Published in Fiftyfoureleven on Monday, May 31st, 2004
Part of the colophon for this blog, this entry acknowledges visual inspiration and gives thanks for some borrowed code.
Rather than write up a colophon for this weblog, we thought that having a colophon category would be the way to do it. That way, the colophon page would serve as a simple colophon category filter, and updates to the colophon would be more visible, as they would occur as posts to the blog. So here goes entry number one...
There are two levels of credits to be given here, one being inspiration and the other being of the 'hey thanks for that code' variety.
This blog currently validates as application/xhtml+xml if your browser supports it (x-phile approved, #59). This would not have been possible without the use of Simon Willison's php script that validates xhtml of user comments.
This, of course, means that users must mark up their comment code, which is something that some people aren't quite in to. We're working on something that will hopefully make marking up your own comments less of a hassel.
Visually the site gets some of it's syling cues from Andy Budd's reclusive CSS Zen Garden entry, sub:lime, most notably the thick white borders (see a reworked version of sub:lime).
Using the content-border shadow idea was inspired by Shaun Inman, and background lines/fade came from Zeldman's Orange design from earlier this year (2004), which I quite liked.
[h4]Layout and content[/h4]The two column blog layout has been done a lot, though it seems that credit for this goes to Dan Cederholm at SimpleBits.
We're looking to refine a few things to how we use this layout and the content that we deliver, and can honestly say that we will, in the future, be lifting something that we first saw on D. Keith Robinson's blog and now see improved upon in Ethan Marcotte's recent redesign of his blog, Sideshow.
And that's about it! Perhaps a final nod should go to the Vault, which was heavily visited while mocking up comps for this site.
Sitepoint's web devlopment books have helped me out on many occasions both for finding a quick solution to a problem but also to level out my knowlegde in weaker areas (JavaScript, I'm looking at you!). I am recommending the following titles from my bookshelf:
I started freelancing by diving in head first and getting on with it. Many years and a lot of experience later I was still able to take away some gems from this book, and there are plenty I wish I had thought of beforehand. If you are new to freelancing and have a lot of questions (or maybe don't know what questions to ask!) do yourself a favor and at least check out the sample chapters.
The author line-up for this book says it all. 7 excellent developers show you how to get your JavaScript coding up to speed with 7 chapters of great theory, code and examples. Metaprogramming with JavaScript (chapter 5 from Dan Webb) really helped me iron out some things I was missing about JavaScript. That said each chapter really helped me to develop my JavaScript skills beyond simple Ajax calls and html insertion with libs like JQuery.
Like the other books listed here, this provides a great reference for the PHP developer looking to have the right answers from the right people at their fingertips. I tend to pull this off the shelf when I need to delve into new territory and usually find a workable solution to keep development moving. This only needs to happen once and you recoup the price of the book in time saved from having to develop the solution or find the right pattern for getting the job done..
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