In the last article, we looked at some basic ways to customize your profile page on Ning, the software built for making social communities.  Using the built-in options on the appearance page, you can make a design that looks very good indeed.  I have seen some very nice examples created simply with thoughtful color selection.

If you wish to go a bit deeper in customizing your page, however, you’re going to need to do a little bit of CSS editing.  To do so, you’ll want to go into your appearance page (see last article) and click the “advanced” tab.  You’ll see a box there where the CSS is available for you to edit or add to.  Ning allows up to 1000 characters of CSS, and you can do quite a lot with that.  Here’s an example.

One of the things that I do not care for in Ning is how long  a page can get if you have a lot of activity going on.  With all the comments, latest activity, and blog posts, the page can creep way down.  I wanted to restrict those areas of my site to a certain height using CSS.

Before doing anything to a page with CSS, you will want to install firebug, or some tool like it.  Firebug is a plugin for the firefox browser that will make your life a whole lot easier if you have not used it before.  Essentially, it allows you to see everything about a web page, including all the html and css information.  You can use this to easily determine the id names of the divs in a page, and then what css styling is applied to that div.

Using firebug, i was able to determine that the Latest Activity section of my page was contained in a div called “xg_module_body”, then in a div called “xg_module_head”, and had the class name “xg_module_activity”. That sounds complicated, but is actually very easy to discover using firebug. There are a number of good tutorials out there for firebug, and even some youtube videos you should check out.
Once you know the structure of the thing you want to style up, you can start playing with the style options in CSS.

/* Latest Activity */
#xg_module_body,
#xg_module_head h2, .xg_module_activity{
width : 540px;
height : 500px;
overflow : auto;
margin : 3px;
text-align : left;
border:1px ridge #B00C34;
}

The code above simply restricts the width and height properties of the div that my latest activities will appear in. With that done, the browser will by default apply scrollbars to the contents if necessary. The other items are simple enough, a thin border and a bit of margin spacing. There are a whole range of things you can edit in CSS, and there are many good reference books that can show you how.

The result for me was that I could have nice boxes rather than long pages that scroll on forever – a little bit cleaner and so easy to do. You could even copy/paste the css code from above and it would work for you as well – this is the beauty of a framework like Ning.
-t.

Customizing Your Ning Page

Ning is a very popular social networking software that allows anyone to set up their own online community.  We chose it when we wanted to set up the largest cross-faculty community of emmerging digital media talents in Toronto.  To encourage members to show off their creative side, Oddly Studios is sponsoring a contest where entrants can pick up some cash for customizing their personal page up.

This is actually not too hard to do with a little bit of messing around.  I’ll show a few tips in here that you can use to give yourself a really cool personal page on Ning.  If you are a member of MegaTag (or another network) you’ll find these handy.  And you may find they can be used on other social networks as well.

Ning Options

Ning gives you a few options for styling up your page.  The first, and perhaps the simplest, is the Ning Theme.  These themes can be selected right from the settings panel and are very easy to install.  Once signed in to your community, just go to your own profile page, and look for the “manage my page” link right below your avatar picture.  When you click it, you’ll be taken to a page that has an option to customize the appearance of your page.

Once you do that, you will see a very fine array of templates you can use to make your page look quite good.  Furthermore, you can select colors, fonts, text options and even upload your own header and side images.  In reality, what is happening is that you are editing a CSS document that accompanies the ning page.

By default, all ning pages use the css and html of the main page for any member pages, but it does not have to stay that way.  Using the customization options on the  appearance page, you can give the page your own style. 

Many people want to move around the content of the ning page.  Fortunately, it gives us some limited opportunity to do that simply by grabbing the top of a heading and dragging it into a new place.  For the more advanced, this is using jQuery behind the scenes, with a dojo adapter wrapping it for backwards-compatibility.  More on that later.

If you wish to do more than the appearance panel allows you to do, you’re going to have to get a little deeper with the code.  There are several ways you can do this, but editing CSS is probably the most straightforward.  We’ll get into that next article.

Have fun!

-t.

This will be a layman’s review of Windows 7, just a few notes about my experience so far with the new operating system, and is based more around performance than interface.  I just need it to work well.

