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.
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onlyembers
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Date: 2011-04-12 07:47 am (UTC)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: