I got to bed late last night, because I was reading about how list elements can be turned into horizontal tabs or vertical link bars.
As it happened, I saw that used today. It was a much simpler design than what I’ve been learning, but the layout was the same.
It always seems that I’ll find some bit of information, and then I’ll need it in the next day or two. I sometimes keep track of whether I’m ‘late’ or ‘early’, by paying attention to these things and noting when I needed it. At this point in time, I was right at the edge. I learned about them by staying up far later than I should have, and I probably wouldn’t have noticed this other example if I hadn’t at least seen a cursory text covering it. I just wouldn’t have been looking for it.
OpenOffice is SLOW. No, I mean it’s SLOOOOOOOOOW.
It takes forever to load into memory, even though the main launcher or whatever loads into memory every time I start up. It takes at least five seconds or more to open a single file, and takes twice that long just to save. It’s pretty graphics-heavy, too; when I was using my graphics card without the drivers installed (read: emergency autopilot; maximum 1600×1200 16-bit), scrolling was a [hard thing to do]. I’d get to the bottom, and it would jump a row a second, and all those button clicks would go into a buffer, so I’d have to wait for a minute as it scrolled one line at a time.
Since taking out my card, and going back to onboard settings, the speed has been fine, but it’s still just generally slow. It can’t do things I could otherwise do with Office (resizing columns to exact pixels is extremely hard), and it looks like they tried to give it a fancy UI and failed. If I don’t use it, it unloads from memory, at takes half a minute to reload from paging files.
I SUPPOSE what’s taking so long in the save/load is that it goes through every single cell everywhere and changes all the ‘,’ in formulae to ‘;’, among other things.
I’m lazy. I could re-install Windows again and install Office (actually, I could install Office right now anyway), but I should only have this for another two months, when I get my new laptop.
Although, if I can’t get a job I won’t be able to afford spending half my money.
Lately, I got some job ads for jobs that ask for things I just can’t provide, as well as experience in the field, for something like $40,000 a year. That would be nice.
Someone else was looking for a website, so I really should have taken it. At that moment, though, I wasn’t nearly as confident in my webmaking abilities as I am right now.
As it is, my design skills are horribly entry-level. I haven’t taken any sort of schooling in design, but I’ve got a natural flair and I’m sure I can learn from looking at what professional designers, such as Douglas Bowman, have done.
There’s still so much to learn.
Addition:
Wow, I was really going at this in entirely the wrong manner.
I took Bowman’s page and stripped it of its CSS, after I noticed the manner in which the HTML was stacked. With all the styling stripped away, you get a very readable page with an image, lists of links, bolding and emphases and quotes where needed, and all in all a very flowing layout. The only problem, of course, is that you’ll end up with such un-styles as tall stacks of thumbnails where they’d otherwise be arranged in a grid.
My site, meanwhile, uses… well, I guess I use styles for headers. I never really had much use, because p and h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 etc always added extra whitespace, which I didn’t want.
Comparing the two pages now, though, my page is less readable and wouldn’t be viewable on a small screen, because the layout persists even without CSS.
As it is, I’ve already completely removed those part-specific classes and replaced them with ID tags. My reference seems to use a bunch of internested tags, so I’ll see what those do. I think the main thing is to name the largest, and then use child selectors to burrow downwards.
I’m excited, of course. It’s 4:00am.
I think, in light of my new ability to get things done, that I’ll stay up all night every night and wake up a good deal after noon. I seem to work best that way.