foxfirefey: Dreamwidth: social content with dimension. (dreamwidth)
foxfirefey ([personal profile] foxfirefey) wrote in [community profile] style_system2011-04-11 07:17 pm
Entry tags:

Style Class, Session #1: Class Intro

Welcome to the DW Styles Class! From the number of people answering the poll, this is going to be a fairly large class, even if a lot of you can't make it. Lurking is, of course, okay! I do want to encourage lurkers to ask questions if they have them, however--you don't have to stay out of sight.

This class is geared around learning by doing. The main project of the class is to create a style of your own! The lessons are tools to help you along the way, so the syllabus is subject to change if I feel we're going over a subject too fast and people need more time to adjust. At the end, I'll have treats for people who share layouts with others at [community profile] dreamwidthlayouts.

Your mentors are, in no particular order: [personal profile] afuna, [personal profile] ninetydegrees, [personal profile] liv, [personal profile] seleneheart, [personal profile] monarchist, [personal profile] exor674, and, well, me. Mentors are here to help me review lesson plans before they go live and help answer student questions--some are CSS only, others know S2. But! If you know the answer to another student's question, please feel free to help them. We all can work together to learn things.

This class is split up into three "tracks" for different experience levels and goals.

Simplified CSS
Designed for people who want an easier introduction in CSS. It involves making style changes to an existing layout with the base CSS included.
CSS only
Designed for people who want to make a layout from scratch based on existing layout HTML--you can do a lot with just CSS. People might need help with an S2 override or two in order to achieve the effect they really want, but overall the goal is to work with CSS.
S2/CSS
Designed for people who want to be experts in changing both the HTML and CSS of their layout, or building in interesting behaviors. S2 is a programming language and once you know it you'll have few limitations (no JS, some CSS cleaning) in making a style exactly the way you want.
Poll #6596 Original Student Desires and Experience Levels
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 151


My class track will be:

View Answers

Simplified CSS
20 (13.4%)

CSS only
17 (11.4%)

S2/CSS
94 (63.1%)

Observation only
18 (12.1%)

I'm interested in this class because:

View Answers

I want to customize my own style
114 (79.2%)

I want to make styles I can share with others
76 (52.8%)

I want to be able to help others with their styles
56 (38.9%)

It's a good way to learn skills I'm interested in, like HTML/CSS or basic programming concepts.
108 (75.0%)

If you have another interest in this class, what is it?

CSS Experience

View Answers

None or very little
47 (31.1%)

Beginner
51 (33.8%)

Experienced
44 (29.1%)

Advanced
9 (6.0%)

HTML Experience

View Answers

None or very little
13 (8.6%)

Beginner
51 (33.8%)

Experienced
69 (45.7%)

Advanced
18 (11.9%)

S2 experience:

View Answers

None or very little
107 (70.9%)

Beginner
35 (23.2%)

Experienced
7 (4.6%)

Advanced
2 (1.3%)

Browsers I use or have access to:

View Answers

Chrome
91 (60.3%)

Firefox 3.x
90 (59.6%)

Firefox 4.x
80 (53.0%)

IE6
10 (6.6%)

IE7
12 (7.9%)

IE8
40 (26.5%)

IE9
38 (25.2%)

Opera
54 (35.8%)

Safari
62 (41.1%)

Mobile browsers/devices
66 (43.7%)

Other
13 (8.6%)

My main browser is:

View Answers

Chrome
26 (17.2%)

Firefox 3.x
56 (37.1%)

Firefox 4.x
44 (29.1%)

IE6
0 (0.0%)

IE7
0 (0.0%)

IE8
1 (0.7%)

IE9
1 (0.7%)

Opera
9 (6.0%)

Safari
9 (6.0%)

Mobile browsers/devices
2 (1.3%)

Other
3 (2.0%)

If you answered "Other" for any of the browser questions, what browser(s)?

Alright students, as your first exercise I would like you to:

  • Say hi, and greet others! Also ask any questions you would like to know before Friday's class on "S2 Background and the Customization Wizard".
  • Fill out this poll--it will help me know who has what experience level, and the different reasons people are taking the course for.
  • Think about what you want your style to look like, if you'll be making a style for the course!

