Jordan Terry

Test for work, igonore this…

jordan_terry — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:04:31 +0000

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, lacus praesent eros neque. Venenatis lacinia felis blandit nulla sed, ut sem, imperdiet justo, ut sit molestie imperdiet tellus pellentesque donec. Cum neque pede et suscipit ac, dictumst aliquam nonummy faucibus magnis ullamcorper, sodales non nisl. Mauris luctus mattis vitae tempus volutpat vestibulum, accumsan pellentesque aenean ipsum, sem mauris. Consectetuer dictum curabitur dui, vel quis, vel nibh interdum molestie ligula lectus porttitor, dolor lobortis felis orci ipsum, in velit est ullamcorper odio nullam quis. Platea nullam eget hendrerit, viverra sit aliquam, varius curae porta fusce ipsum, proin in morbi quis sed cras dapibus. Sagittis sit ligula, magna nunc, proin sem eleifend at, donec nulla mi dui justo. Ac ac, nisl tincidunt, malesuada in varius in erat, praesent ac nulla wisi condimentum sodales, wisi parturient proin.

Quantum Computing

jordan_terry — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 10:49:34 +0000

At University I am taking a module called Group Project, basically we are put into groups and do some research on a topic that we are told about. For this topic we were given “Quantum Computing”, no joke that is all we were told. We were left to our own devices to find out we have a to present our findings to our class. We also had no idea what aspects of Quantum Computing we had to research or how we had to present it, I as we are adults we should all know how to do that!

Anyway after having done quite a lot of research I have found out that Quantum Computing is not simple, at all, there is no short explanation to what it actually is. So my first problem is working that out. When I have finally understood it, I then have to present it to a group of people and get them to understand it! And then impress our lecturer for Group Project, not an easy task. I am going to use post links and any information I find useful on here, so hopefully it might help someone in the future. I won’t be uploading any of my work though, just useful sources and what I have learnt.

So far I have found these sources very helpful and interesting.

http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/quantum-computing-for-everyone/ – This is a blog post by an expert in the field, he attempts to give a simple concrete explanation of Quantum Computing
http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/411 – This is a video of a lecture being given on the history of Quantum Computing
www.research.ibm.com/ss_computing/ – A research website belonging to David P.Divincenzo on IBM. Not too sure whether this one will be helpful.

Not much at the moment, because I am still learning from the sources that I have. When I understand what they mean I will add them to the list.

I only have a few weeks until I present the research so it will become pretty busy on here, very quickly!

Position Absolute Bug – IE 7

jordan_terry — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 12:07:23 +0000

Whilst designing my site I came across a bug in IE 7, it’s also present in IE 5 and 6. I used “position: absolute;” on the header and it caused a few problems! Here is an example of the code that I was using, well, the necessary parts anyway.

<body>
    <div id="header"></div>
    <div id="main"></div>
</body>

And some CSS that accompanied it:

#header{
     position: absolute;
     width: 100%;
     height: 125px;
     top: 0;
     left: 0;
     right: 0;
}
#main{    
     width: 960px;
     height: 400px;
     margin: 135px auto;
 
}

This works fine in all the major web browsers, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer 8+. However, if you are looking to make your site accessible for users who have not updated their old browser to a newer, better one. This solution would cause the div with the id “main” to be positioned underneath the div with id “header”. Again, this only appeared in Internet Explorer 7 and lower. below is an example of what I meant, the title of the page is missing and there is a huge chuck of text gone! Good old Internet Explorer!

To fix this bug just add some padding to the top of the body tag. By “some padding” I mean the height of the header plus the margin you want between the “header” and “main” DIV’s. This creates gives this CSS and HTML:

<body>
    <div id="header"></div>
    <div id="main"></div>
</body>

And some CSS that accompanied it:

body{
     padding-top: 135px;
}
#header{
     position: absolute;
     width: 100%;
     height: 125px;
     top: 0;
     left: 0;
     right: 0;
}
#main{    
     width: 960px;
     height: 400px;
     margin-left: 0 auto;
 
}

This should fix any issues that you were coming across in IE 7. This fix also works in the more modern web browsers, as it is just a different way of doing something. here is a screen shot to prove the fix has actually worked.

