ober

For the actual text, black is fine for a text color. But you should spice the other items up... maybe change the color of the headings, or something. Having ALL the text be the same color is pretty drab. As far as the two-column situation, you could definately avoid that. Put your 2 feeds in seperate divs and have a tabbed system along the top of the page with the name of the news providers. When you click on the tabs, use javascript to hide/show the divs. Or you could just reload the page for the second feed... that's up to you. I just think the 2 column look doesn't really work.

The new one looks good. I only have a few very minor complaints. The background color under the main header doesn't really contrast well with the other colors on the site. I'd try matching that up a little better. Just my opinion. The rest of the site looks really good, but I do think you should do something else with the nav. I don't really think the opacity hover thing looks all that great. I think you could get the same effect with just changing the background color on hover (of course you wouldn't get the opacity effect on the little pictures, but it's really not that noticable anyways). The underline is really ugly tho. Good work... I'll be looking forward to a finished product. And you're welcome for the link ;-) You've picked some good ones.

ehh... it's depressing. I like the main header graphic, but even that is very dark. I don't think there is enough contrast between the main background color and the menu background color. That menu should really stand out, and it doesn't. The general styling otherwise is ok, but you really need some more/different colors. It also wouldn't hurt to see more of the content to get a better feel for how it all looks. And despite your W3C banner, your site does not validate.

Ok... next step: style. All the pages are so dead... the font is very basic, it's basically a two-tone color scheme, and you've provided no depth to the site. It's sooooooo dreadfully boring that no one is going to want to read it. How bout some pictures? How bout some seperation... how bout some depth? And I really don't get the need for 2 columns... it's completely unnecessary and looks REALLY bad at lower resolutions or if the window isn't maximized. I'd rather you threw a bunch of headlines at me and let me pick whether I want to read the details. And your menu is very boring as well... the pop-out thing is ok, but the styling is pretty bad. Maybe you're not trying to be "pretty"... but even some small changes would help.

In case you missed the 2 previous comments, the grey pattern is VERY hard on the eyes. That needs to be changed immediately.

Umm... the new background is definately NOT an improvement.

You've read me right on the questions you threw in there. I think it has a lot of potential. Keep working on it.

Alright... a few things: 1) I think the menu could use some work. I think what you're using for a "selected" class should be the default and you should put a bottom border on them all to make them feel more seperated. The highlight class should lighten the background color and possibly change the bar on the left. The "selected" class should then invert the colors completely (little bar colors become the main background and vice versa). Something along those lines would help. But you definately need a seperator bar... without it, I think it all kind of runs together. Same runs true for the columns you have... it's nice that you use different background colors for the content and nav areas, but it still would hurt to throw a quick border between the two and on the outside. 2) Colors, colors, colors. I'll say it again, colors. The header green doesn't appear much elsewhere, especially in the menu. I think it should. And I also think it might look better if it were a shade darker. Then we have your favicon.ico that shows up on favorites lists, etc... that blue doesn't really appear anywhere that I can see. BE CONSISTENT! It also wouldn't hurt to add something to the main background (not the content area, but the outside). There's too much whitespace, IMHO. A gradient or even something off-white (light grey perhaps?) would help to soften the site a bit. 3) I do like the scroller thing you have at the top... it's not over-the-top annoying. However, it probably wouldn't hurt to throw a light grey border around that as well. 4) Fonts. I'm not sure what it is, but I'm not crazy about the main font you're using. It's not as clean as some fonts are and it gives the whole site a bit of a messy look, IMO. You may consider changing it to Arial or something just for kicks to see how it looks in comparison. 5) The concept: I'm not crazy about it, but it is sort of growing on me the more and more I use the site. It's definately not a typical forum setup, and I can't decide whether that's a bad thing or a good thing. What I think it may turn into is more of a comment system than a thread-response type system. I don't really see the migration of news-article + normal thread talk going on in a layout like that. It's almost unnatural. nitpicky: link to newest member in "stuff" area on main page is unreadable. search engine submission of nothing doesn't really do anything... it just seems to return me to the page I was on. There should be some kind of warning of incorrect usage. And if I put in some PHP code to the search engine, it kinda screws up the input box... you might want to check for <?php and ?> and scrap any results if you see em.

I didn't read everything, but I just thought I'd comment on the blue design like everyone else... it looks fantastic. Your layouts appear to be pretty solid, even with the other style sheets, but I personally don't like your method of style-sheet switching. You should really be able to accomplish that using sessions instead of passing the style selection through each link. Just a suggestion.

