Ganeshnomicks

Over the past few days(almost a week) I resumed working on a content management system that I had abandoned a few months ago. It is coming up quite all right, and has some primitive functionality. I don’t see it replacing wordpress for my site but it may come handy for smaller sites. Anyways, the main challenge I faced while resuming was the lack of documentation/commenting(duh! the books never lied about comments). I have made it a point to comment on whatever new code I write. And also, kudos to the online tutorials which have made life easier. Pagination is easy with the help of online tuts.

For those who are not following…things’ll get clear as soon as the alpha version comes out…dont expect anything spectacular. It’ll contain some basic(basic is an understatement…downright skeletal would be appropriate) features. Its not intended for commercial purposes, its just something I am doing to try out my PHP skills. BTW did I mention it runs on PHP and uses MySQL database.

Stay tuned for more updates…and expect better posts in the recent future

This is one of those random snippets about web designing. I recorded amidst watching a movie.

The secret behind a good web design is that it makes sure that the content occupies the driving seat.  Sure there are beautiful graphic effects, photoshop tricks, fancy stuff to lure you, but as a designer you have to make sure that the design is not so overwhelming that it outshines the content. For a great design you need to make sure that you incorporate subtle effects to intact enhance the prominence of the content.

As more of our computing is moving from the desktop to the  web, I believe that we are going to see more of web based operating systems. There are basically two models that are being followed by these OSes, one is the eyeOS model and the other is yet to be implemented, the Google chrome OS model.

EyeOS is basically an operating system inside the web browser. It has all the basic desktop applications, and the files are hosted on their servers so they can be used from anywhere. The main drawback in this model is the limited control provided for browser applications to interact with the core processes. It is built mainly on PHP and javascript and a whole OS being developed from these languages will always have its limitations.  There exists an operating system, a browser and then eyeOS. The need for an operating system that works on cloud computing priciples and can interact with the core is aroused.

Enter Google Chrome. Chrome aims to solve these problems. It consists of(as speculated) a lightweight linux kernel and uses the chrome engine to browse. This model is far more suited because it eliminates the need of seperate operating system and a browser, it integrates them into one. The Chrome OS model promises to be more powerful and can more efficiently integrate the web with desktops.

What say?

While redesigning this site I came across a css hack by which borders inclined at an angle can be created. I observed it while designing the navigation and decided against removing the slants cuz I think they’re cool.

I decided to play a bit with this little hack and made myself some hills using plain html and css.

You can view it here.

The CSS

#hill
{
float: left;
width: 250px;
margin: 0px;
font-size: 21px;
}
#hill a {
display: block;
width:0px;
padding: 5px 5px 5px 10px;
border-bottom: 125px solid #fff;
text-decoration: none;
color: #000;
}
#hill ul{
margin: 0px;
list-style-type: none;
padding: 0px;
}
.h1
{
background: #e3e147;
border-left: 300px solid #e3e147;
}
.h2
{
background: #47e3b5;
border-top: 125px solid #fff;
border-left: 300px solid #47e3b5;
}

.h3
{
border-left: 300px solid #47c0e3;
border-top: 125px solid #fff;
background: #47c0e3;
}

.h4
{
border-left: 300px solid #e34765;
border-top: 125px solid #fff;
background: #e34765;

}

The HTML

<div id = “hill”>
<ul>
<li><a href=”#” class= “h1″></a></li>
<li><a href=”http://ganeshiyer.net/about/” class= “h2″></a></li>
<li><a href=”http://ganeshnomicks.blogspot.com/” class= “h3″></a></li>
<li><a href=”http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ganeshiyer/rssfeed” class= “h4″></a></li>

</ul>
</div>

I’d love to see your results, post ‘em here.