dtgreenwood.com

I’ve been quietly waiting for this day for a while now. The article archive on the left << tracks the number of posts in any month for the past 12, well, tommorow I will finally see if it works how it’s supposed to. August should dissapear off the bottom and move to the top once I make a post in August. Sad, maybe, exciting, maybe not.

The job hunting is getting tiresome now. Don’t get me wrong I know it’s not meant to be an easy thing, finding a job fresh from the lecture theatre (or not in some people cases) but it’s tough. You see a job you think, oooh, I could do that, you read more information and they chuck in ‘You must have at least 4 years experience’, and this is the problem. No one seems to want to employ the rookie. Once upon a time businesses were made up of fresh faced graduates and employers wanted them, but now you have to be a graduate (check!) and have commercial experience(doh!). But without the experience, how do you get more, it’s a catch 22. So at the moment I’m struggling with job hunting, big time

I guess if you can see this post then my new and improved admin panel has has succeeded in posting to my blog :). I’ve been posting by hand into the database for the last few entries and that got old really quick :P.

I’ve been working on this and a web project I’ve undertaken with Sam and Johnny from university quite alot over the first few days.

My todo list has been (slighty)reduced, woohoo:
Make BBCode work and fully XHTML and CSS. :’(
Make the article archive on the left work again :’(

The ‘view all articles by user’ feature on the profile page now works it just doesn’t count how many yet, easily rectified though!

I’m thinking of creating a subdomain and opening this up for people to look at, I’m even considering asking a few people I know around the net using it for a little while to beta test it. The reason for this is that I just want to find all the bugs damn it!! lol.

If anyone would be interested in giving it a try for maybe a month, then that would be cool! Leave me a comment.

Well, I’m going to bed, it’s far too late but before I go I’ve got to mention SLIMTIMER and Bubbles. I’ve been using slimtimer in conjunction with bubbles to track how much time I’ve been spending on these two projects over the last day and, *checks reports*, I’ve spent 9.5 hours on them today :O. Now I definitely know it’s time for bed, goodnight.

Well last night was a big hit and both me and Claire really enjoyed ourselves. We went to an Italian restaurant called Joe Rigatoni in Harrogate and had a fantastic meal. The atmosphere was great as we sat outside on the balcony, the perfect way to eat a meal in this hot weather. For starters Claire had maple-honey glazed spare ribs which were so nicely cooked, the sauce was thick and sweet and the meat just fell off the bone, mmmm. For starter I had Antipasto All Italiana which fro anyone not in the know is a selection of cold meats such as salami, Parma, sorano ham etc, all very nice too! And I found out that I really like artichokes, all this time working as a chef over the years and I’d never tried them, strange. For mains Claire had a pepperoni and cheese Calzone and I had Joe Riggatonis Favorite Salad which was choc-a-bloc with meats, fruit, salad, sea food and was fantastic! I was so impressed I took a picture, See it here, the image is too big :S. Now that’s a salad!!

So this morning I’ve not done much at all, except read through a few blogs and digg articles. An interesting article is one about digg labs creating some really nifty little data visualization tools so you can see in real time what’s going on. I won’t try to explain them, I’ll let you read about them for yourself, needless to say I’m pretty impressed and easily sat and watched the ‘swarm‘ one for about 10 minutes. :O

So a few days ago I found Zach Braff’s new web site zachbraff.com and have been enjoying his blogging loads, his posts about his sims characters are hilarious, checkout Hot as an untrained Doberman’s Balls and A Picture’s Worth A Thousand Words for some giggles. I really enjoyed Zacks film Garden State, It was an interesting look at a guy returning home for his mums funeral after being ‘disowned’ by his father. Give it a watch if you already haven’t.

That’s it from me, I’m going outside to walk my dog, who no doubt is also a bit warm as well. Cya.

Well after two days of messing with my site I feel I’m getting there.

I still have a list of things to do which include but are by no means limited to:
Make BBCode work and fully XHTML and CSS.
Make the article archive on the left work again :’(
Finish my admin area so I don’t have to add blog posts directly into the database by hand
Make ‘view all articles by user’ feature from the profile page (yes i’ve made a user profile page, why? Because I can!).

So, in actual fact, the list is getting longer the more I work on it, typical huh!

Well, before I go to bed I’d like to wish Claire a happy 5th anniversary for today. I love you very much and life just wouldn’t be the same without you. Claire and me are going into Harrogate tonight for a celebration meal at an undisclosed (to Claire) location and I’m very much looking forward to it.

Goodnight.

For those of you that remember I did say that once i’d finished university I’d redesign my site in XHTML and CSS. Well Tada!!

For the past couple fo days I’ve been working on this design and am pretty please with how it looks. Only a few things left to do.
These are:
Make BBCode work and fully XHTML and CSS.
Make the article archive on the left work again :’(
Finish my admin area so I don’t have to add blog posts directly into the database by hand

I think that’s it. If you find anything else then let me know in the new comment system. Which I hope will stop those bots spamming me!

Let me know what you think to the new design.

There's entirely too much uppercase in that title but nevermind!

Whilst doing a spot of web design I've run into some interesting problems. Now, I know Internet Explorer isn't the best browser at handling CSS but considering it's majority browser market share I'm a bit miffed!!

I'll see if I can explain the problem. I am trying to have two different a(link for those that don't know) attributes in my CSS file. Now, in Firefox and Opera this isn't a problem. I just have the following code in my style.css file:
Code:

a, a:hover, a:visited, a:link, a:active
{
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, Geneva, sans-serif;
font-size: 12px;
letter-spacing: 0px;
padding-top: 4px;
color: #FF0000;
}
.article a, a:hover a:visited, a:link, a:active
{
font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif;
font-size: 12px;
letter-spacing: 0px;
padding-top: 4px;
color: #3939AC;
}

The aim of this is to have links inside the article attribute have different a tags to all the other a tags on the site. However, Internet Explorer seems to stick with the last a attribute stated in the CSS and just do that for all of them. Really really annoying. As this means that I've either got to grit my teeth, keep it as it is and exclude everyone using IE from seeing what it is intended or just have one style for all links on the site.

Does anyone have a solution to this problem because I'm stumped.

Also for anyone interested in web design and standards, I stumbled across http://www.graphicpush.com/ which I think you should take the time to look at. Man, that's one sexy site, one day mine might look as nice.

I've been ill for the last couple of days and it hasn't been pleasant at all. Apart from being either sat on or in front of the loo (don't worry folks, that's as graphic as it gets) I've been having stomach cramps and headaches. Combine this with the sweltering heat of the last couple of days and I've not been feeling 100%.

However, I have used this time to complete Half-Life 2: Episode One and I must say that I am really reallylooking forward to the next episode! The story to episode one is great and the gameplay is also fantastic. The most frustrating part has to have been not having a gun for half the game! grrr. But when I finally got one, that's when the action really got going.

Other than that I bought Lucky Number Slevin on Claire's recommendation and it's fantastic. A little slow moving but a great film all the same.

I've also been playing with the new last.fm player which is fantastic, has to be at least 10x better than the last one. Try it out. If you like it you can subscribe and get more stations. It's well worth £1.50 a month I can tell you!!

I miss the big breakfast, having Johnny Vaugn wake you up in the morning was a real treat! Anyway.

I've been reading alot recently about users, in particular user groups and target audiances (I'd back this up with links but I can't find them) and how a website needs to take into account it's users more than ever before. For example a website that perhaps have information on how to use the internet will attract alot of visits from new intenet users, most likely using Windows and Internet Explorer, good stuff, that website need not worry too much about target audiances user agents (browsers etc). Where as for example a website that attracts alot of more technically minded people will need to concentrate on making it's website accesable from a large range of user agents such as Opera, Konquerer, Mozilla etc.

You can blame who you like for the fact that Internet Explorer has the largest proportion of users but the fact is that with the global medium of the internet this needn't be the case. Firefox have made the first move by advertising alternatives. I think it's about time that people were made more aware of the alternatives open to them. Yes the average user might not want to change, but it's liek anything else, if they at least try it, then they might like it more or even find that it's more suited to thier needs.

I made the move from Internet Explorer to Firefox pretty much as soon as I got my own computer. I've now switched to Opera and have been happily using it for a month now. It's fantastic. My advice to anyone would be to try different software in exactly the same way you would try on cloths. However, no-one wears the same sweater for the rest of their lives. Do they?

