chiiyo

Is it going to be that bad, Soleq? Let's say I install it on one of those new iMacs, and then use it to run Browsers, all types. Would it take up a lot of effort and time?? Because I'm really interested in getting another Mac and yet I want to test my site in Windows browsers...

Hmm. You can use CSS for the basic layout of that table (because technically using tables to layout non-tabular data violates the whole separation of content and presentation idea).One way to do the whole click 1 or 2 or 3 and 4 will change, the easy but less advanced way, would be to make three html pages, where clicking 1 would lead to page 1, where your 1 would be "selected" and your 4 will reflect the content required, and then creating similar pages for 2 and 3.Another way to do it, would probably involve either javascript or PHP. The javascript method I'm not too sure, not a big fan of javascript, but basically you have to program the links in 1,2, and 3 to be able to affect the behaviour in 4. (Not too sure what I'm saying.... anyone want to clarify this?)And the third method, by using PHP includes, whereby you program the links in 1, 2 and 3 to trigger another page to be included using PHP into 4. That way you have one page. Kinda works like a frame.Ah, and of course, you could use frames. But wouldn't recommend it.I would probably recommend a combination of the CSS and PHP method, it's probably the most lightweight method around...Don't mention it! Glad to help!

BTW how's the performance of Virtual PC?? I'm thinking of installing it on my mac...

Okay, by font-family, that is basically listing down the font of your text, whatever text that is being listed. As for options, you can put in any font you like, only that you must know if you put a font that is not common, many people will be seeing your site in a font you didn't design for. Previously, in html, you could only specify one font, so if the end-user didn't have that font, he would be stuck seeing your website in his computer's default font, which more often than not is Times New Roman (yuck). So CSS counteracts that, creates a situation where your website degrades gracefully, by allowing you to list other fonts. In this case, you're telling the end-user's computer to display the text first and foremost in Verdana, but if the computer doesn't have Verdana, to display the text in Arial, and if the computer doesn't have Arial, to display it in Helvetica (which is, by the way, a gorgeous font), and if the computer doesn't have any of those three, in any sans-serif font. This way you cover all bases. So yes, the first font is the top-priority font. About font-size, the ones used in html code are different from the one you define in font-size. The numbers in html point to a particular size, set in html, and I'm actually not too sure what that size is, but there are usually only 6 numbers? 1 to 6? (haven't used the font tag for so long...) What happens in CSS is that you can fine-tune that size of your font. Instead of relying on arbitrary values, you can define the font in pixels (px), ems, points(pt) and other measurements. BTW, the font tag is deprecated as of XHTML 1.0 Strict, so you should use CSS to do your font-styling. Read more about it at HTMLDog. Hope this helps!

Hmm. How I usually do it is look at the range of greys that are web-safe. If I have a website with a white background, I'd have text (assuming I want black/grey text) that is the grey closest to black, which is #333333. If I have a black background, I'd use the grey closest to white, which is #cccccc. And if I had a light coloured background, I'd use black straight, a dark coloured background would get white straight.That way I know there's consistency, all my background-text colour combinations have roughly the same level of contrast. Saves all the thinking about colours and stuff.

Sorry, random post, but, NilsC... "Enjoy have GUN and learn"??? *explodes laughing*Anyway, welcome to Xisto! Don't worry too much about motivation, everyone starts out with the intention of a website, but after a while, we come back for the company.... *wink*Have a great time here...

Yes! This is what I mean... *adds them to RSS aggregator*I hope by spreading news sites around people will at least be aware of things. And be more informed as to making the choice between the OSes, or just plain working with each OS.Any more?

Oh darn. So you mean there is no way I can install Windows and dual boot it with Mac OS X? Because of the architecture of the Apple hardware? >_< I thought it was such a good idea and a perfect excuse for me to finally get the Mac mini... and proliferate my home with more macs! I've heard horror stories about Virtual PC being horrendously slow, O_o. What I really need is really another Windows sitting next to my Powerbook, install most of the browsers on browsers.evolt.org and if possible, connect it in some way to my Powerbook. Guess I might have to build my own PC and run Windows and Linux on it... I might still get an Apple Cinema Display though, to mirror my 12" PB screen and to run the PC on it. They just dropped the price of the 20-incher.