And now, I'm going through and checking to make sure that all people who answered the original interest poll and don't already subscribe get a reminder to watch this community (unless they have different methods of keeping track)! Hope to hear from you all!


Previous: Syllabus

dchan: A cat making a :D (excited) face. (kitty :D face)

[personal profile] dchan 2011-04-12 07:37 am (UTC)(link)
Hi! I'm dchan. I mentioned this in a previous post, but I'm a relatively experienced tinkerer in HTML and CSS and can do a little bit with S2 but up until now I've mostly been working off of other people's frameworks instead of designing my own styles from scratch. I'm quite comfortable digging around in the source code and documentation to figure out how everything works but I'm really not all that up on what the current best practices are for web design so I'm hoping that you'll guys spend some time on that.

In addition to learning stuff, I'm hoping that having a defined schedule and assignments will help me conquer my laziness and procrastionation. It's so much easier to use a default layout that I kinda like instead of spending the time and effort to code myself a layout that I *really* like.

I didn't check the box for it but I suppose I'd be up for sharing the layouts that I make but I don't get ideas very often and I frequently get distracted by other shinies on the internet so it's really more of a 'nice bonus' rather than a driving motivation in my case.

ETA: Page 2! Woo!
Edited 2011-04-12 07:38 (UTC)
samjohnsson: Place I Want to Be (Autumn Bridge)

[personal profile] samjohnsson 2011-04-12 07:39 am (UTC)(link)
Hey, all. Since there is CSS tutorials going on, I am in! Mostly a hand-coder, and have been kicking (and getting kicked by) HTML and .js since tables were cool and a Geocities address was mandatory. But I haven't had a lot of practical CSS (ab)use practice outside of a wysiwyg editor on a pre-built site, so I am here to break my layout hard!

(No generic questions yet.)
Edited (Wrong icon, forgot a detail) 2011-04-12 07:41 (UTC)

[personal profile] ex_pippin880 2011-04-12 07:40 am (UTC)(link)
:D I will see how I go! I have an interesting combination of busy+too ill to do half of what I need/want to do at the moment so.

(It feels really weird not capslocking at you. :p)
majoline: picture of Majoline, mother of Bon Mucho in Loco Roco 2 (Default)

[personal profile] majoline 2011-04-12 07:46 am (UTC)(link)
Hi! I'm Margaret and I know a goodly amount of HTML and CSS but almost nothing of S2. I learned both of those things not on LJ/DW and because of the ridiculous amount of time I spend on my home-on-the-internet I've never really felt like trying to mess with it.

I'm really excited because I want to learn how to do styles in general and I really want to try to make me a new one.

Speaking of questions: should I set up another account for this learning experience? I don't want to mess up my default.
liv: Stylised sheep with blue, purple, pink horizontal stripes, and teacup brand, dreams of Dreamwidth (sheeeep)

[personal profile] liv 2011-04-12 07:47 am (UTC)(link)
I've learnt things sort of backwards; I know the S2 system pretty well, from a scary number of years of troubleshooting and helping people with layouts (I was doing LJ Support back when S2 was first introduced, yes I'm that old). Indeed, I was one of the team who ported S2 over to Dreamwidth back in the closed beta days. It's based on this experience that I've offered to mentor, because I can definitely help people with the labyrinth that is the advanced customization system.

However I have really little experience in either programming or web design, so I'm almost a beginner at the same time. I don't know how to generate good concepts for what a journal should look like, and I don't really know enough CSS to implement any ideas I do have. Especially positioning, I really struggle with positioning. I'm pretty good at "porting" other people's layouts, eg from LJ Flexible Squares to DW Tabula Rasa, or from purely CSS based to S2. So as a student, I mainly want to learn to design from scratch.

