I have upgraded this site with the  DNBE 1.4 release.

The good news for those who have downloaded the Greenway theme from my downloads page is that, thankfully, it will work fine.
The not so good news is for those of you who have downloaded the RandomQuote extension is that there are a couple of bugs in it, mainly relating to null references.  I am currently working on these and hope to have an update out to you withing the next 24 hours or so.

As always, feel free to leave any comments or suggestions regarding these themes and extensions.

I was looking around again at web design tutorials and came across this tutorial on creating a site for drupal.  Drupal is an open source CMS. 

http://www.gomediazine.com/tutorials/create-a-killer-band-site-with-drupal-introduction/

I am not familiar with Drupal and will probably never use it, but the first couple of steps in the tutorial series can be applied generally to the design of any site using Illustrator.  I have listed them below for quick access.

Read Part 1 - Design it Illustrator
Read Part 2 - Slicing it Illustrator
Read Part 3 - XHTML

Those of you who frequent this site will notice the blog looking a bit of a mess recently.  Someone managed to hack into my site and change the style of the site and a few other settings which meant it looked a bit of a mess.  It's really disheartening when this happen, fortunately they were not totally malicious and did not totally destroy the site.  All the content was still here, just the presentation was changed.

Thankfully now everything is updated and back to normal.  Hopefully it won't happen again.

I have been doing a bit of looking around lately, trying to find some detailed tutorials on Graphic Design.  Simple enough for somone like me who is not naturally artistic.  I did come across a blog by David Airey where he lists what he considers the Top 50 Graphic Design Blogs.  It's gonna take some time to look at all 50 sites.

Following on from my last post about creating a CSS Layout from Scratch.  I did find a rather intersting series of posts titled 'The Highly Extensible CSS Interface'.  This is (quote) a four-part series of how-to’s and savvy conversation (end quote) where the author speaks extensively about markup — XHTML, CSS, and a little scripting.

The Highly Extensible CSS Interface - Introduction
The Highly Extensible CSS Interface I - The Foundation
The Highly Extensible CSS Interface II - CSS Selectors and JQuery
The Highly Extensible CSS Interface III - Adding Ajax Interactivity
The Highly Extensible CSS Interface IV - Testing for Extensibility

With each article links are provided for downloading code discussed in the article and to see a demo of what is presented in the article as in the image below,

It's now Bank Holiday Monday, you probably won't be surprised to hear I have eaten too many easter eggs and am quite sick of chocolate, until tomorrow. 

After modifying the Greenway CSS template for use as a DNBE theme, I really wanted to be able to create more themes.  But this time from scratch all by myself rather than taking something someone else had created and just modifying it.  I have a knowledge of CSS and have mainly used it for formatting and styles, but hadn't mastered the art of page layout with CSS.  A quick search on Google brought up a lot of results but one particular tutorial caught my attention on Subcide.  They have a step by step tutorial on creating a 3 column layout from scratch, just what I was looking for.  I like the fact that the author explains the Why and Wherefore of his methods.  IE quirks are even taken into consideration.  The finished product uses nothing but XHTML, CSS and a few images. 

The next blog theme or CSS template I create will be done while following this tutorial.  I recommend you read it, especially if you are starting out using web design or using CSS.

RandomQuote is now at version 1.1

I have done a minor update to the admin Quote.aspx page.  You can now edit a quote in the grid.  This saves you having to delete the quote and then add it again as a new entry.

I have achieved this by using a DataList control and storing in an the XML file as before.  The rest of the extension is unchanged.

The updated extension is available from the download page.

All you have to do to update any previous version is to overwrite the admin page ( Quote.aspx , Quote.aspx.cs).  Everything else is the same.

The thing I love about the internet is you can get a lot of things for free, and legally too.  I wanted to create a theme for DNBE but I did not want to create the whole site template myself, images, styles etc.   So I turned to the internet, as I often do in these situations and found this Greenway template on free CSS templates.  I adapted this free template  for use as a theme on the blog. 

Click for a live preview.  (This preview has the RandomQuote extension that I created)

You can downlaod the theme from here Greenway.zip (32.99 kb) or from my Downloads page

** This extension has been updated **
** Go to Random Quote Extension Update **

I have created an extension for DNBE.   For installation instructions see the README.TXT file included in the downloadable zip. 

The extension is "RandomQuote", and does pretty much what it says on the tin. RandomQuote allows you to display a quote on a page, randomly selected from those you have entered via the admin page.  You record two pieces of information, a quote and a reference, i.e. author, date and time or place of the quote.

Any quotes you have entered will be displayed in the list.

When the control that renders, there are three style sheet classes specified.  You can use these classes to style the look of the control using CSS.  The three classes are 'quotemain', 'quotetext' and 'quoteref'.  The rendreed HTML will look like this:

<div class="quotemain">
    <div class="quotetext"> Some quote text here </div>
    <div class="quoteref"> Some reference here </div>
</div> 

a simple style sheet may look like:

/****************************************
Random Quotes
***************************************/

.quotemain{ /* Specify style here */} 

.quotetext{ font-weight:bold;}  

.quoteref{ font-style:italic ;} 

You can download it from here or from my downloads page.

version 1.0, 17th February 2008.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any feedback, suggestions for improvements or if you find any bugs.

Godaddy do offer a free installation of the dotnetblogengine when you buy hosting with them.  Despite that, I decided to manually install the blog myself.  I did have a couple of problems which I managed to solve, though it would have helped if I had found this post on donnefelker.com before I attempted the install.  Read this post if you wish to install blogengine on godaddy.

STOP! Don't go away, your shortcut is not wrong. 

Why a move?
Well, after much thought and pondering I decided to move my site to a different host.  Along with it I have changed blogging software.  I have done this for a number of reasons.  My site was previously hosted at Freewebdot, I chose there about 2 years ago when it was free to have a site hosted by them.  Due to reasons "beyond their control" they now require people to pay for each of their hosted sites.  Things have been OK for a while, but until recently I have not been able to log into my account with them because when you click the LOGIN links the login screen does not load.  I have sent many emails to them over the past couple of months with no reply more than an automated response. 

Software
Iwas previously using the free express edition of Community server which worked well out of the box, but is not very customisable unless you have either money or time. I want to use blogging software that can be maintained and customised without needing lots of time and money, which also rules out the possibility of writing the whole site myself.  So after some digging around and considreation I have settled on the open source blog engine at dotnetblogengine.net.  As far as software years go this is very infant software written in C#.  It has however gained quite a large amount of support from users as well as the general community.  The strong points for the blog engine project are first and foremost it is free, it is easy to create and apply your own theme of choice and it is relatively easy to create your own extensions.  So easy infact that I have already written a Random Quote extension, when installed the administrator can add quotes and a control will randomly select one to display on each page rerfresh.  This is more surprising when you consider that I am an experienced Visual Basic developer and the extension is written in C#. 

Here is a list of the available extensions by the community that I have so far installed in the blog engine:

• Comment Toolbar
• lightbox
• Quickerlinks
• Social bookmarks
• Youtube
• Askimet antispam extension
  If you do want to install this extension you may need to update some of the blogengine files as explained here.

It is going to take a couple of weeks to transfer my blog posts over from my previous host, so please bear with me.