Although I understand the reasoning behind the separation of the OS subsections into more subsections, it's a bit sad that everything's split up, and there's no apparent sharing or understanding between the people using different OSes. Although I do admit I don't like Windows, I embrace all other OSes. As such, I propose we put up links to our favourite OS-related websites. This way maybe I can get to know of some Linux-flavoured development News sites or something to do with Windows even. I think this might lead to more understanding and more information... To start off, here are some of mine. Since Mac OS X and Apple Hardware are kinda interlinked, some of the sites below deal with both... About This Particular Macintosh - A webzine of sorts that covers a lot of things and is as good, even better sometimes, than those Mac magazines you get off the shelves. Love the humour. Apple Legal - Don't know about the name, but this is a software review site for Mac applications. The review quality is pretty good, short, but pretty informative. MacFixIt - Troubleshooting Solutions site. The recent post on preparing your computer for an installation of Tiger is very helpful. MacNewsWorld - A collection of Apple in the news everywhere, online and offline, quite interesting to read now and then and really good if you're going to write a paper on Apple and need news sources. MacOSXHints - A collection of short but sweet hints for the OS, some of which are well-known and aimed towards the beginners, but they have often rather interesting and less well-known hints too. MacRumors - Rumors site. I got there mostly for the forums though, they have a huge userbase and they are very very helpful when something is happening to your mac and you don't know what to do... Heh. How about you?

I think maybe we should get back to the topic? He's not asking specifically whether macs are better or windows are better, let's not turn this into that type of topic. More specifically, he's asking whether buying that OS7 machine his friend is selling him at 50 bucks is worth it.I'm agreeing with Soleq, there's no point buying that machine. Unless you want to use it for very easy tasks or to use it as a server. To give an analogy it's like asking you to buy a windows PC that was made in DOS times, or maybe slightly better, a Windows 3.1 Machine. Sure, it MAY be possible to upgrade it to Windows XP, but it's going to be hard, the parts will be old, and you're going to spend a lot of money upgrading the sucker by buying memory and hard drives and cd-drives, and have a headache because the parts will be hard to find, and then buy your new software, and then have another headache because the new OS doesn't work with some of the parts and stuff...OS7 machine upgraded to running OS X, will be akin to Windows 3.1 machine upgraded to Windows XP. Think about it. Is that 50 bucks worth it?Although usually I would recommend macs to anyone, in your case, if you want a cheap machine, just assemble some PC by yourself or get it from Dell or something. If you want a mac get the Mac Mini or the iMac or something.

Being on an Apple Powerbook, and using that for my main system does have it's advantages, but since the nearest PC near me is one floor away (my younger brother's), website layout and compatibility testing is a pain-in-the-neck, since I can only test on Safari and IE:mac.There are other slight annoyances too, like sometimes I need Windows to do stuff with my school, or just to fiddle around with Linux and stuff. So I was thinking, just theoretically for now (because I'm short of money), but is it possible for me to buy a Mac Mini (because it is such a gorgeous little machine), and then load Windows XP (or Longhorn when it comes out) AND a flavour of Linux, and use them as well as Tiger? I don't need them to run inside each other, maybe like Dual Booting, but this time Triple Booting...I'll only be using the Windows interface to check websites and stuff, connect to the net to access some sites I can't access right now, nothing very demanding, will probably have to install all those firewalls and anti-spyware and anti-viruses and stuff (I am really grateful I'm on a mac!), but that's probably all I'll do on the Windows OS. For the Linux one, I'll probably use it more for tinkering rather than website-testing, but will do a bit here and there too. For Tiger, I'll probably use the Mac Mini to do my bit-torrenting (since it'll be at home most of the time as opposed to my laptop) and install all flavours of Mac browsers on it (I don't want to clutter up this system) but probably nothing intensive on it either. The Mac Mini will probably be a secondary system rather than my primary system, which would still be my laptop, considering the specs of the Mac Mini...In short, the Mac Mini will be like a computer for me to test my site in all platforms, as well as do some tinkering. I'll probably have to get a monitor to go with it too, as well as mouse and keyboard... *looks at scarce table space as it is* Thank goodness the Mac Mini is small...My question is, is this possible, and if so, what kind of complications do you think I will face?

Livejournal is free. There is a paid option, which has more features, but to have a livejournal is free.

According to HTMLDog.com, having the stylesheet seperate from the actual XHTML or HTML file also is in accordance to the whole separation of presentation and content idea.Basically your HTML or XHTML file should only have content-based information, and your CSS stylesheet is all the presentational information. Having them in two places helps to even more demarcate your content and your presentation.