Goals for the course:
  • sort out the archive and tags views of my journal, which are kind of a mess at the moment because of the CSS tweaks I made to my entries and comments views.
  • implement some kind of collapsed / collapsible / summary reading page system, hopefully robust enough to add to all the system styles
  • make a start on designing a style which uses some fixed width and absolute dimension elements, ideally without too many compromises on screen-reader accessibility. I know a lot of people hate DW's selection of highly flexible, relative sized, div-based layouts, because they want to use graphics and make something pixel-perfect in any browser or resolution (including weird / proprietary / deprecated ones). I don't know if it's possible to have fixed width and accessibility at the same time, but I'm hoping to learn enough to start to tackle this issue.
  • build on my skills for helping people who have a really great vision for what their journal should look like, but don't know how to implement it.
liv: Stylised sheep with blue, purple, pink horizontal stripes, and teacup brand, dreams of Dreamwidth (sheeeep)

[personal profile] liv 2011-04-12 07:52 am (UTC)(link)
That sounds about like my level of experience :-) I'm quite good at fiddling with other people's code by trial and error, but I'd like to be able to think of a concept and decide how to implement it in a more systematic way.
exor674: Computer Science is my girlfriend (Default)

[personal profile] exor674 2011-04-12 07:59 am (UTC)(link)
Yay another S2 mentor!!!

ETA: implement some kind of collapsed / collapsible / summary reading page system, hopefully robust enough to add to all the system style

There's actually an active bug for that if I understand what you mean properly -- at least a summary view. The collapsible would be quite hard to add to just your style, given it'd require trusted mode ( which is system styles only )
Edited 2011-04-12 08:14 (UTC)

[personal profile] flamewarrior 2011-04-12 08:02 am (UTC)(link)
Hi! I'm flame. *waves*

I'm here because none of the existing styles, or amended-by-DW-members styles (that I've been able to find) are quite what I want. And once I start thinking about what I want, I have Lots Of Ideas, which is very frustrating when I don't have the first clue about CSS. And I don't even know what S2 is...
exor674: Computer Science is my girlfriend (Default)

[personal profile] exor674 2011-04-12 08:04 am (UTC)(link)
Hey! I'm Dre and I am going to be one of your mentors.

I've been spending my spare time for the past 2-ish years being a volunteer developer for Dreamwidth, and because of that I have way more knowledge then I'd like to have on the S2 backend ( and many other scary parts of the code ).

Sooo... I can probably help you on any bit of S2 you need help with.

I am probably not the person to ask if you are having trouble making your style look the way you want it in HTML/CSS, but if you have the CSS but it is just not working, I will totally be willing to look at it to see if I can spot the problem.
teigh_corvus: ([Personal] Blackbird wandering)

[personal profile] teigh_corvus 2011-04-12 08:24 am (UTC)(link)
Hello! I'm T. and I'm pretty much a newbie at all of this. I've tweaked some basic things in layouts, but nothing major. Despite being somewhat intimidated, I'm terribly excited to learn this stuff.
liv: Stylised sheep with blue, purple, pink horizontal stripes, and teacup brand, dreams of Dreamwidth (sheeeep)

:-)

[personal profile] liv 2011-04-12 08:25 am (UTC)(link)
Yay you as well. I feel really proud to have worked with you over the years, seeing you progress from Support newbie to a kingpin developer of DW.

I know there's a bug somewhere for summary views; I'm happy to use that as my spec if I'm not treading on any toes, because it seems like a reasonably sized project for the level of S2 learning I'm hoping to do in this course.

For collapsible, if it's not jumping ahead too much can you explain why it would require trusted mode? I think [personal profile] kunzite had something like it on LJ, where you could "mark" entries as read or unread or "bump" them off the page (eg if they had broken HTML). So my very vague plan is to give the journal owner the ability to mark selected entries in some way, and if I can do this, I have a pretty good idea how I'd go about telling S2 to display them in full or collapsed depending on which flag was set. Is that completely unrealistic, do you think? I don't think it would need to be AJAX-y, though of course that would be way more awesome.

