Tag Archives: rant

Indenting HTML: WHY!?

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The problem with creating pretty HTML that’s indented nicely is that it’s a language that can’t really be indented! It sometimes have an affect on the actual look of the page.

For instance with a <pre> tag, trying to indent that nicely with the rest of your page will make the output shifted massively to the right. The only way to fix it is to have the pre tag the only piece of the source that isn’t indented, which looks uglier than having no indentation at all.

Which inefficient weirdos are debugging by looking at their source and not using Firebug anyway? In your editor you should have “highlight matching tags” turned on. It adds completely useless characters to the page, which are literally invisible. You’re paying for those bytes, and the user is being made to wait fractions of seconds (which Google ranks you on) longer.

Just stop doing it!

WordPress contribution is not for the technically inept.

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I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I love WordPress. It’s perfect for what it does. And even when you want it to do something it wasn’t made for, you can probably find an add on to make it (or at least hire a developer to make one for you).

When you need to make one you kinda run into problems though. The documentation is so damn iffy, and the support is fairly slow moving. The irc channel sucks. So, for the good of everyone, whenever I have spare time I’m going to do a bit on the documentation (which is in a wiki format). I can’t believe there are still some fairly common functions that’re used in WordPress that aren’t even covered yet.

A while ago the only support I could get was from a wiki page in French. Fortunately I could read it, but still. That’s just not good.

None of the code for WordPress is commented either, which I think is a really important thing within an open source project! You can’t get more developers if they can’t understand what your code is doing without rummaging through every include. It’s just not cool.

Stupid course is stupid.

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I’m actually feeling productive today, and I’m fairly certain I have a multitude of work to do.

I woke up with the intent of creating this database we need for Database Design Concepts. Well, I say need, but it turns out we might not actually have to hand it in. Because I thought it was integral to my learning, I sat through it and slowly knocked up a few tables following the instructions letter by letter.

When it started explaining, in great detail, how to change the freaking font of a label I gave in. Not only was it offending me, but flicking through the book I can’t see anywhere where it’s telling me to hand the finished database in. Even if it did, what would be the point?  You can’t vary from the obnoxious instructions; even if one person created the database and then gave a copy to everyone in the class the person marking it would never know. They’re all identical.

So, I gave in with that. I’m pretty sure there’s more work to be done, so I asked Laura. Apparently we have a Systems Analysis assignment that we’ve not been told about yet.

The final assignment we have is from Computer Tech, to create a website. I’m not sure why I can’t just give him the URL to one of the many websites I’ve designed and coded to prove my work, but meh. I have to create a guide about Leicester for freshers of DMU, which I’m okay with actually. I might even be able to make some money from it. Even if I do feel slightly underestimated.

Why can’t university be as hard as I actually expected? Why do people walk into a degree with zero knowledge of the course? There are people that have blatantly never even used a computer before on my course; wtf? Just make A Level Computing a requirement of the course entry, and teach with that as a foundation. Don’t freaking teach it me again! Grr.

I’d switch to Computer Science if I wasn’t so worried my math would let me down.