The thing about Xanga (it was my first weblog), is that, often than not, Xanga was the first weblog for a lot of people. I got mine more than 4 years ago, it was the Xangabot who sent me an innocuous email, and I was just curious, and got onto the weblog bandwagon very early. Like Livejournal (which I currently have), Xanga was and still is all about the community. It's about having your blog, and making it easy for you to check out your friends' blogs, join communities, and let your friends see your blog easily, things that other community-based weblog sites also have. Xanga is really a lot like Livejournal, but slightly less customisable, and thus, aimed at the less web-savvy people. The reason why there are so many people on Xanga, as opposed to Livejournal or Deadjournal, is that in the beginning Livejournal worked like Gmail, in that you required an invite in order to get in (this was cancelled a few years back).I'm one of those people that really believe in weblogging. I have gone from Xanga to my own site, blogging by Blogger at first, then Greymatter, then got an extra blog at Livejournal for writing purposes, and then shifted my main blog over to Livejournal, because practically all my friends are on Livejournal. The community factor here is very important. Lots of people never switch from Xanga or Livejournal because it is just made so easy to check your friend's journals or comment or post in a community blog. When I post something at my Livejournal, I know all my friends will see it and know about it (it works better than email and SMS sometimes).Now I'm still keeping my Livejournal, and planning to have two blogs on my website, one for writing, one for opinions, serious stuff that I don't need my friends to know, and those will be operated by a blogging system. I've tried MovableType, Wordpress, Nucleus, Textpattern, but none of them really work the way I would like them to, so in the end I might just end up blogging manually.I agree that people who have a Xanga shouldn't show off, it's not that big a deal in terms of how much skill is required to maintain one, but look at it this way: people who think they've done a lot for their Xanga probably are not very web-savvy anyway, so it really might have been a big deal for them.

Can someone tell me whether anything is REQUIRED in the .htaccess file for Xisto? I think I accidentally deleted it and just wondering whether there is something essential inside the .htaccess file...Because all my php files are turning up blank... O_O

Here's a little mini-tutorial on how to arrange the rounded corners in a table. Since no one has really answered that part of the question yet. 1. First, you should have your corners ready as gifs or jpegs, whichever is smaller. I'm assuming you have four corners, as in you want a rounded rectangle. You can either use the vector method, or draw a rounded rectangle and just grab the rounded corners from there. What I usually do is draw a circle on my background colour, and fill it with the colour of my rectangle, and then cut it up into quarters to make my four rounded corners. Like so. 2. Anyway, the table is going to look something like this: I've labelled the nine different cells for better understanding. 1, 3, 7 and 9 are for putting the four rounded corners, 2, 4, 6 and 8 are to complete the border (and to give a nice padding effect) and 5 is where you put your content. I'm using rounded corner gifs that are 20px by 20px, so I know exactly what is the width of my border. 3. So let's start with the code. <html><head><title>Test page</title></head><body bgcolor="#cccccc"><table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" bgcolor="#99ccff"><tr><!---this is the cell 1---><td width="20px" height="0px"><img src="topleft.gif" alt="this is the top left rounded corner" width="20px" height="20px"></td><!--- this is cell 2---><td width="200px"><br></td><!--- this is cell 3---><td width="20px" height="0px"><img src="topright.gif" alt="this is the top right rounded corner" width="20px" height="20px"></td></tr><!--- this is cell 4---><tr><td height="200px"><br></td><!--- this is cell 5---><td>Put your content in here</td><!--- this is cell 6---><td height="200px"><br></td></tr><!--- this is cell 7---><tr><td width="20px" height="1px"><img src="bottomleft.gif" alt="this is the bottom left rounded corner" width="20px" height="20px"></td><!--- this is cell 8---><td><br></td><!--- this is cell 9---><td width="20px" height="1px"><img src="bottomright.gif" alt="this is the bottom right rounded corner" width="20px" height="20px"></td></tr></table></body></html> That should work... change the colours around, change the dimensions, stuff like that. Using CSS would help a lot, I think a lot of the code is non-XHTML-compliant... I put height=1px for the rounded corners cells because from past experience, it's kinda hard to force the height down to a small size. Specifiying the image's dimensions should force the cell to enlarge to just perfectly that size. Of course, using the CSS method I wrote above might work a lot better, or at least mixing CSS and tables would work better than plain no CSS...

Reading through the comments of the link that Coach posted is another very interesting link on this subject, where the author attempts to take an objective look at tables and CSS, this time, advocating that tables should be used side by side with CSS. It's an interesting read, at least, and gives some form of hope to people still wanting to use tables...

Just a random note, but I was surfing around, and here's a link to a site that teaches you how to do rounded corners with CSS, don't need the graphic at all... Might be useful to some of you CSS-lovers...

