Crash course on CSS

News:
After too many hours of wrestling with CSS coding, I’ve finally got this baby up and running. I’ve gone and converted some of the recent entries into the WordPress archive, but since this website dates all the way back to 1999, I’ll probably just convert the entries starting with 2006. If anyone’s bored enough to read the older entries, he’ll just have to do it without the benefits of WordPress’s categories, archives, or other nifty features.

Weblog:
I’ve never been very good with technical stuff–particularly anything to do with coding. To this day, although I’ve designed and maintained my website for well over seven years, I’ve yet bothered to learn a single line of html code (hey, blame it on WYSIWYG editors like Netscape Editor, the very first web editor I used, and Dreamweaver, what I’ve been using since 2001). I think at some point I was forced to learn simple java scripting because I needed that extra something beyond the capabilities of html, but by now I’ve forgotten it all. I thought I’d never have to deal with that kind of headache ever again–until now.

Most of you tech-savvy kids already know what CSS is, but for those of you who have been living in a cave, CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet, which is like a set of rules that governs the design of a webpage. The beauty of CSS is that you make any changes to it, that change will automatically be applied to any webpage relying on that particular CSS as its set of rules. I’ve known about CSS for years, but like I mentioned, I’ve been spoiled by WYSIWYG editors, so I never had to deal with CSS as I never used it–until now (see the pattern here? I avoid any techie stuff for as long as I could, until I’m forced to learn a new trick).

This whole CSS business happened because I’ve been on a quest to find the perfect blogging software–one that could be installed on a server of your choice instead of being hosted by a company like LiveJournal or MySpace. I visit Ragnar Tornquist’s blog regularly, as I’m a big fan of his (The Longest Journey rocked my world), and I was immediately drawn to the simplicity and the practicality of his blog, which is powered by WordPress. I just knew I had to give WordPress a whirl, and what a whirl it turned out to be! See, WordPress uses CSS, and if I wanted to use it, I’d have to learn it (unless you just use a pre-made template like Rangnar does, which I couldn’t because I wanted to intergrate it into my website, so some heavy customization is required on my part). Unfortunately for me, WYSIWYG doesn’t exist for CSS–at least not in the way that something like Dreamweaver is capable of. I searched high and low and tried a bunch of CSS editors like TSW WebCoder, EngInSite CSS Editor, Style Studio, Amaya, Topstyle..etc, and none of them gave me the kind of immediate feedback I needed. Finally someone at the WordPress forum pointed me to a lovely little free CSS editor called CSSVista. Bingo! It wasn’t 100% what I wanted, but it beats everything else I’ve tried into a bloody pulp. CSSVista is incredibly simple and elegant–it does just one thing, and does it very well. What it does is give you a live view of your CSS in both IE and Firefox at the same time in a split screen, with the CSS code on the side. Any changes you make shows up instantly in the live view–simply fucking beautiful. What you see now as you read this is the result of hours of me learning CSS and tweaking (I started with the Classic template from WordPress). This is probably a one-time thing, and I’ll soon forget all I learned just like I did with java scripting. Let’s hope whatever next techie stuff I need to learn won’t happen for many years to come (wishful thinking. Everytime I work on a piece of new music, I’m forced to learn some new features on some sequencer/softsynth/sample library).