Ryan Condron’s Designer Blog

I have been working on the Portrait of Central Illinois Project some but as the semester presses onward, I am having more and more homework which is taking time away from the project. I am working on it when i get the free time and hope to get some inspiration from a new PHP book that arrived in the mail today. I hope to get this done soon, so i can then move on to my portfolio and get it converted into a database driven website. Overall, the work on the project continues and is progressing slowly.

I recently posted information about the switching of the Portrait of Central Illinois Project to a database driven website, and was looking at a content management system for my website. I have finally decided that Joomla, a the leading PHP content management system is not suffiecient for the project and I have decided to build my own database driven website using PHP and MySQL. The new feature may take longer for the development cycle but has a better chance for growth and control under my own system. I plan on having a ton of new features including a ATOM Feed to go along with the RSS Feed, guest polls, and at a later date comment instead of the use of a forum. The forum may still exist but it is uncertain at this time what is in store for the feature and the Portrait of Central Illinois Blog will be going away. I will instead have a category in this blog to deal with information updates about the project.

I hope and anticipate the site will be up and running sometime in November. The new site will have adds to help support the growth of the project. The ads will be a banner at the top and bottom of the page. There will also be a PayPal donate button on our homepage if you want to help even further.

Have a great day, everybody.

I have worked with Joomla for a few weeks now and I have changed my mind… The amount of work modifying everything so it looks just like I want it and not have the ability to add different things, I have decided to build my database driven application, it will look better and function better that I could make with Joomla. I still plan to add some ads to the site, to help with hosting costs and traveling costs to see new places, I will also have a donate button for PayPal if you want to help even more! I can’t wait for everyone to see the new and improved Portrait of Central Illinois.

All summer I have worked on and blogged about the look of my project called Portrait of Central Illinois, while work keep up I have been working with a Content Management System, known as a CMS for short. This would make it quicker update, make the site look totally different with the change of a theme, but also could allow for user to login and view content made for them and not non users like the old website. So, as I continue to work with the Content Management System through a program called WAMP, I will soon make the switch online and be able to focus on content instead of the design.

I have also decided after a long time of hating online ads, I have come arround and am going to place a banner ad the top and bottom of each page. This will help generate money so I can have gas to bring you more and better information about the beautful places in Central Illinois. I want to bring you the places from counties all over Central Illinois instead of just East Central Illinois.

I work at the Stardust Drive-In Theater in Charleston, Illinois and am now I maintain their web site. The old theme was full of table code for the layout, thanks to Microsoft FrontPage. I designed a new theme that looks better, loads faster, easier to update, and has more features. This is all posible by using CSS or cascading stylesheets. The film theme came to me while threading up ‘Night at the Musuem: Battle of the Smithsonian.’ The look of a film strip, would give it the artistic them along with a red plush carpet background.  Thats how it all got started and I went home that night and started to constuct the theme and showed the boss about two weeks later and it finally came to life this past week! So, I have offically redesigned my first business website.

After using Kompozer tonight, I realize why I absolutely hate WYSIWYG editors! I was using Kompozer to update the website for work and it kept corrupting. So, I would have to start over, after 4 times I had to save after each step. I like coding because it is easy and half the time if Notepad++ has a problem, it saves my work in a temp file. The thing with Kompozer is that it is a bug fix for Nvu. It doesn’t work very well and is aggravating to use. These situations are why I hand code.

I also hand code because I can create something better coding than with a WYSIWYG editor. I am working on a theme for the work website so it will be easier to update and look better and more attractive. This will be something completely different than they have now. Once i get the pages finalized we will switch to the new design.

And that’s why I code…