Dear MTV,

I know I don’t exactly fit your age profile anymore but I really want to be MADE into a killer PHP programmer. I love watching your shows on a relaxing Sunday afternoon and I’ve seen girls become prom queens, rappers and skateboarders. How exciting would it be to turn a motivated grrrrrl into an excellent programmer?

I can already imagine dramatic framing shots at 4am with pizza boxes and cola, such as these:

This is me at the RFID Hackers Camp in a futile attempt to write a php Flickr script at 5am. I am a cut-and-paste coder, I can put little pieces together, tweak them a bit and hope they work. However, I would love to be able to produce beauties such as these:

• Interactive storytelling experiment #2: The urban areas of tomorrow by Wilbert Baan
• Google News interpretations by Flickr by Erik Borra

We could show how great the art of producing clean code is and how difficult it is to achieve. And while we’re at it, we could do something really politically correct (meh) such as promoting the fun of technical education and skills to girls.

What do you think MTV?

I installed the Now Reading plugin written by Rob Miller to display the books I am currently reading in my sidebar. The reason I chose this plugin is because it allows you to create a database of your books and offers reviewing possibilities. Installing and configuring the plugin was easy but after adding my first book the layout of my sidebar was messed up (see picture on the left). The border of the box had disappeared and the design did not quite match the rest of the page. My first guess was that it had something to do with the hierarchy and inheritance aspect of style sheets because CSS determines how the plugin is displayed. Once the page is loaded the PHP code of the plugin is “executed” into HTML (more on this later) which is sided by the style sheet which rules the style/layout.

I took a look at the PHP code from sidebar.php located in the templates folder (now-reading/templates/sidebar.php) and noticed the following:

Read More…

I recently redesigned my blog because I was not completely satisfied with the old look. I thought it was a bit too dark and a bit too messy. Instead of starting from the scratch and building my own theme I adjusted the Coffee Spot theme I was using. There is one main reason why I did not attempt to build my own theme from the scratch: I am not a coder.

I am not a PHP coder
I can read code and interpret most of the code so most of the time I can adjust the code to my needs but I cannot write it so that it suits my needs. I am sure I could learn it if I had the time but unfortunately time is not always on my side.

I am not a CSS coder
Some people argue CSS is not code while others argue that markup languages are in fact code (more on this later). I side myself with those who see CSS as code and I see and experience CSS as an executed markup code. The effects of the coding are not visible until it is interpreted and executed by a browser. I have never really learned CSS but because I know HTML it is fairly easy to interpret and adjust. In the early days of making websites content and markup were interwoven in HTML. With the advent of CSS those two were separated making it easier and quicker to adjust the look of a website. For example font type and size were no longer directly coded into HTML but defined in a separate Cascading Style Sheet. The fact that the style sheet is cascading means that it is highly hierarchic. This hierarchy is the main thing I struggled with while changing the design of my site.

One of the powers of style sheets is that there is a hierarchy of relationships. These relationships are defined by the concepts of cascade, inheritance, and specificity within the language of CSS.¹

I am not completely done with the redesign of my site yet but I am amazed that pretty much everything was accomplished just by changing things in the style sheet. No need to adjust the PHP except for adding one single line in the footer to show my tagcloud which was previously nested in a widget (more on PHP in widgets later). I am quite eager to dive into CSS to fine tune my site. Before and after the makeover:

The main problem I am focusing on now is the fact that my Now Reading plugin doesn’t display my books correctly. I am pretty sure this has to do with the hierarchy and inheritance aspect of style sheets.

1. Holzschlag, Molly. Cascading style sheets : the designer’s edge . San Francisco Calif.: SYBEX. p. 43 [↩]