Did you by any chance go into your cpanel and actually create a new MySQL database for MovableType? It's not really stated in the instructions, and I think that may be the source of your problems. You have to go into CPanel>MySQL Databases, and create a new MySQL database for MT, and then change your MT files using notepad to reflect the change.If you still don't get it I'll post up a detailed step-by-step instructions. Just thought I'd check on that point first.

I'm not exactly sure what you want, so I'll just post some links to various ones... As you have mentioned, there are services like diaryland and livejournal that don't allow you to customise the theme, next comes the question, do you want your blog on your own website, or on a "community" site? Because I know Livejournal and Xanga are in essence, community blogsites, where you are directly connected to other Livejournal and Xanga users, and it's made very easy for people to check out your blog and for you to check out their blogs. The other way to go about it is to have software that has either an editing page elsewhere or on your own server. This type of blogging software requires you have a website of your own, like maybe an Xisto account. These are the ones that actually allow you to customise the theme, most of them, if you know, how, can be customised almost completely. One that I can think of that has an editing page elsewhere is Blogger (actually that is the only one I can think of... heh heh), and the ones that you'd have to install on your own server range from the really powerful ones like MovableType and Greymatter, to others like the much touted easy-to-use Wordpress which replaced b2. When you have an Xisto account, you can check your cPanel, under Fantastico, and check out the blog softwares there, which includes Wordpress, as well as Nucleus, b2evolution and PMachine Free. Personally, I've used Greymatter, MovableType, Wordpress, Blogger and Nucleus, and I'm currently going to try out b2evolution... Actually, since I need very specific things from my blogging software, I'm thinking of giving up altogether and blogging manually... Oh yes, and whilst you're at it, check out OpenSourceCMS and try out some of the blog softwares for yourself. Since you said that it's actually a website, not a real blog, you might also want to check out some of the CMS like [url="http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ and [url="http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/. Play around with the different systems to find the perfect one. I know I'm still trying...

Another point to note is that it's not just about coding for standards, the whole point is that CSS, even standard CSS, tends to screw up with different browsers. Especially if you're using CSS to do the layout of your page. I just spent an hour last night reading through three articles on the pros and cons of using CSS to do your layout versus using tables, and they all say that CSS screws up more often than tables in terms of consistent design over different browsers, especially older ones...

Oooh. Thank you Brian~ *adopts as fellow Mac-enthusiast on Xisto forums* *digs into her old blog post about all the applications she has on her mac* I actually like Microsoft Office for Mac... at least, compared to the Windows version. I think the Mac version is more intuitive and prettier than the Windows version! *wink* Stuff like the formatting palette, which is so much more intuitive than the windows one... Yeah, this one have to buy... I love most of the applications that come along with the OS, especially the ones that are coming with Tiger (still waiting for it!), like Finder, Mail, Safari, Stickies, iTunes. I think ClamXav rocks, purely because it's a free (donation-ware) lightweight antivirus scanner, which is basically all you'd need on a mac anyway. I hate bloat. Can't live without Firestarter FX for overburning my CDs and Himmelbar for the whole Start-bar functionality I'm used to in Windows. MacJournal for archiving all my writing into different Journals, and VooDooPad Lite for notetaking is just miraculous. I wish I could pay for VooDooPad though, I think there's a lot of functionality in the paid version that would really clinch VoodooPad as my main note-taking program. Like ability to export to .txt and sketching. MP3 Alarm Clock... *grin* because I need to wake up to some random song that I love every morning! I use Cyberduck and Adium as well... This Imagewell, can you put up the link to it? Looks intriguing...

Haha when I first checked this post and saw your first picture, my brain went, Whoa, that is some multiple exposure shot!Then I realised you did it digitally. Which kind of spoilt it for me. >_<. You know, if you had actually done all those shots naturally (by this i mean with a film camera or something) you would be very very skilled! Especially the phone one. I was like, whoa, how he get it to spiral like that? *brain was working out the specifics of it, focus on phone, and then let camera move just a little bit on rotation with long exposure...*Nice photos, but yeah, as I said, the fact that you did it digitally was a tad disappointing...

Kyle, the iPod plays .mp3 formats as well as the iTunes proprietory format, which I'm not too sure of. What the iPod Does restrict you is that although you can download music into your iPod, it doesn't allow you to redownload the music from your iPod back into your computer. It's how Apple is trying to stop piracy in a way, so you can't just go to your friend's computer, download the music, go back to your house, and keep it in your computer.Of course, there are workarounds for this, there are freeware out there that allows you to extract music from your iPod to your computer. Also you could transfer the music as data files instead of as "songs". Stuff like that.

'Xcuse, but if windows was created in 1985, it would 20 years old...Caught that mistake cos I was born in that year. =_=. Sorry for being finicky.