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25 July 2009

Intermediate stuff for complete beginners

I logged into my Twitter account yesterday and noticed that the amount of followers had suddenly dropped from 25 to 12, but now I can see all 12 in the list of followers. It makes more sense now. I guess the whole thing with the invisible followers was just a bug...?

This summer has been pretty crappy so far. It's been raining a lot lately, and it hasn't been very warm. Even in these parts of Sweden it should be more than +13 C in July... There was about one week of nice weather a couple of weeks ago, but the rest has been just rain. Bleh...

We have this tent-like thing in the garden. It's like a frame of metal tubes with a soft plastic shell over it. The roof and the corners are a flimsy kind of plastic and the actual walls are made of a very fine kind of net. The point of the whole thing is to be able to sit outside and enjoy the fresh air, while keeping the bugs out, and with a roof to keep you dry if it rains. Unfortunately, this thing was very cheap and the quality matches the price. The roof is leaking a bit and the shell is just a bit too small for the frame, so the mosquito net walls don't actually go all the way down to the ground. Now, I like rain, so last night I got this idea to go out into this tent thingy with a couple of candles and lanterns and just chill with a book while listening to the rain. When I got out there, I noticed that the place was just crawling with red beetles. Apparently they had found their way in under the walls and thought it was a good place to stay dry. There were hundreds of them. I went back inside the house and watched TV instead.

I finally figured out how to format links in different ways for different content boxes with CSS. I wanted the links in the main text box of my website to be red so you can see them. I also wanted the links to be black in another box, because red links just looked bad in it. But I couldn't figure out how to have both at the same time. After looking through a ridiculous amount of websites about CSS coding, I finally found one that explained this particular thing. Not surprisingly, it was quite easy to do. I just had to define each box I wanted to format as a different span class in the html and then define the format of the links in that class in the CSS code. Easy enough to do, once you know how.

With all the millions of tutorial sites out there, it's surprisingly hard to find a site that actually explains everything well and from the very start. Even on sites for beginners, most of them seem to either assume that you know stuff already and start with stuff that actually isn't so basic, or just leave important steps out, probably because they seem obvious to the writer. If you really, truly do not know anything whatsoever about the subject, those kind of sites are pretty useless.

1 comment:

  1. Actually, yes it is very basic knowledge, which is why most sites probably don't say it. It is a combination of being able to style links and being able assign style classes to HTML tags. So they probably explain how to style links and explain how to assign a class to a specific HTML tag. Bringing both together is probably left as an exercise to the reader, because it not only applies to styling link colors, but to everything. It's two basic and explained concepts combined in one of many possible ways.

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