Big Andy's Blog

Monday Morning!

The weekend flew past and it’s Monday morning. Before I go to work I will tell you what’s been going on since last I wrote. I passed my penultimate CIW exam – CIW Site Designer – with 91%, went to London Web Standards (about accessibility), had my first ever IT job interview, to the (6th) annual Pidgeon Walking Weekend in (Herefordshire), and to my brother’s birthday drinks in London.
Otherwise I have been learning about the Typographic Grid (with help from Mark Boulton’s site, and Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop” book) and learning some PHP.

This week I am going away somewhere (either Bath or Brighton) to celebrate the three years that Marion and I have been going out together. Tonight I am going to London Web Standards which tonight is about HTML5 and Flash.

Weekend and Studying

Sunday afternoon and the birds are cheeping, otherwise it’s quiet and I am taking a break from studying. This week has been a busy one with my first ever Reading Geek Night with Mike Robinson talking about “HTML5 Today”, Mark Adams “Geeks are Gods”, Chris Alexander on “Darks arts of SEO” and Workhouse Coffee’s “Coffee Geeks”. Wednesday we went to see Foals play at the Academy in Oxford, preceded by an excellent meal in Coco on Cowley Road. Thursday night. Otherwise this week I have been studying and coding.

Coding

Currently on the coding side of things I am working on putting the top 3 (or 5) blog.big-andy.co.uk headlines, with a small summary, on the main page of my site big-andy.co.uk.
So far I have succeeded in getting information e.g. headline, summary on a page on my test site but that still needs some more work before it will go on my main site. Also I have been working on some JS and PHP.

Studying

This week has been intense. I have been doing lots of online mock exams as well as practising areas that I need to improve on. This morning and last night I took 3 online “Full Exam” exams and scored 93% then 96% respectively. I think I am ready for the proper exam and to move onwards.

Weekend and PHP time

Good Evening Folks! I have been working on some PHP recently. I have decided to change from .html to .php on big-andy.co.uk so that I could use a consistant navigation bar and any changes that I made would be only to one (navigation.php) file rather than 10+ files (with .html).

I did have some difficulty, however, with my current testing situation. I am using XAMPP on my PC to test what I make before I publish it online.
The root of my XAMPP site is http://localhost/ and the root of my website is http://big-andy.co.uk so I wanted to do some PHP to show the root and based on this to serve a different navigation (xampp-navigation.php or navigation.php) depending whether the page was on the XAMPP server or on the web-server. I did it like this:

<?php
if ($_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"] == "localhost"){ include'../php/xampp-navigation.php';} else {include'../php/navigation.php';}
?>

Thus the problem is now overcome and I can go back to my real life as a normal person.

In other news the conservative scum have gained more seats than any other party in the UK General Election much to my distaste. They didn’t gain enough seats to have a majority and we are now in a hung-parliament (no one party has a majority) for the first time since 1974. Will they do a deal with the lib-dems, or will the lib-dems do a deal with Labour scum?

It’s my Mum’s Birthday today so “Happy Birthday Mum!” we’re going over to Sandhurst tomorrow to have dinner at a restaurant with my brother, my girlfriend (both of whom need urgently to update their websites by the way) my Dad and Mum.