If I can't do it on an entry-by-entry basis, at least the ability to switch between expanded and collapsed view for the whole page would be a really desirable feature.
sunrisetr: (Default)

[personal profile] sunrisetr 2011-04-12 08:28 am (UTC)(link)
*waves* I'm Sunrise. I have some experience with CSS and HTML, and most of the time I can get my layout to do what I want, but all that I've done in S2 so far is modifying other people's functions by following tutorials (and being very, very afraid). Hoping to learn enough to tinker with S2, and pick up some skills in creating layouts from scratch.

Thanks for doing this!
exor674: Computer Science is my girlfriend (Default)

Re: :-)

[personal profile] exor674 2011-04-12 08:37 am (UTC)(link)
Aw thanks.

http://bugs.dwscoalition.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3503 is the bug in question -- that would be totally implementable on the S2 level alone, just as a ?.arg as you couldn't define the new view.

I assume by collapse you meant more of an AJAXy "click a link and it collapses/expands in place" which would require JavaScript ( which is a big nono outside trusted mode ) -- Something like that could probably be done through S2 by having a link that added/removed arguments ( if you were okay with lack of persistence if you revisited the page w/o those arguments, because there would be no way to persistently "mark" the entry )
kabal42: Captain America and Iron Man leaning on each other, arms around each other's shoulders (Default)

[personal profile] kabal42 2011-04-12 08:39 am (UTC)(link)
Hello everyone!

I'll mostly be following on the sidelines and will be using this to later build my own layout/make styles. Later because I'm finishing up my thesis right now and have surgery coming up, so I doubt I'll be able to follow. But I'll be reading along and using this when I get a chance.

Thanks to the faculty for making this possible :-)
liv: Stylised sheep with blue, purple, pink horizontal stripes, and teacup brand, dreams of Dreamwidth (sheeeep)

[personal profile] liv 2011-04-12 08:47 am (UTC)(link)
OK, gotcha, thanks. Looks like [personal profile] ninetydegrees and [personal profile] afuna are on that bug, so I won't duplicate their work. Last time I looked at it wasn't very active.

I'll take on the entry by entry bit, then. I'm a bit scared of JavaScript (I don't want to bite off more than I can chew if I'm doing S2 and CSS as well), but I think it would still be useful even without the persistence and the AJAX.
vilakins: (art)

[personal profile] vilakins 2011-04-12 08:50 am (UTC)(link)
Something simple and elegant with all the features I like. My current one is OK but it wastes a lot of space and could be simpler. I'll have to think about where I'd like elements to be.
rain_and_snow: Image of a Victoriana style butterfly (old butterfly)

[personal profile] rain_and_snow 2011-04-12 09:15 am (UTC)(link)
I'm with you on that one!
ariestess: (Default)

[personal profile] ariestess 2011-04-12 09:18 am (UTC)(link)
He-ey there! I'm [personal profile] ariestess, or you can call me AJ. I'll answer to both.

I taught myself HTML out of a couple of manuals back in 1994-ish for a class project in college and have pretty much continued learning by self-taught and/or "find and steal code" methods ever since. I maintain 3 different websites, all hand-coded through templates I created myself. I took a CSS class from Virtual University back in the spring of 2004 and still have my homework online. Eeek! For the most part, I now use TopStyle Lite when creating my CSS for my websites.

As for S2, I have absolutely NO knowledge of using it beyond a little bit of customization, usually of colors for various layouts I've used over the years over on LJ.

I'm looking to find a new way to be creative, and have wanted to figure out how to make layouts for quite some time now.
kuangning: (Default)

[personal profile] kuangning 2011-04-12 09:27 am (UTC)(link)
*waves cheerfully.*

I'm Cairsten, and while I've done quite a bit in HTML, I've touched CSS only as much as I needed to fix/tweak someone else's pre-built styles. I've dabbled in S2 for the same reasons, reading enough along the way that I at least know where to start looking for a problem and can usually find a solution, but not enough to be able to lay out something that's all mine from the ground up.
the_mad_hobbit: (caution)

[personal profile] the_mad_hobbit 2011-04-12 09:50 am (UTC)(link)
Hi, all! I'm new to DW as well as CSS, though I have SOME HTML experience. I have wanted to learn this for ages and am more than happy to be a part of the class! Thank you for offering the course!

Hugs,
Rach

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