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linktree Topic: Ideas for ramping up knowledge for a n00b
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Author Topic: Ideas for ramping up knowledge for a n00b  (Read 658 times)
crisrogers
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« on: July 03, 2008, 07:26:52 AM »
Preface: I do not, nor would I try to do what our good friends at Shape5 do - it would be silly for me to try.  I also have no aspirations (ever) to create new templates.  Mike, Jonah and others are extremely helpful on the more esoteric items, but:

What's the best way for a n00b (willing, not a developer, able to follow a book, etc) to learn how to manipulate and augment the templates here so they do what we want them to do.  This would include:

1.  Taking a stroll through basics land; enough context to get the job done.
2.  Practical CSS and HTML/XHTML editing - to do 'x', read and perform 'y' action.
3.  (fill in the blanks - I'm asking b/c I'm a n00b)

An appropriate answer would not be "pay someone" or "just hack through it" - too many gray hairs already and time/life is too darn short.   Good books, websites or product ideas for someone to pull this together (clearing throat ;-)  ) are great and other bits I'm unaware of are even better (pretty pictures and motion/video/CBT takes the cake)  I want to be moderately self sufficient; I simply lack the creativity to parse all the bits together and getting frustrated and despondent due to ignorance simply won't do.

Many thanks in advance!
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jonahh
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« Reply #1 on: July 03, 2008, 03:58:47 PM »
Hello,

Well first off the bat I would say to use firefox with the firebug plugin installed (if you don't already do this).  The firebug plugin will allow you to actually "inspect" a webpage.  This means you click the little inspect button and start hovering over items on the website, for example the logo.  You hover over it click and then in the firebug window it will show you want HTML makes this up, DIVs, etc and what CSS corresponds to it (including the CSS file it is being pulled from).

With firebug you can also change entities temporarily, you can delete images, change the height on a div, etc.  So you can see exactly how or what a change can look like.  Pretty much the closest you'll get to visual CSSing.

For some tutorials, etc http://www.w3schools.com/ is a great place to start.

I hope this helps.

Regards,
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-Jonah
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Shape 5 Team
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