AccessDataForce.com – Page 18 – Web Design & Development

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The Symbol of Cutting-Edge Computing

Post author By Michael H
Post date September 24, 2016

Top image of me sitting in front of my 3 monitors for my main PCs (at home taken by my chromebook). I also have a couple kindle fires and a great Chromebook 15″ that I got refurbed for $150! Wonderful laptop & no maintenance. I work on lots of PCs at work every day doing tech support & network administrivia.

It’s difficult for those of my generation — people who grew up with the beige PC box as a cultish object of desire and the symbol of cutting-edge computing — to understand just how divorced the modern world and population have become from the desktop PC. The desktop today is akin to what mainframes were in the past: an imposing, burring, gargantuan construction that you only resort to when you really need to get some heavy work done.

from an article on The Verge.

Basket of Tolerance Design

Playing with Google Fonts

Post author By Michael H
Post date August 26, 2016

Looking at different Google fonts to get some depth on the header text Find Out More. Then added a star field background, a constellation image and a horoscope to round out the essay from The Basket of Tolerance by Adi Da.

Basket of Tolerance Design

Colorizing the Table of Contents from The Basket of Tolerance

Post author By Michael H
Post date August 13, 2016

Excerpt from The Table of Contents of The Basket of Tolerance

This week’s mini-project was to colorize the Table of Contents from The Basket of Tolerance. Using CSS3 gradients with 50% transparency, it was pretty simple to add gradient backgrounds to document elements. And a little code to go along with the page, since it’s being produced from the database. I’m going to have to deal with outline formatting at some point…

tech

Programming with Crouton (Linux) on the Chromebook

Post author By Michael H
Post date July 31, 2016

Snapshot of linux (xfce) running on a Chromebook

Snapshot of linux (xfce) running on my Chromebook

I’m really enjoying working on my new (refurbed) 15″ chromebook I got from Acer for just $150. First thing I did was add the developer version of linux using the Crouton setup.

Google did an excellent job designing a very lightweight OS–and I am running a linux virtual OS with it, and it works fine for my current learning of laravel (a php framework on steroids) and web design.

Another little project: I also just loaded the latest version of linux (16.04, xfce) on an old dual-core system, and it runs using only 300 megs of ram on a base system. I put in an SSD disk to boot off, and it’s ready to run in about 5 seconds–and runs really smooth! SSDs are ideal to boot off, and then you just add an extra hard drive for additional storage look these up.

Basket of Tolerance

The Seven Stages of Life (mobile friendly) Page, which started off as a Bootstrap Experiment

Post author By Michael H
Post date July 14, 2016

I’ve been working on making a bootstrap carousel… which has been morphing into a page showing off Adi Da’s Seven Stages of Life.

First I got a bootstrap carousel working with bootstrap and jquery. Good. Then I started working with headers and captions in the carousel, and was dissatified with the legibility of the text, so eventually I just decided to put text below and remove all the text from the carousel itself.

I have beautiful artwork to work from, adapting it to a mobile format–think chunks instead of big blobs. So instead of a long long landscape image with embedded text, I chunked it down to the basic image, then put the text into a flexible list with a nice css3 gradient using colors from the image. That way the page can be viewed from a smartphone (landscape, 420 pixels) all the way up to a desktop useful content.