SHout-For the Shearites Out There!

The Sheares Hall portal "SHout" is for the Shearites to be updated with the hall activities and to know more about the upcoming events. It is managed by Sheares Hall Publications and is under the technical supervision of the Sheares Hall IT team. 


As the Design IC of the IT Team 09/10 I was given the task of revamping SHout. This was my first experience with Content Management Systems. The website is built with Joomla. 


For those hearing it for the first time: "Joomla!" is an open source content management system platform for publishing content on the World Wide Web and intranets as well as a Model–view–controller (MVC) Web application framework. It is written in PHP, stores data in MySQL and includes features such as page caching, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, search, and support for language internationalization. 


The entire project was a fun and learning experience. Though I did not get paid for it but the appreciation I received for my work is truly satisfactory. I feel proud to have contributed to my hall with this web portal. Take a look here:

Sheares Rocks!

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Cadeau de Nature - A Nature's Gift

Sheares Hall Photography Competition 09/10 is open. Every year Sheares Hall Photocomm holds this competition for the shearites to appreciate their photography skills. There is a theme every year and this year's theme is "Cadeau de nature - a nature's gift".

The webiste for the competition is my first "officially" launched website. I learned a lot of PHP and dealt with MySQL for this purpose. Here is the link.

View

Forgot to mention this was the main reason why i had to prepone my tickets and be back to hall 12 days in advance. After seeing the website up and running I realized I made the right decision. (A great leaning experience). Well people have told me I am workaholic.. if thats so.. so be it!

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Blogger Template- Working with CSS

I recently found time to expand my knowledge on web-designing by exploring in detail CSS-Cascading Style Sheets. For those of you who hear it for the first time, my friend wikipedia describes it: "Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation (that is, the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL."

I had the idea of its syntax and working but never did i actually put my skills to practise. So I decided to start with something simple but something that would be useful and not a waste of time. Thus, I decided to create a blogger template.

Designing a blogger template from scratch would have taken ages.. so i decided to start with a pre-designed template and modify it with my styles and classes to give it the look i wanted. What came up as a result was this template:

View Demo | Download

This template incorporates shades of black, white and blue.. includes a favicon like the one for this blog, a navigation bar and several other customizable features. To be honest i think the blog banner is a bit too simple and can be futher improved. Since I don't have enough time now.. maybe I will update it in future.

You can download this template and use it for your own blog. Just visit the demo blog above and find out the details. Feel free to give your suggestions!

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