A very good coding night.

Wow, what a great coding session.
I’ve been continuously frustrated with the look and feel of the web client that goes with CONGO. The client is called “Coconut” (special thanks to Mister Privacy for coming up with that one), and has been slowly expanding into a system that lets you do all the functions that CONGO can do.
The problem? It was UGLY. I mean really ugly. I couldn’t use it for advertising, and even though it ran beautifully in text mode for use at events, it just wasn’t nice to look at.
I even got a poke in the side from a friend who said “Nice product, nice web site, but what’s it look like? There’s nothing for folks to see!”
Well gawrshdurnit she was right. So today and this evening I sat down and learned something that I’ve been avoiding, namely how to set up nice looking webpages using cascading stylesheets. My blog uses them extensively (course, I didn’t -write- my blog), and I’ve edited other folks’ code, so I had an idea what it was like, but it was still a challenge.
All you old HTML geeks. Remember learning all the tricks and tweaks to get a table element to line up right? That is -SO- 90’s now. Go CSS. This stuff rocks.
I worked out a design, built my new stylesheet, and converted all of the Coconut pages over to use them.
Check them out here, here, here, and here.
I actually feel like I can take these and put them on the business site, and NOT die of embarrassment at how ugly they are.
Go me 🙂