GalaxyGoo Blogs

How does that sound? Crazy, huh... Well, ofcourse it's crazy... But that doesn't mean you can't try to mimic an OS! And that's exactly what EyeOS does... It's 'a free, cross-platform Personal Content Manager System based upon the style of a Desktop Operating System.' Written in PHP, it is quite a nice little project and it is quite fun to play around with the demo, also cuz it has a few 'application's that you'd also find in yer standard OS. Unfortunately, or is that fortunately?, it doesn't seem to run too well on IE cuz of CSS-related issues, but you can't have it all, can you?

Posted by Edwin at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I uploaded the new, CSS based, version of the main GalaxyGoo site today. Tell me what you think. I'm waiting for bug reports galore :-)

What do you think of the design compromise for pages with Flash content?

This is my first experience with CSS for layout, and it's become a love-hate relationship. With more experience, I'm sure it will be mostly pure love ;-)

Posted by Kristin at 02:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After trying to get my layout to work one way without success, I've changed my layout.

The problem was that, in smaller browser windows, the flash movie would crowd out the side bar in unpleasant ways. I tried using percentage for the dimensions of the movie, but that behaved differently in every browser I tested it in...not a good sign for the browsers I hadn't tested in.

So, in all pages with flash movies as the content, I've modified the side bar. Some of the information in the side bar is now in a "top bar", some is in the "what's going on here" section, and part is still in the side bar which is now below the movie.

I'm implementing it now :-)

Posted by Kristin at 04:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was so close, and yet...

Yes, I'm struggling with getting the site's new design to work across browsers at different window dimensions. I've got four elements in the layout: banner, content, sidebar, and footer. The last big challenge I was facing was to get content and sidebar to sit side by side, and to have them behave as they were the same length regardless real length, without overlapping other elements. First, I tried using position: absolute for the sidebar. But that led to problems of overlapping elements.

So, now I'm returning to float. To keep both content and sidebar vertically aligned at the top, I've nested them into a container div and set them to float: left and float: right. Since many pages have flash movies in them, I want the sidebar to move below the content if needed. Well, so far it's working in IE, but not mozilla or opera. Very frustrating.

On the bright side, the sidebar isn't overlapping the footer anymore :-)

Posted by Kristin at 02:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, it's true. Basic CSS is very easy. However, as soon as I started table-free CSS layout design I realized that this was an all new game. I'm still very much of a novice, but I can see why folks started using words like "zen" with CSS. It's almost a meditation.

I'm still keeping it simple, but here's a sneak peak at my attempt to design with two columns a banner and a footer: Table of Contents for GalaxyGoo

We all need a little help from our friends..I got some help over at bit-101. I'm posting a link to the thread because it may be useful to others.

Posted by Kristin at 03:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Today, seeking technical inspiration in my efforts to convert GalaxyGoo to full CSS, I took a peek at source code for the O'Reilly website and was surprised to find that it was table based.

I turn, instead to

• CSS Zen Garden


• Holy CSS Zeldman

Posted by Kristin at 01:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)