The idea seems pretty solid, however, implementation is not your strong point at the moment. I like the header image idea, but I think it could use some work. The header font doesn't really match anything else on the site, and the color seems to be just plucked out of the sky. You should really consider using a color theme generator to find some colors that match a little better. You'll find a few in the first thread in this board. Secondly, reading on that color is somewhat annoying. I think you'll find that 90% of the people on the web would rather read with a white background, or maybe a very soft grey. I'm also not crazy about your layouts... they're very smushed together and your main content could definately use some left and right padding. It probably also wouldn't hurt to add some more borders and give the different areas some definition. I would have validated your efforts, but your domain seems to be some sort of redirect which prevents me from even trying.

I work for a large international company, so I build websites to share our internal data. We run detailed tests on the products we build and that data has to be compared to the data run in our 3 other labs world-wide. So I take the data, put it in report format and build graphs off of that data. Some of my databases require user authentication, some do not. All of them require database interaction and some pretty hefty math. While I think the web is the future for data interaction, I don't think it can do it all. While some of my graphs are pretty impressive, it takes time to build them even on a LAN (4-5 seconds, sometimes a little more depending on complexity). So we're still developing a variety of system based programming tools that can do more intensive analysis. The web has it's place, but so do a lot of other tools. I know a lot of people talk about how web 2.0 could transform the way we compute, but I don't think we'll EVER go 100% in that direction.

And I must say that I'm impressed with your work for only being 18. I've always said there are some truly talented female programmers out there (I went to college with a few), and you've just proven my point again.

Wow Gaia... I was borderline on your for a while, but had pigeon-holed you to be a male. Go figure.

I'm not sure what it looked like before... but something tells me this isn't your design... just some slight (if any?) modifications of IVP?

[a href=\"http://www.joystiq.com/entry/1234000340065758/\" target=\"_blank\"]http://www.joystiq.com/entry/1234000340065758/[/a] Probably not the most reliable source, but I've heard this more than just there. Apparently the PS3 is so hard to write games for and has so many design flaws that the game makers claimed they would go bankrupt writing games for it. Sounds a little messed up to me, but I doubt you'll see PS3s before 2K7.

I hope you can wait... they screwed up the first design so bad that they fired the entire design team and are starting over from scratch.

For anyone interested in some light reading... here's some links I found today: [a href=\"http://dhtmlnirvana.com/ajax/ajax_tutorial/\" target=\"_blank\"]http://dhtmlnirvana.com/ajax/ajax_tutorial/[/a] [a href=\"http://rajshekhar.net/blog/archives/85-Rasmus-30-second-AJAX-Tutorial.html\" target=\"_blank\"]http://rajshekhar.net/blog/archives/85-Ras...X-Tutorial.html[/a] [a href=\"http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/AJAX:Getting_Started\" target=\"_blank\"]http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/AJAX:Getting_Started[/a] [a href=\"http://www.sitepoint.com/article/remote-scripting-ajax\" target=\"_blank\"]http://www.sitepoint.com/article/remote-scripting-ajax[/a] [a href=\"http://ajaxpatterns.org/Ajax_Examples\" target=\"_blank\"]http://ajaxpatterns.org/Ajax_Examples[/a] [a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX\" target=\"_blank\"]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX[/a] [a href=\"http://www.developerfusion.co.uk/show/4704/\" target=\"_blank\"]http://www.developerfusion.co.uk/show/4704/[/a] [a href=\"http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2EE/AJAX/\" target=\"_blank\"]http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2EE/AJAX/[/a] [a href=\"http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/06/09/rails_ajax.html\" target=\"_blank\"]http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/06...rails_ajax.html[/a] [a href=\"http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php\" target=\"_blank\"]http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/e...ives/000385.php[/a]

They were destroyed with the forums upgrade. The admins are trying to get them restored.

Gast, just a note about those sites: The phpbuilder tutorial is excellent and very straight-forward, but they use some pretty sloppy javascript that will leave you without a http object if people are spoofing their browser type. The code for creating the http object should be taken from the webpasties site.

I don't know about you, but I'm already doing a bunch of research and putting it in my applications.

Obviously, I don't. ;-)

Nope... it means making javascript calls using XMLHTTPRequest to a back-end PHP app (or whatever your backend application may be written in). It literally fetches new info from the server and brings it back to the page without reloading. Have a go at this: http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/kassemi20050613.php3

Well, seeing as how the site doesn't even have a layout as of right now, I think I'll wait until I have somewhere to post stuff before I start writing tuts. EDIT: Now I'm going to have to write a PHP class to do all my processing. I guess I could download one, but what would be the fun in that?

It would be kickass if you used AJAX for displaying the calendar information ;-) This comment could be stemming from the fact that I just built my first AJAX app and i'm kinda high on the possiblities now.

Ok, this stuff is awesome.... when I do start writing tutorials and answering questions?