Why

I just am working on transferring my web hosting to just host and it is a giant pain! Taking forever! I'm kinda at a stall until I get this completed. I will be doing mass work over spring break! I hope you all have a fantastic Spring break 2 and spring break 3

-Kyle

jeff is a genius.





do you see that? different backgrounds, same CSS. thanks to jeff.

as of right now, i'm working on picking out different backgrounds and editing my newly taken portfolio photos.

also, i will probably start designing another website in the same manner (drupal) for a friend who needs a small portfolio site.
so i will be extra needy.

tonight i spent time researching domain/hosting options.
what i have found so far:

godaddy.com
hostgator.com
pair.com
networksolutions.com
1and1.com
justhost.com
domain.com

obviously, i want it to be reliable and affordable. oh and support drupal and be not terribly confusing for a n00b like me.

thoughts?

Hosting

So I haven't made much progress in the last few days because I've been out of town, but I thought I'd make a post anyway. Danelle texted me earlier to ask about hosting and domain names, so I just thought I'd share about mine. I got both my hosting and domain name through GoDaddy.com. The domain name was like 15 bucks or something like that. The hosting service was more expensive. I got it last summer for like 130 bucks or so, but that is for 3 years worth of hosting with GoDaddy. Drupal should be compatible with GoDaddy as far as I know but I haven't tested it. Anyway I think there are probably free hosting places out there so don't go paying 130 bucks just because you think Danica Patrick is hot.

-Love Dan

I have been playing with the css trying to figure out how to get these two nodes to sit right where I want them. I have not had much luck though.

These first two are modules I'm considering playing with. They seem like they could be potentially helpful, but also potentially distracting.

http://drupal.org/project/glossary

http://drupal.org/project/nodeasblock

These two links lead to blog posts that focus on helping with Drupal development. I've found some useful information, but at the same time I've found a lot of information that I'm not sure what to do with.

http://urlgreyhot.com/personal/weblog/drupal_tip_1_inserting_blocks_content_pages_blog_entries_etc

http://urlgreyhot.com/personal/taxonomy/term/101

While visiting this blog, however, I discovered that a problem I have with Drupal on my machine is translating to other Drupal-based websites.


The first image is a screen capture from the blog I just referenced, and the second is from my drupal test site. It seems to be a problem with anything classified as a certain header type, but I'm not entirely sure how to go about fixing it. Any ideas?

This is what I'm looking at as of today. I've got my logo and navigation in the correct location. The specific CSS styles are what has been giving me the most issues.

From the start of this direction I wanted my website design to rely heavily on visual interpretation and not so much on verbal. I wanted the emphasis for my gallery website to be on pictures, and I knew that I needed to limit my online portfolio to a very small selection of pieces.

With this comp I realized that I wanted the visitor to know immediately what they could find and how they could find it. By bringing thumbnails and the sub-navigation for the gallery page to the forefront of the website I could immediately immerse the viewer in my work, which seems to be a proper introduction to who I am and how I think.

(As a note: the 'magenta' parts are what would appear during a rollover state and each section would have actual images, not gray boxes (admittedly I am still working on thumbnail images for each section, and even on category titles).)

okay guys-

i'm stuck. help me out here.

i go to "content types". i create a new content type for the text block that i need to appear on the homepage.

is it here that i can define what kind of content this is? text, img, etc? cause i can't. i have the options of 'name' , 'type' (computer-readable name), 'description' & submission, workflow, and comment settings.

anyway, next step i go to create content and under my new text content i can put in a title and body text and set comment preferences. save it.

then what? cause it suddenly shows up on all my pages.

so i go to views, and check through the settings there. they're throwing an error under my fields settings.

"Error: handler for node_data_field_main_image > field_main_image_fid doesn't exist!"

thats great, but i can't change it, and it won't let me add a new field (aka my frontpage text content i added). it doesnt show up in my list of stuff to add.

i'm FRUSTRATED! any ideas???

Due to our most recent critique, I have decided to completely start over on my design. Yay! I'm really excited about the new concept, and I think it definitely shows my personality and way of design much better. For the most part, the elements are going to be hand drawn, so that's what I've been working on the past few days.

So here are some of my concept sketches, more art nouveau with a decent amount of white space.

The boxes on the front page will remain static - and wont change or pull anything from the database. It will show work from the catagory it represents (The titles will be hand drawn on top of the swirls). Currently, I'm still in the sketching process for this.

The last picture is my header and footer. My name (Or soon to be name) will go up on the header in the white empty area. "Contact" or "About" will be clickable. Does anyone feel like "Contact" And "About" shouldn't be in the header? Should it be somewhere else? Let me know! :D

Header

So I figured out how to make my header actually look like my mock ups. All I had to do to put my logo in there was to change the logo.png file that was already in the starter kit. From there, the rest was just making adjustments to the css style sheet. On a side note, I'm watching the Bourne Ultimatum right now and it makes me wanna learn secret ninja moves from the government.

Dan out.

this morning i spent some more time working on my comps, to incorporate the much needed navigation.
the navigation on the home page will be in the introductory paragraph: you click on what you want to see.
this is what i came up with for the portfolio and other sections:



so after that i messed around in drupal a bit. it is giving me fits and i have been very frustrated with it today but at least i'm becoming familiar with it. tomorrow i will crack open my book and focus on it for a few hours.

this is what my homepage looks like so far:



great, huh? as you can see.. i have my navigation set up the way i like it. once upon a time i even had the introductory paragraph on the homepage, but i messed it up somehow and then i got it on all the pages which seemed like a step backwards so i am just starting over tomorrow. hope you all had a good day!

I've been working on translating my visual ideas to a working Drupal interface. I feel like I have a start that is a bit hacked together. I need to add navigation above and below the logo and actually create the rotation of images, in flash, that appears on the right. One of the real challenges for me is switching my thinking from creating pages as I would have in Dreamweaver to creating views that show nodes and blocks of information as is done in Drupal.

I've been working on making the gallery page more navigable and comfortable to visit. There are still a few small kinks to work out, like how to handle pieces with more than one image without over-complicating the visual effect and minor spacing consistency issues, but at least it is getting closer!