A Little Different Perspective

It is funny how new information can change an opinion. Take, for instance, yesterday's post. I saw the headline on an RSS feed on a friend's computer today and suddenly realized that with the picture that I had posted and the headline someone might get an entirely different picture of what I was trying to communicate than that which was actually intended! Rrrrowr!

Similarly, I am finding the results to the placeholder page that I posted tend to get an entirely different perspective depending on the browser, monitor size, etc. used by the viewer. I am really not happy at all with the way that the page is being publicly displayed. There are huge gaps in the layout that weren't present when I developed the site and checked it against both IE and Firefox. It would seem that using relative values when doing layout isn't an effective practice.

After I looked at the template for my Joomla site, I began to understand why I was having so many problems. They had created specific CSS fixes for each browser that the template encounters. I don't have time for that. I will probably rummage around in the next day or two and see if I can find a decent template to clean things up until I can get the Joomla site online. I do think that I will attempt to fix the HTML for the real estate feature that I have created for the site. (By the way, that house really is for sale.)

Speaking of the Joomla site. I AM VINDICATED!!!!!! I spent the better part of today working with a developer (who has almost 20 years' professional experience) who was as annoyed and perplexed about how to configure Joomla as I was. (It was nice to find out that no, I'm not an idiot when it comes to Joomla and that yes, Joomla is neither easy nor intuitive.)

Together we were able to come up with a couple changes to the new website, including downloading and configuring a weather module and an RSS news module. I'm pretty happy with the weather module, and the new website will be getting RSS feeds from The Weather Channel. I'm not completely happy with the RSS News module. I may end up grabbing another and seeing if I like it better. We also did some configuration to the layout of the page and discovered a module map for the template. (VERY useful piece of information.) Overall, I am thrilled with the progress that we made today.

One thing seems evident, though: it is time to revisit the Joomla tutorials. I understand enough now to where they should actually be helpful.