The Glade 4.0

So somehow, I'm the most apt person in my organization to re-work our website/keep it managed.

Currently, I'm coding in notepad. While workable, this is a little bit painful. Most of the coding I'm doing is fairly simple additions to the existing CSS code, and adding/modifying content. Once I've modified the code, I upload using WinSCP to our universities server.

What do you use to write HTML code? Notepad? Some other program? I'm interested to know.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

I'm a fan of Sublime Text 2 in Windows (download link above the comments). For FTP, Filezilla is one of the better (and free!) clients.

Sublime Text 2 is free but it'll pop up a little window asking you to purchase it every 30 saves or so. You can decline and keep working as usual.

Feel free to ask any questions you might have while you're in the process of rebuilding!

Notepad works fine for the basic stuff. I use dreamweaver since I have it.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Hmm, I'll check Sublime Text out. WinSCP is keeping me set for uploads atm- I'll keep Filezilla in mind if I need to switch at some point in the future.

I will ask here though about indents and break tags. From what I understand, I should be able to use a style="text-indent:5%" attribute with the <br /> tag, just like I can with the <p> tag.

While the latter works, however, the former does not. Am I missing something easy?

What I'm trying to do is a two-tiered indent system with a main heading, then a list of dates indented from that, with talk titles/speakers indented again under each date.

I'm currently just using a two-indent system set up as:

<p style="margin-left:5%;text-indent:-5%"> which leaves the header at one level and all following text on another.

I did figure out how to use hidden/unhidden portions of a page today to expand/contract subsections, and that was quite helpful in organizing some stuff.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Applying styles to the <p> tags works because they wrap around content <p>Like this</p>. Styles will apply to anything contained inside of them. The <br /> tag however is standalone and doesn't have anything inside of it (nay, can't have anything inside of it), so applying styles to the tag itself is useless.

The best markup I can think of for what I'm seeing in my head based off of your description:



Note that embedded (above) or, preferably, external stylesheets are always a better idea than inline styles (applying directly to the tag itself). I used margin above because it will move the entire element away from the left side, whereas text-indent only applies to the first line of a paragraph.

Hmm, cool.

I'll see about editing the style sheets to include that- I need to make sure it doesn't mess with the existing headers, but that should make it a lot easier to code in the future.

I'm slowly moving from lengthy and painful workarounds to more refined methods of coding that will make it easier in the future.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

If you don't want to modify existing content, just make sure to use class selectors (like h3.date {}) instead of tag selectors (just h3 {}) which would only apply to the newer <h3 class="date">...</h3> code.

The last time I edited HTML it was in PSPad, but that was a while ago.

I havn't done any programming to speak of, but I know that UltraEdit has a lot of programming features for specific languages.

I use Notepad++ as a major upgrade over standard Notepad for editing config files, etc.. which I spend a fair amount of time doing...

vi

Well, vim

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I use notepad for quick edits, and MS Web Expressions for other stuff. We used Expressions in a couple of my classes, and even got a free student version, and I really, really liked it. Moreso than Dreamweaver, which I had been using prior to Expressions.



As far as this goes, I really think you can do this with an unordered list. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding what you are saying, but it sounds like you are trying to do exactly what unordered lists are designed for. And you can even set your own styles for the list and for different layers of the list, as Lenas described, including custom (or even no) bullets.

Then, you just add the content, and let the tags and your stylesheet handle the indents and margins.

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"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

I had tried doing it with a basic unordered list, and it wasn't coming out like I wanted it to- but I might need to go back and set some different styles and see how that works out. It was the bullets of the <ul> tag that I didn't like- but maybe there's a way to make it non-bulleted.

Basically, it's a calendar type-schedule.

First heading is the semester/year
Second heading is the date/time/location
Third heading is the speakers names/titles of the talk.

From playing around with formatting, there needs to be at least a blank line between the semester/year and the date/time/location as well as between the date/time/location and the names/talk titles, or it starts to look overly crowded.

The way I have it now, I have the first headings as links to a javascript:unhide command I coded in that opens a list of all of the dates/times/locations and speakers. Within each, I'm using a structure that looks like this:



So that it breaks out looking like this:

Date/Time/Location

Speaker, Title
Speaker, Title
Speaker, Title

It's working OK for now, especially with the javascript:unhide command to cut down from several dozen listings to a few visible at a time. For future ease of updating, I can code in Lenas's suggestion of adding style categories for each of the categories to clean up the code a bit.

My next item is to tackle getting a well-organized photo gallery... And it would be nice to do some-sort of a filmstrip-style banner of randomly selected pictures if I can figure out how.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

That's the style tag you're looking for to remove the bullets.

Although, you may want to give it a class selector, like Lenas said, so that it doesn't remove the bullets from any other ul tags.

Like:


Then, when you want to use a non-bulleted list, just use the <ul class="speaker">Speaker, Title</ul>

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"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

This is how to do it with a definition list (better than UL in this case since it provides two levels of nesting) and without the need for break tags:



Nice clean markup with no extra tags, and you still get good formatting Note the class of "last" which is taking the place of break tags and pushing proceeding content down with a margin-bottom:15px;

This. I enjoy Dreamweaver.

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Ok, so thanks to your wonderful suggestions, I've gotten a lot of the formatting cleaned up and nailed down. I went with editing the external style sheet, and everything looks much cleaner.

But, I've got a new question:

How would I go about coding a vote/poll via the website?

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

You generally need some sort of server side scripting (php, cgi, asp, whatever) to process the vote in countvote.html.

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Hmm, ok- thanks. I'll see what I can do about the other end of things.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.