Handy PHP.com - A PHP Resource Website

I have developed a new website using Joomla for the sharing of PHP resources. The new website, Handy PHP , is in addition to VWOne which is my Volkswagen website still in developement.

Handy PHP will feature various small functions which I have written along with a number of tutorials which I feel will answer some of the more common PHP questions. The website template is derived from the template I designed for VWOne. It is a relatively clean template which is variable width but does have a few glitches when viewed in Internet Explorer.

The website will eventually offer script and library downloads, links to other PHP resources, and various PHP information.

So if you could stop by and take a look at Handy PHP and let me know what you think, that would be great. Any feedback will be helpful and will be considered. I usually make better progress from negtive feedback so don't be shy. I'm a big boy and understand that my site is far from perfect.

Thanks,
vujsa

 

 

 

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Is this normal ? This appears on top of your site, just above the VW car.

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No, this isn't normal! That started after I was working on some auto prepend/append scripts. Some of the files became corrupt as a result and I haven't had a chance to repair the problems.

Thanks for stopping by though.

vujsa

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It is a pretty good site in my opinion. One thing I do not like is the layout of the site. It isn't very appealing, and sometimes that is a bad thing. Make sure that there is barely any white and it may turn out better.

Also, you should start making tutorials on how to make a news box that works. I have not seen very many that work, and this would be great for your site.

One more thing. Is your site hosted on AstaHost? I know it may seem like a random question, but I was just wondering.

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I second that. Of course, it is always better to fully develop your web site first, and then switch to the design. Here are some things that I would change.

• The pathway text should be separated from the bottom border a bit (that includes the date, too). I would give it 'padding-bottom: 3px;'
• The header isn't very good. While I can't say it is TOO simple, it could use some more background effects, and LESS text effects. Also, I would change the text colour to a brighter one, probably white.
• You need to add a 'padding-left' to the left sidebar, since the text touches the browser border, which makes it hard to read sometimes.
• The top menu is neatly done, but has sharp edges, which I don't like.
• As for the content, the titles (with the background) should be vertically centered. I think it looks better that way.
• And the last thing is connected to the right sidebar. Again, I think it is another thing that needs to be centered, but horizontally.

Be advised that I am using Firefox, so some of these things might be good in Internet Explorer. But if it's not good in all browsers, it's not good at all

 

 

 

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I love this "do not remove".

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First, I want to thank ALL of you for stopping by and taking a look at my website. Having a lot of input is a big help when trying to wrap things up. I think I have got some really useful feedback here. I'll try and address each item individually.


I'm not sure what I can do about this. The only white "#ffffff) on the site is a little text and the serch box. I guess you could be talking about the pale aqua background I'm using. Or maybe you are talking about the whitesoace on the website. The "BLANK" areas. Those will be filled in as I add more content. You said that you didn't like the layout but didn't really specify. Is is a matter of where content is or an overall visual problem?


I already have a pretty good list of tutorials that I need to write. I'll be adding a feature soon for visitors to suggest tutorials that they would be interested in having me write. As for a news box, I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean that you like the way that news articles are set up on my website? If this is so, I must inform you that that isn't one of my scripts. I think that I could write such a script and a tutorial for such a script but it would be a pretty advanced topic. I'll keep a more simplified newsbox in mind though.


YES
That isn't a random question at all. You are on a posting for hosting forum so any questions about hosting is always relative. I've been using AstaHost hosting since March 2005. Since the free web hosting package here is better than most of the paid hosting packages I could afford, I haven't seen much reason to leave. I may move to a paid server someday if my bandwidth requirements exceed my quota here but if that is the case, I should be able to generate enough advertising income to pay for hosting.


Wow a list. Thanks for specifying. I'll use a list to reply to each item.

1. That has been something I have been having trouble with. I get it to work in IE then it won't work in mozilla (NS, FF, etc...) or vice versa. It also seems to be very dependant on the version of software being used. Newer versions of IE tend to read the CSS better so I might be able to finally get this issue worked out. I use Netscape which since it used the same Mozilla core as Firefox and Mozilla displays the content nearly the same. Most of the glitches have presented them selves as a result of trying to get IE to display correctly. The newest Mozilla version makes that text particularly difficyult to read in path and date line.
2. The header was a pretty quick graphic I put together in order to get the template usable. The decorative text was an attempt to overcome the lack of visual satisfaction provided by the image. It will eventually get a makeover.
3. Again, this is a version issue. The Netscape I normally use (about 2.5 years old now) correctly displays the text about 3px. The new Mozilla core displays the text more like it does in IE. I'll add some padding to that.
4. I'm glad to here that you like the top menu, I lost a lot of sleep trying to develope it. It is the menu I designed for my Volkswagen website. As for the sharp edges, I think that you mean the sharp pixels which will require me to run an unsharp filter on the images? I'll give that a try.
5. Is this text vertically aligned currently? I hadn't noticed before. I used the default Mambo template CSS for some of that stuff. I guess I have to go ahead and finish my CSS now.
6. Is this for the header only or all of the content? The header is the same as the left side in this case. Now that you bring it up, I see a slight difference in padding on each side of the header block. Wow, that'll take a while to figure out.