With next to no hassle the problem has been fixed! I haven’t come across any problems with this method yet, but that’s not to say it is 100% bulletproof!

Hopefully this will be helpful to some of you Web Designers out there!

2012 and the Re-design

jordan_terry — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 21:15:34 +0000

Bonjour, over the past few months my site and blog, especially the blog, have become a bit barren and I have rarely updated either of them. But I have decided that as 2012 is approaching I will make a change to that. Here I am going to outline what I am going to natter on about on this website!

2012

My Target for 2012 is to Blog regularly, I hope at least three times a month. I am planning to blog mostly about the web and web design. Expect, tutorial, hints and tips! Other than just talking about web design I will also natter about some of the stuffs going on in my life! I have a few goals for myself in 2012 so hopefully I will let you know how they are going too! Here are a few of them:

Learn to Drive
learn to speak a foreign language
Do something for charity

That’s only three of the things I want to do next year, god knows whether any of them will get done. Well, the driving is becoming a necessity now! I should probably get a Girlfriend too. Might get my parents off my back!

The Re-design

About a month ago I completely re-designed jordanterry.co.uk and I tweeted about it non-stop! I should have waited a while longer, there were many little design flaws. However, all the issues have been fixed and my website is ready to roll.

When I came to re-design the site, I wanted to make it easily available to as many devices as possible. I considered creating a desktop and a mobile website. But this could have taken a long time, and probably caused a lot of stress! I decided to make jordanterry.co.uk responsive. A responsive website responds to the size of the screen that it is being viewed on. There are only a small number of changes made between each version, but I think they look great. If you are on a desktop or a laptop, you can re-size the browser that you are using to get a real feel for what I am talking about.

I can’t really cover much about responsive design in this post, but I will in the very near future. I will create some awesome examples too!

If you want to read some more about responsive web design Here is a great link:

An article by Kayla Knight on Smashing Magazine

And here are some examples of great responsive designs.

This isn’t the most helpful post ever, but I hope you enjoyed it, also, I will work on my writing skills too!
See you in 2012!

My Simple CSS3 Gradient Generator

jordan_terry — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 17:54:49 +0000

Whenever I am designing a website I like to try and fit in as many new Web Technologies as I can, this can be quite difficult when working on client projects as their websites must work in as many browsers as possible, as a lot of their readers won’t be running the most updated version of Google Chrome, or Mozilla Firefox.

However, CSS3 gradients are one of my favorite things to come out of the CSS3 updates. If I could, I would use them everywhere, literally! They save so much time and the page loads much quicker than if an image was being used to represent the gradient, this is more noticeable if the image was being used as the background to a page.

Currently, when I can use the CSS3 gradient, I have to trawl through a number of different Websites to collect together the different versions of the syntax that I need for it to work on different browsers. After getting them all to work properly, I then have to find the Internet Explorer filter that makes gradients work in it. This can often be time consuming. So I have decided to create a tool that allows me to generate gradients that will work in pretty much every browser. Here is the link below:

My Simple CSS3 Gradient generator

At the moment this tool is very simple, it just covers a simple top to bottom gradient, with a start and an end colour, currently it only accepts Hex colours (e.g. #ffffff). Also, I only have one IE filter included in the final code, yet in the past I have used two different filters, but this one seems to work in IE, as far down as IE5. It was tested in the most recent Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview, debugging in different IE5, 7, 8 and 9 and on Browser Stack. As time progresses I will add extra features to the tool, such as the gradient angle, more stop points and a radial gradient. But for now, it suits me fine, hopefully it provides some help to anyone reading too!

Thanks for reading.

Jordan

First Post

jordan_terry — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 17:57:51 +0000

Hello! This is the first post on my new blog. Not going to write much this time around, just creating my first post. On this blog I will post code snippets, tutorials, and anything else that interests myself! All I … Continue reading →