Whilst checking out my websites statistics it would seem that my visiter browser stats are like this.[ul]
37% Firefox
31% Other
27% Internet Explorer
2% Opera
1% Konqueror
1% Safari
1% Netscape
0% Mozilla

I can safely say that the reason firefox and other are up at the top is because I get a few hits from people I went to University with from the Department of Computer Science. Hope the site works for everyone!

What a weekend!! A nice long one that is!

I'll start on Thursday. On Thursday I had a day off from doing anything as it was my 21st birthday. So me and Claire went into Harrogate and pickd up my suit that I'd ordered the previous week and some shirts from burtons which Claire got me for my birthday. That evening we also went and picked up Kaspar my housemate from Hull from Harrogate train station after his 8 hour train journey from Devon, ouch!

Friday saw the arrival of the rest of my housemates that were coming, Phil and Naomi, the other three, Kwame, Adam and Paul couldn't make it for various reasons so that wasn't cool. Would have been great to have the whole crew together! So friday Night a ten strong group of us went to The Cattlemens Association in Harrogate and had a fantastic meal. I managed to suprise myself by eating a 20oz steak which was made much easier to do given the fact that it was cooked absolutely perfectly! The guys all sang happy birthday to me and I got a dessert with a candle in, even though I knew it could happen I was still a bit embarrased. After spending almost £200 in the restaurant we moved onto Time and had a great time, I even got a free bottle of champagne from Becky, my younger brother James' other half. Woo hoo, thanks! So after walking out of Time, yes I walked, I was drunk but I pride myself on not being carried home when drunk, we got in taxis and went back to my place.

Saturday morning… Hangover. I wasn't anywhere near drunk enough the night before to deserve that! I managed to get rid of it by eating some nice english breakfast that Mum and Steve had prepaired for us all, great stuff! So after breakfast I had to repair and clean the BBQ.. I repaired it at least, Claire, Phil and Naomi cleaned the grills. Then it was a case of buying in some burgers, sausages, charcoal and drinks. I managed to quite well out of morrisons, I spent £27 on food and Claire bought 30 bottles of stella for £16. So we went home and while I was getting the BBQ ready for lighting it started raining, D'oh! We put up our tents and gazebos and retreated inside for a little bit. Come six o'clock the rain had let up a little and we all went outside and got the BBQ going. People started arriving, food got eaten, alcohol got drunk and I hope a great time was had by all! Everything went smoothly and nothing got broken… apart from a bottle of champagne someone had put in the freezer to chill exploding all over the freezer that is. Whoever you are I'd like to know so I can slap you for wasting a perfectly good bottle of champagne!! Lol.

Then on sunday everyone helped tidy up the garden and then left. We didn't do alot else on sunday

Then Monday came and it was time to travel to Hull for Phil and mines graduation cerarmony which went fantastically. One of the parts I was most looking forward to was Rob Miles speaking as Cerarmony Marshall. I've mentioned before in my blog that Rob Miles is a lecturer at Hull University and has, from what I've seen, the best methods for teaching programming ever! He's also a very funny guy. You should all go check out the pictures he took of the ceramony on his blog at www.robmiles.com, I'm three rows back and fourth person in from the right on his picture.

So after all that I got a nice early night and did some painting today. Good stuff. Only thing to do now is step up a gear in the job search stakes! But before I do that I'm going to play some World Of Warcraft! Pictures to follow… eventually. Toodles

Quote = "Father Larry Lorenzoni"
?Birthdays are good for you. Statistics show that the people who have the most live the longest.?

Today is my birthday, woo hoo. Don't feel any different but hey ho! Today me and Claire are going to pick up my suit from Harrogate. I can't wait, I'm more excited about my suit that I am my birthday. The suit is a birthday present to myself for my graduation, self indulgance is a great thing huh!

It is also my Auntie Helens birthday today (what a birthday present I as huh!) so I'm going to visit her at her shop, here's hoping she's in!!

Preperations for my birthday BBQ are going ok i think I have to fix the bbq tonight so that it stand upright and isn't a horrible rusty mess, otherwise any money I get for my birthday could end up going towards court fees

Anyway, that's it from me for today, I'm hoping that I'll have something interesting to tell you guys about my weekend and maybe have a few pictures too. I hope your all as excited as I am Peace to you all.