Thanks for letting me know what browser you are using. It would have been nice if you told me what version but I can now see that it is FireFox 1.5.0.7! I had to choose which features I wanted to work no matter what and ompromise on the other cross-browser compatibility. I think that I can adjust everything now so that it will be better interpreted by all browsers. Now that IE has decided to make an attempt to follow the standards, it will be easier. I'll have to add a best viewed notice for visitor with older browsers.
Boy I tell you, it is not an easy task to design a variable width dynamic template these days. But nearly all of my spacing and posistioning issues have been resolved. I used to get the background image repeat errors when the page width was too narrow.


Yeah me too. I don't care how many people use the scripts and tutorials but I want them to remember where they got the information so they can tell others. The entire purpose of my website is to provide PHP help but if all of my content is copied to other websites, then people don't have a reason to visit my site. If people don't visit, what is the point! That's why we require posts to either provide sufficient credit to the original writter or we delete the content and ban the plagiarizing member. We don't want our stuff stollen and we don't want stollen posted here.

As for your first post in this topic, I noticed that I had accidentally pasted instead of copied the url information for my new website and left multiple copies of the VW site instead. The VW site has some file corruption due to some xperiments I was doing with my .htaccess files. That site will be getting a fresh installation of Joomla soon to replace the origianl Mambo installation. I'll be an ugly upgrade I can tell you now. So many mods installed.

Again, thank you everyone for being candid about your opinions. I'll try to get these issues resolved ASAP.

As for anyone else, please continue to review my site as I'm sure there are other issues that'll need to be resolved.

When leaving suggestions reguarding how the website looks to you, please include the name and version of the browser you are using as well as the resolution of you monitor if you know it.


vujsa

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vujsa,

Nice site. I plan on stealing gleaning a lot of good information from over there.

There is no doubt that it will be successful for you. Any problems if I include a link on my pages?

Only thing I noticed was a 'jump' of the page below the horiz menu under the header when on-hover happens. When I load/re-load the page and then hover on the horizontal menu, the image change shifts the contents beow the menu bar. (NS7 OS9.1)(antique)

As for tutorials, will you be linking to your tut's here at Astahost? or copying them to the new site?

I'll be back regularly. Good Luck with it.

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I'm currently having this kind of problems at work.
My collegues use my tutorials when they teach things to customers.
They simply remove my sig on the bottom page, saying this is useless for they current purpose.
I think they have to write down they own pages, or mention my name when they use my pages, they should be honest and never remove my name from my tutorials.

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Well, thanks for all of the feedback, please keep it coming.

Here are the cahnges / fixes I've done so far.

• Fixed the pathway text position. Looks nearly identical in Netscape, Firefox, and Internet Explorer now.
• I slightly blured the edged of the top menu buttons - is that better?
• Vertically centered the contenT titles.
• Fixed the height of the left menu buttons. Actually look like buttons again. Not sure how that got out of wack.

Here is what I haven't fixed:

• I haven't had a chance to pad the left menu as it will take a bit of creativity. Hard coding it would cause a lot of other problems so I'll have to add some parameters to the content residing in that position.
• The right side content header is not as wide as the space it occupies. I'll have to find the CSS entry for this particular part of the template and get that fixed but with the nesting involved in that area, it could take some time.
• The website header image won't be cahnged right now because it functions and I have a bunch of other things that need to be worked on.
• jlhaslip, I couldn't find the "jump" you were refering to. There is a bit of a shift when a page loads that has scroll bars on it because the top of the page loads then the content loads which is when the browser realizes that the content uses more space than the screen has and scroll bars are loaded. Might I suggest that you upgrade from Netscape 7.02. I'm using NS 7.2 which has the same usability as 7.02 but obviously does a better job of reading more modern webpages. I don't really care for NS 8.1 since it behaves much differently than the NS 7.X series.

As for linking or resusing tutorials here at AstaHost, I am not planning to do either. I'll promote AstaHost as a free web hosting service and a place to find many people that are knowledgable in PHP as well as many good PHP tutorials but there will be no direct link to the tutorials. I may use my tutorials at AstaHost as inspiration for NEW tutorials at Handy PHP but the articles I have written here stay here. If a topic here comes up some day and the best answer to the question is located on my website, I'll post a link but I don't want my website to be an extention to the PHP forum here and I ddon't want AstaHost to be the extention to my tutorials.

yordan, that's a tough situation to be in. Here is the real problem. If you write a tutorial that you use at work, your employer can claim rights to it. They can argue that because they are paying you to do a job that contributing a helpful guide that aids you in doing your job makes the guide their property. Basically, they feel that they have paid you for the information already and as a result don't feel that you have any rights to the material. This is mre obvious with an architech. The architechs job is to design buildings. His employer pays him to design these buildings. As a result, the designs are the property of the employer. The architech can still claim that he designed the building but can not claim ownership of the plans that he drew. This is significant because if you try to make a fuss about this a work, your employer may simply say that there isn't anything that can be done since you no longer can claim ownership of the tutorials. The only way around something like this is to establish ownership of any plans or documents prior to sharing them with others.

I hope everyone will continue to review my website and provide feedback.

Thank You,
vujsa

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