My installation is the 64 bit version of Windows 7, and this is the first time that I have used a 64 bit operating system on a PC.  One of my big fears was that I would run into a lot of compatiblility problems, but I’m happy to say that has not been the case at all.

The installation was very easy, taking little time to accomplish.  My system is decent, but not blazing – a quad-core Q6600 at 2.4GHZ and and  anVidia 8600GT.  I installed some more ram for the occasion, so now I’m up to 8 gigs of DDR2 800. 

All in all my system runs pretty good!  With the install completed, everything just worked for me.  I went about intalling the CS4 suite, and again, had no trouble.  All the applications I have tried up to now have worked just fine.

High Def Video

I can edit high def now, namely 1080p at 29.97.  But just barely.  I’m working in MTS files, these are what my Canon high def cam-corder records at.  At sufficient light they look incredibly good.  I fired up Premiere and After Effects to have a go at some nonlinear editing.  This always crippled my system previously – and it was fairly crippling still, but the point is I could do it.  Reviewing clips was decent, but when I would drop them on the timeline things would start to get choppy.

Taking a quick look at my system monitoring software, the bottleneck at this point is definitely CPU.  The CS4 suite is interesting in that it is quasi-64 bit.  In other words, some things are 64 bit, but others are split up among cores and handled as 32 bit processes.  So while I have a crap-load of RAM now, the CPU is still going to complain at those high resolutions.  There is probably not much that can be done about it, other than upgrade to an i7.

During rendering, Adobe Media Encoder managed to suck 98 percent CPU usage out of my quad, and over half the ram was being used up.  I consider that not a bad thing as it means the renders are being accomplished faster.

Probably the largest annoyance I have up to now is that my Cintiq 21UX does not seem to display properly.  It shows scanlines that indicate it is displaying in analog rather than digital mode.  This is a known problem.  As I have the latest drivers from nVidia for my card, it would seem that there is little that can be done to fix it other than wait for new drivers.  The tablet is usable, but those lines can get annoying and tire out the eyes.

The writing is definitely on the wall for this system.  Windows 7 rocks and is a great operating system for hooking up more raw power.  The install is easy and network compatibility was not an issue – it found all the XP systems on the network right away, something that took forever in Vista.

I give Windows 7 a thumbs-up so far!

I can’t help taking a little dig at that dreadful windows 7 launch party video that went out.  (I mean what were they thinking?)

That said, I’m right now looking at a very lovely windows 7 install screen, and listening to my main computer spin the drives.  I’m excited for Windows 7 in a manner unlike any other windows installation I have done.

For one thing, this will be the first time I’m moving up to 64 bit operating systems.  Even with Vista, I installed the 32 bit version (for all of two weeks).  Don’t get me wrong, there were things I loved about Vista, but I simply didn’t have time to wait for a couple of service packs to come out – business waits for nobody.

However the reviews I’ve been hearing regarding Windows 7 have been very solid indeed, enough to make me take the leap and spend the cash.  I won’t lie, recent announcements by adobe have had something to do with it, namely that future versions of After Effects and Premiere will be 64 bit only.  Makes sense to me, and it shows that the writing is on the wall.  Even right now, I’ve been hearing so much about the improved performance of CS4, and have noted it even on systems in the shop that were running windows xp 64 bit.

By now this post will have attracted the mac fanboys who will no doubt have a long list of reasons why osx is superior and has had these problems beat for a long time, etc.  Fine.  My position has always been that it is not about being better or worse, it is about being most appropriate.  I built Oddly’s first round of computer by hand, assembling them on my own and stringing together deals to help give us what we needed while keeping the costs low.  Those computers have been modded multiple times since then, but they are still running for us.  I really could not have done all that with a mac.  That said, we do have mac equipment now (I’m typing on it at this moment) and I like it just fine.  Smart shops these days can not be without several operating systems and configurations.  I suspect in the future it will all be a moot point as all operating systems combine in one big VMWare soup.  That will be some hot-pot!

So as of today, I’m doing Windows 7, and enjoying the install with a cold beer.  Much deserved after spending all day backing up my files.

-tim.