lewro’s blog - 2.1 - web designer beginner

Life has been extremely busy during the last couple of weeks. So I have decided to check if I am on the way to my targets. As I wrote at the beginning of the year I have specified 8 targets for this year so lets see how am I doing.

Learn PHP

I sign up for PHP Course in City University as I wrote before and it has been perfect experience so far. I have got about 7 lessons behind me but I have already realized how much I could do once I learn only the basic stuff. The course is very interesting and I enjoy it a lot. I am already able to create simple web application with user registrations, querying and updating data from the database. Server side validation. Working with functions etc. I have decided to take the advance class once this one is finished. When I finish my new blog I am going to be building my first PHP application. It will be project management tool where I will organize all my projects, including related tasks and so on. It is going to be very clean, “CODA type” interface.

French language.

I have been listening to my French audio podcast 3 times a week. I have managed to go true 3 lessons only but I am quite happy with that. Slowly, slowly. There is no rush. This task is not that important as the other one. The most important thing is that I have not stopped.

New design for my blog

I have spent quite some time on this task. I have got all the templates designed in the Photoshop and I have already build 2 templates. There are about 5 more to go. This is quite time consuming but I hope I will get this done very soon.

Part time projects

I have had a time to start a new part-time project and I still have one open. I will probably reconsider this task and might just finished the open one. If there is a time at the end of the year I might take one more but I am not sure because the time is very tight.

Sport

I am doing just fine on this one. The gym is going well during mornings but I should start running at least 2 times a week because I promised to take part in half marathon in February 2009. The weather was nice couple of weekends so we went to Hyde Park roller blading several times. I am sure we will spent lots of time there this year.

Holidays

We still have not decided where are we going to but we are considering nice countries with sea like Croatia, Portugal, Italy. It might be a last minute shot.

Organic garden

This task is not going well at all. I have just recently moved to different house and It looks like we are going to be moving again soon. So this all depends on the new house. If there is a place for my plants I will definitely continue with this project. So far it has been put on hold.

Photography

I have made couple of “OK” pictures in our small weekend holiday in Torquay and I hope I will do some really good one during the summer holiday. If I do not forget to charge my camera battery like last time I might shoot some photos in the London as well :o).

So thats about it. It is going pretty well and there is still half year in front of us to reach all the targets. Wish me luck and I hope after all this moving and school extra busy times I can post more articles about CSS, HTML, JS and PHP.

I have discover one really cool CSS technique I want to share with you. It is about changing 2 background images at the same time on hover. It is very impressive, looks like java-script but no, pure CSS, just need to find time to write about it.