sethdesants.com

* - still in sandbox

I would like to wish everyone a happy new year! I was lucky enough to welcome in the new year with some college friends in my hometown; so the chance to meet up with some good high school friends was greatly appreciated.

I have been all over the place with recent site improvements. The majority of my efforts have been focused around some element or another of user login.

-I started work on a main control panel for DB functions (view/edit/etc). Like my blog entry interface, I am the only intended user, as such I usually focus less on appearance and more on usability/functionality. Even so, the simple fact that nothing I am doing has any sort of time line, other than any I choose to put on myself, I have the chance to take my time on all aspects of the sites development. I would like to think that any interface I build for myself would certainly be solid enough to easily be ported for multiple applications/uses. The progress I made thus far on this control panel is encouraging. Without intending on it, the page is slowly beginning to resemble the current DB interface I use, phpMyAdmin.

-I started work on a user login screen yesterday. It s currently under my "links" section. I started working on it for a few reasons. I wanted to re-write the login code, cleaning up certain areas; I wanted a page for people to be sent to when trying to access a restricted part of the site; and I was looking for a new page to use the sessions with. Thus far, the best thing that has come out of the page is an experiment I tried tonight with the CSS, which has yielded some nice design options. So far, I have only tested it in FireFox, and I am not very optimistic for it's chances of surviving the IE gauntlet, but at least this is a start. I'm sure this method of displaying information is posted all over the place, but I was excited to thing of it as a "What if?" and actually implement it as I had originally envisioned it, without many complications (note I said it likely wont work in IE, yet). I was looking to add some more information on the login screen, but I kinda liked the simplicity of nothing at all except the login form (bad UI, but it's my site). I decided on using the Javascript method of hiding/displaying DIVs as I previously posted about. It worked as expected. Then I thought it would be cool if more of the page changed, so I started fooling around with the position/size of the hidden DIV. Finally, after some Photoshop fun, I made the background for a DIV which would lay completely over the other DIV (background only), so the login form will still be displayed, but the background wont. At this point, everything can be modified with general ease. I fooled around with a graphic for a while tonight, but look forward to working on it again, sometime soon. On an unrelated note, the login/logout is currently working well, with the exception of the sessions. Sessions are being carried over from the "splash" page to the "login" page, but not the other way around. I will work on that as well in the near future.

There are also some visual differences that I added a little while back. The 470 "Main" column now has new background boxes. They aren't the final look I will likely go with, but I think they are nice for now.

As I look around the site, there are a ton of things that I need to go back and work on/fix, and luckily, I have plenty of time to do it. I think I will put an emphasis on content that will require user login. The entire idea around login is so I can put up stuff like photos and videos, with the ability to control access. I guess we will just have to wait and see what and when new stuff will get put up :-) Have a good night.

-and sorry for such incredibly boring/bland/blah blog posts. At this point, they are helpful for me to track the progress of the site, some day, hopefully, I wont still be designing the site!