不知道 i don’t know

Model of “The Opus” Building, Dubai, UEA (under construction)

Installation view of Hadid’s furniture and lighting

I’m quite proud of the site I’ve just coded for the Cambridge Folk Festival (client: Cambridge City Council). This work was done as part of my day job at Cambridge University Press.

The original branding is done by Adrenaline Creative. Based on this, I created the website design for last year’s Festival but kept it quite basic as I only had a week from brief to hand-over. This year I had a slightly longer period to update the site to follow the new poster design and incorporate some other changes requested by the client.

The most obvious change was to convert the navigation from a static vertical list to a horizontal drop-down menu system. This was based on the excellent Suckerfish Dropdowns menu by Patrick Griffiths and Dan Webb at A List Apart. Behind the scenes the code had a complete overhaul to ensure it validated as XHTML Strict (validates as of 25/3/06) (all my sites are coded to this standard nowadays). It was also an opportunity to apply everything I’ve learnt about CSS and XHTML in the year since I last coded the site.

One of the requests from the client was to make the site easier to maintain, so I’ve placed greater emphasis on re-useable code in this version. Each page is made of five basic areas, four of which are the same on every page, so are pulled out of the code as separate files (Server Side Includes). This means that every page on the site can be updated just by editing a single file. The header, navigation bar, sponsor’s list and footer are all saved as these Includes.

One concern I had was that the navigation would be difficult for some people to use, so in the body of the Website Map page I used the same Include file used for the navigation, but added some new CSS rules to style it in a more straightforward way. I think this demonstrates the power of combining Includes and CSS.

I’m partially deaf. I went through a battery of tests at Addenbrooke’s Hospital earlier this year (including a very scary MRI scan) to see if there were any physical problems that could be dealt with in any way. The tests didn’t reveal anything out of the ordinary – my hearing in my right ear is just deteriorating.

I’ve been given a hearing aid and it’s ugly! ugly! ugly! and I’m too vain to wear it out of the house. The best thing about it is the case that it comes in. It’s a small ring case covered in black velvet-like material. Inside, the hearing aid sits on a black cushioned base and the top is lined with white silky material with the words “National Health Service” printed in Gill Sans (all caps). The Gill Sans makes it feel very 50s in style – an era that’s always appealed to me.

Putting the hearing aid into the case ruins it completely.

Technorati Tags: 50s, addenbrookes, font, hearing aid, hospital

I’ve just spent a frustrating few weeks trying to create a 3-column website for a client where the middle column does one very simple thing – to expand dynamically to fit the content.

Basically, it can’t.

Which just seems crazy to me. Where is the benefit of having tables, images, any fixed size element overlapping the adjacent area when its enclosing DIV becomes too small? Surely this is something that should have been considered when the spec was being drafted? If you look at my site and make the window really small then the “What’s new” image eventually overlaps (or is overlapped by) the right hand side.

I would regard myself as a fully paid-up member of the pro-CSS camp, but if it can’t do something that simple and common then it’s of limited value and other methods have to be entertained. In this case I’ve had to resort to a table to create the columns, which does exactly what I want but makes me weep to think that I have to add this to my beautiful code. This table makes the code more complicated and reduces the accessibility of the site.

Technorati Tags: 3col, code, columns, css, design, tables, webdesign, website