Getting the most out of your CSS Journals Seven

Sorry for the long delay between part six and part seven everyone. The Christmas season was one of laziness and fun. Hope your Christmas and New Years was well. Now on we press, before we get mixed up on topics about what mum did to Santa

Favourite your journal!

That's right! For those who don't know, or haven't been to my userpage yet, you can now (with some limitations), Favourite people's journals! With help from dancewiththesky, the original idea being by BoffinBrain, and coded by myself, you can now use CSS, GD and PHP to fut a fave-counter on your userpage! Each person who reads your journal can click on the button and fave the news article, and the counter will go up. Keep in mind that this does NOT add the journal to your favourites, nor can someone see who has faved the journal (due to technical limitations). But this is a concept that is quickly expanding.

To claim your own, check out Favebox v1 and follow the really easy instructions! Subscribers only sorry ;D

Two Column Journals

This code was posted by the ever inventive BeyondTheHorizon and shows you how to create a two-column journal layout using some basic CSS.

Read the article here: Ever wanted a 2 columned journal?

And make sure to thank BeyondTheHorizon for the code!

Highlighting text

ive been wondering how to make say an indevidual line in the main section of the journal have a different colour backround/text .. maybe highlighting a section of text would be a better discription.. by RAINBIRD

This is something that could be handy for everyone, and easy to do too! Here's the code you need:

CSS:

.highlighted {
background-color:#FFFF00;
}

HTML:

This is the text to highlight!

And now your text will be highlighted in yellow! Use sparingly please, as too much of this effect can cheapen your journal

General design tips

When designing a journal, keep some design tips in mind:

• For your backgrounds, pick shades of one colour. Shades of dark red, greys and greens work well
• For text, a good contrasting colour works well. Black on white, white on black, light red on dark red. Contrast is good
• Avoid obvious backgrounds. Tone them down if they're to be used in your journal
• Don't jam up your journal with flashing text, too many animated pictures and gadgets. If it annoys you, it will annoy most others

This applies to all design works.

CSS tutorials

Instead of featuring journals here this week, I'll point you to some very useful CSS tutorials, to give those who don't know CSS that well, a good start.

<a href="nyssajbrown.net/blog/projects/…Nyssa's CSS dA Rundown - Very useful for dA CSS
W3School's CSS tutorial - Great for an easy-to-read CSS overview
W3School's PHP tutorial - Good tutorial for PHP, which is a necessity for GD, which makes Favebox possible
PHPFreak's GD tutorial - Perfect for learning GD, which lets you use PHP scripts on dA (with limitations)


And that's it for this week. Sorry for the delays, the next one should be ready in 2 weeks time like always. Happy 2007 and remember to note suggestions to Grayda