Here is a blank two column (Right) CSS template which you can use to get you started on building a website. All of the main divs have been styled and the layout is avaliable for you to simply paste into your favorite code editor and begin designing it to your liking. You'll find the full source for the blank CSS template at the bottom of the page. However please read the whole page instead of skipping to the source code, there's a couple of statements about certain CSS attributes you might want to change

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Today James' Blog experienced some downtime today, about 12 hours worth, which is quite alot, but strangely this was not because of a server going down. No it was a strange incident involving one of the key systems that powers WordPress (The engine that runs James' Blog) and that is MySQL. If you had visited the site today then you would of either got just a forever loading page or if you had viewed the site after a few hours you would of got the temp page I set up, which redirected all links to the temp page. Because the website wasn't offline just a key system wasn't functioning correctly which like I said was MySQL, it handles all of the databases connections and because access to the database couldn't be established nothing was able to be displayed.

My host got in touch with me after having communication difficulties of there own and basically this was the problem:

"There was first an issue with MySQL which i corrected, but then outbound requests would not resolve hostnames. This highlighted an issue with DNS, which I have now resolved. Two, probably unrelated issues happening consecutively..."

In basic terms the service MySQL could not process connections correctly and the DNS (Which is mainly the domain name which is james-blogs.com) had difficultly to. Probably just bad timing like Dan (The Tech support rep said in the statement above) but everything is fixed now and also my host have put in some new measures to stop this from happening ever again which is good! But to be fair since moving to LRC-Hosting 10 months ago, this has been the only downtime besides when they moved there network around (Which was planned)

Anyway James' Blog is back online again, sorry for the downtime and now I shall reply to some of your comments that people have been leaving on articles and tutorials.

Every tutorial I've done on navigation bars or menu's has been the normal one level navigation bar, but when you build a website you may feel the need to create sub categories, for example my blog houses various tutorials which are stored in categories, I have a drop down navigation bar on the main link, which is tutorials which then displays sub catergories and then the specific catergory e.g. Tutorials > XHTML > Basics in that example there are three levels. You can create navigation bar levels using lists, it's the easiest way to create a drop down menu but for styling it can get a bit tricky, but in this tutorial Im going to show you how to form a drop down navigation menu and then style it with CSS

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I apologize for the alliteration, but that's what I've been doing for the past couple of days. I've been planning a couple of tweaks to my one and only WordPress theme for a while, but have only got round to it recently, this is due to me being on holiday and before the exams I took last month. But whats good is that the exams are over and while I'd wish I was back in Scotland because that would mean I wouldn't be going back to sixth form tommorow, but im back in England so there we go. Anyway I like to do a what I call blog update post any once in a while to update you on the latest changes that happen behind the scenes so to speak. Read on to get the latest information

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Following my last little article on WordPress plugins I can't live without, it made me remember something I'd done recently to my WordPress installation. If your a WordPress user which runs WordPress on a server rather than a wordpress.com hosted account then you'll understand that each time you install or remove a plugin you have to provide FTP information in order for WordPress to correctly locate the wp-content/plugins directory and get authorization to add or remove a plugin. This while small can become quite tedious, but did you know you can get WordPress to remember the FTP information forever? Which means you won't have to constantly keep typing in your password each time you add or remove a plugin!

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