For many years I have hopped for a space for a model railroad. Early last year, I finally was able to purchase a house with a basement and room big enough to have one. I am excited to now have a space. Continue reading A New Model Railroad Space
Menus With Bottom Aligned Titles
It seems like a simple thing. Have the text align to the bottom of an element, instead of the top, while filling it’s parent’s container. In practice, it is a lot harder than it should be. Continue reading Menus With Bottom Aligned Titles
A Nifty Little Timer
I have been working lately on retro fitting my department’s website by adding a time tracking feature. My first interface was just a couple of drop-downs, one for the hours numbered 1 through 12, and another for minutes with various minute values. There would be a default value of 2 minutes selected already for easy tracking of quick entries. Job done, right?
A Responsive Design Experiment
I have been playing around lately with responsive web design. My department is in the process of redesigning our site. To help everybody visualize what the site will look like and to help me with figuring out the css, I have been building a prototype out of just HTML5 and CSS3. The CSS generated by SASS. Scripting to run menus and other features will be added later. You must have a recent browser for it to work right, and since it is a prototype, I am not in any hurry to make it compatible with older browsers.
Take a look. (server taken off line.)
e-Learning Center Media Player
What started it was the need to add captioned video. The original version had the ability to show transcripts, but it was limited to a long string of text. Since the original was built two wonder events happened; the updated release of Captionate, and Flash’s FLVPlaybackCaptioned component. This new version of Captionate allows for the easy creation of the timed XML file that FLVPlaybackCapioned needs to work properly. Voilà! Easy caption creation.
An Example Banner
As I promised earlier, I am posting this update on the progress of the theme development for the site. I have finished a part of the banner for one of my themes. A lot of research on trees and rocks helped to get these to look the way I wanted. All of the content in the banner was hand drawn inside of Photoshop.
HTML 5 Player Goodness
Times are a changin’ and my department knew that we needed something more than the Flash based players we had been using for quite some time. One of the bigger forces that drove us to need an HTML 5 player was the rise in ‘iDevices’, such as the iPhone and iPad by Apple. The charge was given to me to create a player that would work nice with the existing infrastructure and able to deliver media in both video and audio formats.
Example of a Portfolio Post
The current underlying framework that my department’s site relies on is getting a little long in the tooth. One of the things we had hopped to move to was NAU’s current CMS called Ektron. Our design department came up with the following design as a mock up of what we wanted our site to look like. This was before we had any idea if and what any templates would be like. Continue reading Example of a Portfolio Post
A Fresh Start
Having this up and running is the beginning the journey towards the next version of Zenbaida.com. I am excited about the possibilities and ease of maintenance that this new content management system, or a CMS, offers.