Ruelicke.net

Pro Blog Design had an article about formating blog posts for readability the other day. As we discussed further methods of styling your blog articles, we started talking about “the concept of making the first letter of a paragraph larger than the others“.

I then decided to give this technique a try on my blog and we continued talking about it, which helped me to tweak my CSS code to make this “magic” happen. The code for this “magic trick” was posted as comment, but I think it is better to put it into an extra tutorial article although it is nothing special if you know how to use Cascading Style Sheets.

There are two methods to achieve the goal, I will tell you how to do it and mention the advantages and disadvantages. Continue…

Unlike my PHP and HTML tutorials this tutorial will be different.

Although I know JavaScript I don’t use it often because of a few reasons. So I’m using this “tutorial” to
1. refresh my knowledge about JavaScript
and
2. teach you the one or the other useful thing.

Let’s begin

For this “tutorial” you should have some basic understanding about HTML and CSS, later it could be useful to know PHP, but that’s some time later… Continue…

The majority of the Internet users should have heard about the World Wide Web Consortium or better known as W3C.
The W3C is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web (W3). It is arranged as a consortium where member organizations maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the W3.

Or as Michael Martin from ProBlogDesign.com described it in his article “Does Valid Code Help Your Blog?”:

The W3C is the internet’s daddy. They created HTML, CSS, and dozens of other specifications that govern the use of the technologies that makes the internet thrive today. Valid code is code which meets their guidelines, and can be tested in a validator, such as the HTML and CSS ones.

I don’t want to discuss if using valid code should be used in a blog or if it is actually helpful for a blog. To be honest, I had it in mind, but somehow ProBlogDesign.com beat me to it, which is actually helpful because I can skip this part

To sum Michael Martin’s article up I dare to say that it is useful to use valid code, or better: Web Standards, in a blog.
His reasons are all great, but I have to add one more reason why you should use Web Standards: chances are higher that your blog is accessible by all humans, especially those with disabilities.

Less known among the Internet users is the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the W3C. Although some webmaster and “webcoder” know and follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) put together by the staff of the WAI there are way more webmaster / “webcoder” who are not following these guidelines. Continue…

You know how to write a valid XHTML document, however, the page is still not as nice looking as ruelicke.net or google.com or any other website out there.

What I teach you today is not how to create a professional website, but it is the basic design method any web programmer started with.
It is the old school table, but I add Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to the table to get it a nice look.

But before you can start, you need to have an idea how you want to structure your page. The best thing to do is to grab a piece of paper and make a draft. As example I made a draft in a graphic program, although I prefer the paper method:

Continue…

Now, after we learned how to show content and also had a first glance at variables, we will now go a step further.

To define a variable in PHP you just need to use $ and a variable name: $variable.
You can use as variable name whatever you like, however you are not allowed to let it start with a number, like $1variable and there are also some predefined variables, about which I will talk later.

There are many types of variables, but for now we concentrate on 4 types (actually 5, but the fifth will follow in another tutorial). Continue…