Thinking about switching your site to includes?
I am slowly working in PHP includes in the header and footer of my pages. It is a great may to manage content across sites but today I learned something. Save yourself a load of headache and trouble of having to switch file types and add this ditty your .htaccess file:
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .php3 .phtml .html
That way your .html files act like PHP and you can use PHP includes. Not satisfied with PHP? How about shtml…
AddType text/html .html
AddHandler server-parsed .html
Now back to fixing my muck up this morning an remember kids – do not change file names unless you really really really have to. Here is a good .htaccess tutorial that you can refer to as well.
Care to test a form?
Wondering where my ‘give us feedback’ link is? Well I was working on form for much to long for what it is. To be honest my part-time developer was working on it when she isn’t being swamped by 4th year work. Anyway here is my give us feedback form. Please test it out for me and let me know what you think.
While you are at it, could you test out the search from the web.uwaterloo home page? The same functionality has been added to the search page as well. Let me know what you think and if you have any problems with it. The search is basically the same one used on the Graphics web site.
Note to self: do not override checked out files from laptop
I forgot what work I had done on files that were checked out by my laptop version of DW and now I have over-written some stuff when I should have made a test page. Anyway. Monday. Grr.
Long weekend reading
Over the weekend I sat down and went through Dave Shea’s and Molly Holzschlag’s new book The Zen of CSS Design (which you can get at the UW bookstore). What a great book. It gives some good insight into what is behind the CSS Zen Garden and some design concepts. Really worth a read if you can squeeze it into those end of year budgets 
There were a couple things that did stand out while I read it though. The first bit is more of a ‘this is the code in the garden and why’ which has caused a bit of stir in places. One discussion that spilled over into emails to Dave Shea caused him to post a response on his web site about the AAA statement on the Zen Garden. Another one, The Zen of Disinformation brings to light some issues with the accuracy of some parts of the book. Molly and Dave have comments in the thread of that article. Interesting thread.
Even guru’s make mistakes and they really shouldn’t be tarnished too much for it… the book is about the Zen Garden and design, for that it is really good book. Just be sure to grab Web Standards Solutions or Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards (both should be in the bookstore here) if you are looking for more accurate and extensive information on web standards
What a short strange week it has been.
Yup things have been slow to be posted. My apologies for the CSS documentation and the XHTML.
This afternoon you should see a Malarkey style topographical image of the CLF XHTML. My notes from last week’s ‘create your own CSS’ will be up as well. Over the weekend I will work on more detailed step by step if I get some time and the weather is nasty For now Macromedia has some information on Design Time Style Sheets for those forging ahead. Remember that you need to copy the CSS files from http://uwaterloo.ca/css/ that you need and when you bring them in you need the proper order, including your custom.css.
More details appearing soon… mad week I tell ya. Mad.
