I spent a big ol’ wad of time this week learning Adobe After Effects CS4. The program is not for the meek.

As a hardcore Cubase user for years and years I have a certain idea in my head how things should operate. Obviously, Cubase and After Effects do totally different things. However, the manipulation of time based media is similar. At least it’s more similar than ice cream and uranium.

The bottom line is I needed help. Okay, I need A TON of help getting started with After Effects CS4! So I started on Youtube. I began on one one of my “I love the internet speeches” to an audience consisting of Panzer, my canine partner in crime. I hadn’t been this excited about the web since I found out that a cinder block weight 42.5 lbs.

To my amazement, I discovered that the Care Bears movie had let out and a stampede of kids  ran to the computers to be the first to make an After Effects Tutorial and put it on Youtube.   I have nothing against kids. I hate them.  I want to smash in most of the rotten little bastards, but I don’t have anything against them.

As cool as it is to actually see a kid taking the initiative to  make a tutorial about a complicated topic like After Effects, it’s not funny to me watch a kid shoot at the wrong goal when my business is at stake.   To put it simply, kids are dumb. That’s why they are called kids. That’s why (back in my day) we just rode bikes and waited for our peckers and brains to grow. Doogie Howser did all really difficult stuff for us.

It seems that it’s simply impossible to create an effective tutorial when your breath still wreaks of your momma’s boobie milk.

Solutions

Create Youthtube.com

The training wheels addition of Youtube.

Parents Could Try Being Honest

Being positive is great. However, it would sure make my day if dad actually watched the damn thing before saying, “That’s GREAT, junior!”.

Youtube Could Rethink Their Search Engine

Yeah, you heard me. You’d think the makers of the most sophisticated search engine on the planet (Google) could find a way to highlight the best videos.

Youtube Age Flagging

Our favorite video site could implement a simple questionnaire. For example, “Would you rather beat a woman with a hammer or a spoon?”. If they don’t answer, “Both”, they clearly aren’t grown up enough to provide any value to the world yet. They’ll come around.

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What Works In IE Seldom Works In Firefox…forget Safari or Opera
I never ceases to amaze me just how many new bugs I find when using CSS. I can get exactly what I want in one browser just to find that

CSS Requires You To Be A TOTAL Master
I’ve been dealing with CSS in “hobby” mode for nearly 3 years now. There definitely isn’t more than a couple of days that goes by where I haven’t made changes to a CSS file on some site, unfortunately. Still after all these years, I run into the appears to be a super simple problem and ends up taking an hour to fix. I’m talking about a link color not being the same in multiple browsers or Firefox not listening to my width requests because it is designed that way.

If you really want to use CSS without wasting tons of time, you must be a TOTAL css Master. If you are missing any piece to the puzzle and don’t understand each and every tool available to you, you are in for a long, disastrous haul.

If You Are Not A 100% Total Master of CSS, You Waste LOTS of Time
Just the other day, I had a list (the thing that uses ul and li tags). I wanted to display it horizontally with an image in the background for navigation tabs. I tried a method where I simply made the li 150px wide and 30px tall to force the li to be big enough for the background image tag to be properly displayed.

Of course, this worked fine in IE but was a complete failure in Firefox. This is usually a red flag that I’ve taken the wrong approach. So, I started searching the forums, made a post at Sitepoint, searched and searched and searched. It took about an hour to find a blog where someone mentioned that all you have to do is add a “float: left” to the li. I didn’t even know you could float an li tag at all.

This blog wasn’t mean to really focus on that problem. This blog was meant to illustrate that I wasted well over an hour just trying to do a simple horizontal list with a background image that looked great in both main browsers.

How Can I Make Money?
I have several sites that I have to run. I have 27 forum posts waiting for my reply at my recording forum right now on top of work on TextLinkCenter.com, Dogsniff.com, and a few sites I’m doing SEO on. I don’t have time to spent 1 hour on a stupid list. I’ve got money to make and things to do.

Faster With Tables
With a few exceptions, I’ve found that it is often much faster to use tables for the basic layout and divs / css for the smaller elements within those tables. Maybe this is just lack of CSS skill on my part, but that is my point. If I can achieve my goal in 4 hours instead of 12, I’m better off with tables, divs, and CSS. If a tableless design costs 8 extra hours, what’s the point?

What Are The Benefits To Tableless CSS Design?
I’m still looking to find the reason. I know that it’s always a good idea to separate the content from the style on a site. I understand this. However, what does that have to do with using a container table vs a container div.

I guess CSS uses less code. This is often true. However, in most cases the differences ins negligible. Who cares if I use an extra 1k on a page. The difference between a 42K page and a 43k page is 0 to be.

I know you can do some interesting tricks like hiding navigation (like they do at Sitepoint), but I’m just not sure that I care about that too much. That’s something that could be handled when a successful site is graphically redone. It’s not something that will make an otherwise unsuccessful site a huge hit. Since most of my sites are in the development process, the last thing I want to do is waste time on candy that won’t directly benefit me.

There Are 500 Ways To Do A Tableless Design
This is a huge problem in my opinion. It’s nice to have options when solving a problem. It’s nice not to have options when there is no problem. In other words, you can repaint your bedroom changing the color once per day. Or you could just like the color you have and move on to a more important problem.

My point is sometimes choice is a bad thing. (This comes from my recording studio background). If you like it, move on. Quit playing with it! CSS offers so many ways to get from point A to point B that it gets extremely confusing. On top of that, you need to figure that each and every method of getting from point A to point B has some kind of downside that you usually figure out once you’ve crossed the point of no return.

