity.
Many posit that the IOC members personally profited from the decision or were too naïve in believing China would elevate itself above imposing its controversial political practices on others. All or none of that may be true; the fact remains that it is a travesty that will be repeated again when the Games come to Sochi, Russia in 2014 under Putin’s regime.
But I wanted to talk about what is a minor travesty by comparison: NBC’s awful coverage of the Olympics.
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I know, I know. The always intimidating coding part of making a web site. The biggest reason people use the WYSIWYG web editors is because they gloss over the coding. Why code if you can just slap some images in Front Page or DreamWeaver and it looks fine?
The reason is because you don’t have much control over your web site if you use a WYSIWYG editor. It makes it difficult to duplicate pages, fine-tune details, and provide consistency all the way around. Plus, if you’re skilled enough in the editor to actually overcome all of those deficiencies, you spent as much time learning to do that as you would learning HTML and CSS.
So that brings us here. It’s time for us to design the layout of our new web page using HTML and CSS. I’m going to have three parts for this tutorial. First, we’ll talk about a little HTML, its basic structure and what you’ll need to know. Second, we’ll look at styling that with a bit of CSS and I’ll explain its basic precepts. Last, we’ll put all of that to use and create a basic template page.
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So now you’ve got all your tools set up — you have a test platform for Wordpress, a graphics editor, and everything else you need to get going with web design. You’ve also come up with a basic layout and have decided what you want to present.
Next to actually deciding what you want to accomplish, this is the toughest step. You need to figure out what your web site should actually look like. Yes, this takes creativity, but more than that it takes perseverance. It’s hard to be struck by inspiration when you need to be. It’s much better to just suss it out and let inspiration strike organically in the process. I’ll illustrate this as we progress.
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In the last article of this series I talked about coming up with concepts about (1.) what you want your web site to accomplish and (2.) what you basically want it to look like.
Just as important as those two points are the tools you use to construct your site. Most people go with some sort of WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) editor like FrontPage or Dreamweaver.
Poppycock, I say!
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In October of last year the Atlas Foundry in Tacoma, WA had an explosion. There were problems with refueling one of their three ginormous propane tanks and the tanks apparently didn’t like that.
If you didn’t get a chance to see or hear about it, watch this (some foul language):
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