Let’s talk HTML and CSS: about DIV and SPAN

During my web development years, I got these questions a lot: How to convert an HTML table to DIVs and SPANs? How to put several DIVs on the same line? How to make give a SPAN width and height? Etcetera DIV, etcetera SPAN. So to make it easier to explain and refer to again later, allow me to present this ‘demo’ slash step-by-step tutorial. Hope this helps!

Facebook Grid Picture

Psst.. wanna have fun with your Facebook Photo Album? Or you just want to jazz up your Facebook pic? Then you've come to the right place---I'll show you how!

If you haven't notice, your pictures in Facebook are organized in a grid structure. To be exact: they will be in a four-column grid. And just like the screenshot below (or the real thing here), you can see that it's very easy to take advantage of this layout. The key is to know how to count. In pixels, that is!

Use the jQuery, Luke!

If you're asking me what's the most useful thing I ever come across when developing websites, my answer will be jQuery. In fact, that's one of the top entries in my to-do list when doing website projects. So important and so useful to me, that it has saved my life!!! Well, actually it's not THAT dramatic really... but with jQuery, it makes implementation faster, easier, and fun-er, thus giving me back those precious long-lost portion of time to get more family time, more game time, and--of course--more sleep.

How so? Quoted from their website:

jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development.

......say what???

Allow me to break it down so it's easier for you to understand.

Use XAMPP to serve data-driven personal websites

Related to the previous post on serving websites using a Windows 7 computer , my friend was asking if it's possible to host PHP-based data-driven websites (using MySQL as the data storage) on his Windows 7 computer. Well, why not? Let's talk about this a little bit....

Use IIS to serve websites from your Windows 7

Thursday, 11PM. I was cleaning up my desk, getting ready for my lunch break, when the Marketing Manager stepped into my office.

"Ohai! All ready for your gaming expo?" I asked her casually.

"Yep, pretty much. We're also set for a survey-slash-raffle program, where our booth visitors can fill in their contact info and play a jackpot-machine minigame to get into the instant raffle."

"That sounds gr---" I tried to reply, but she kept on going.

"It's a flash webpage, and we're using Microsoft Access as the database storage. So we'll run everything off the browser on our two laptops. They both are running on Windows 7."

Suddenly I had a funny feeling down my brain. "Sooo... you want me to copy the program files to our website?" I asked, trying to guess where this talk led to. "No problemo!"

"Actually, THAT'S the problem..." she told me, sighing. "We won't have any internet access in the expo. And we're leaving by 3..."

Aha! So my feeling was right. Being a helpful coworker, I gave her a promise worthy of the next Presidential candidate: "Give me your laptops, and in 30 minutes I'll make it work locally."

And there she went, dashing to her office and back, presenting me with 2 high-end laptops and a big wide smile on her face.

So how did I tackle this? With the help of Microsoft's IIS, it's super easy! Follow these steps, and you can do it too!