What’s All This IE Hack Stuff?
If CSS is sooooo great than why are people implementing javascript to fix “bugs” in IE. I realize that the CSS guys blame IE for this and not CSS. I don’t see this as a “bug” in the IE system, necessarily. I see it as a bug in CSS with IE system that makes the CSS waste more time and effort.

Conclusion
I’m not saying that a Tableless CSS design is a bad thing. I think it can be a GREAT thing. However, it’s only a great thing when it saves time and increases the chances that my site will be successful. This seams to be limited to the 100% CSS Masters.

If you are 100% CSS Master, than you may not agree with what I’ve said in this blog. That’s fine. If you understand all the ins and outs of working with CSS, it probably is quick and easy to get what you want.

However for anyone in the “Less than 100% CSS Master” level, good luck. The ideal utopia CSS is a crock. If you are trying to tackle such an enormously difficult design (like tableless CSS) make sure you have an extra 30 hours to deal with all the problems you run into. Maybe read a book that covers CSS from cover to cover….I wish I would have done that 3 years ago. Maybe I should do it today!

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I was attempting to use an inline list in the header of my new Dog Digg site called DogSniff.com. I usually don’t use background image tabs just for simplicity’s sake, but I felt that this site really required the tabbed look.

My HTML:

<div id="menu">
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.dogsniff.com">Hot Topics</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.dogsniff.com/upcoming">What's New</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.dogsniff.com/comments">Comments</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.dogsniff.com/submit">Submit</a></li>
</ul>
</div>


I setup the usual inline list code:

#menu ul {
height: 30px;
display: inline;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}

#menu ul li {
display: inline; background-image:url(tab001.gif);
padding: 5px 0 0 0;
margin: 0px;
list-style-type: none;
width: 116px;
}


It looked great in IE but Firefox wouldn’t listen to my width: 116px or height: 30px styles. Great! Of course, if IE works and Firefox doesn’t, there is usually something wrong with my implementation of the entire CSS.

It turns out that IE paying attention to my width and height settings is an error as LI pages should not use “block” styles (which I’m slowly getting the hang of).

Just Add float:left
It turns out that the solution for getting my background image to work well with both IE and Firefox is to use a float: left in the li style like this:

#menu ul li {
float: left;
display: inline; background-image:url(tab001.gif);
padding: 5px 0 0 0;
margin: 0px;
list-style-type: none;
width: 116px;
}

That took care of it for me!

Brandon Drury

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Frankly, I’m amazed at how fast I can setup a site using Wordpress.

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Chase’s old man has got some land somewhere here in Southeast Missouri that he offers to people around the universe to go hunting. Chase’s dad (who may not even exist) has remained anonymous so far during the web development process as all my dealings have been with Chase.

From the way that Chase talks, his dad had never even used the internet until a week ago. However, this doesn’t mean that he can’t have a great website to further promote his business endeavors.

So Chase, who is a little more up on this whole internet thing, came over and we worked out a site for them in just a couple of hours.

Chase’s dad didn’t want to spend a fortune on web design, so I used a freely available script (called Wordpress…which is the same thing this site uses) to manage the Missouri Deer Hunting Land site.

Just like with HomesByDHS.com, this is a site that the user can manager entirely themselves. Just log in to the admin panel and change what you want to change. It’s very simple and takes me, the web designer guy, out of the picture. Of course, I’m always here if they need me, but it’s nice for both parties when they can do pretty much everything themselves.

Soon, I will begin the process of ranking in the search engines for Missouri Deer Hunting.

Brandon

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It was a big deal to me to build a site that Rick could work himself. Rick may have a mega understanding of studs and insulation, but he’s ALMOST useless on a computer. So, I used a little programming (okay, a lot of programming0 to create a site that he could update 99.9% of the time himself.

I’m a very busy guy and sometimes it’s hard for me to make time to change a mundane detail on a site for a client who may not know how. Well, that has all changed. My programming and site design makes changing, editing, or updating a website about as simple as checking your email at Yahoo or Hotmail.

So what does HomesbyDHS do that a normal site doesn’t do?

• When Rick wants to add a house, he logs into his admin section and clicks “Add A Home”. He’ll be asked the price, square footage, bedrooms, bathroom, etc. He’ll then be asked to specify pictures from the house, which will be uploaded, automatically resized, and stored for web use. If he sells a home, he simply edits the home and changes it’s status to “sold”. The home no longer shows up on the “for sale” section.
• If Rick wants to announce to the world that he has a new home for sale, he clicks on “Newsletter” and types a message (and even includes images). When he hits send, his entire mailing list (anyone who has ever contacted him via the Homesbydhs.com website) will receive the update of his latest home for sale. Not everyone will want to receive this updates, so a link is provided in the email to remove a person from the mailing list.
• If Rick gets busy and forgets to send a newsletter, I’ve written a script that will automatically email him if he has not sent an email in 30 days. Sometimes we all need a reminder for various tasks. Using programming keeps out site active, alive, and keeps traffic and awareness up without having to waste brain power remembering. Let my programming take care of that.
  Rick can also post updates in the news section of the site.
• If Rick wants to add a new page or section to the site, he simply clicks on “create new page” and then writes what he wants to say, adds pictures where he wants to add pictures in a format that feels a lot more like word that some crazy web page programming junk.
  If Rick decides that one page doesn’t fit what he wants to tell the world, he uses the admin tool to remove it.
• Rick always wants to put his best foot forward, so the website is setup to always show his most expensive home at the top of the homepage.

When work completes on the scripting and graphic design of Homesbydhs.com, we will begin the search engine optimization process to get Rick’s Cape Girardeau Real Estate site to the top of Google and the other search engines.

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