Free sheet music and music lessons for street musicians
Help build a navigation bar for the Songbook website (Looking for help with PHP , Cascading Style Sheets and Macromedia Flash)
I plan on spending the summer going through all of the recordings and transcriptions I've made this last year and organizing them into a collection of online songbooks. But before I can get to any of that work, I need to design a user interface that will allow people to view each page of the songbook online.
My main project right now is to come up with a simple graphical user interface that will allow people to cycle through each songbook page by page, print out the sheet music and download the MP3's, so that they can build their own customized songbooks and play-along CD's.
My vision for the user interface is simple - to build a navigation bar that will sit in a frame at the top of the screen which will provide a constistent set of navigation buttons that will allow the user to flip through each page of the songbook, and which would allow quick access to a table of contents and to other important pages. The idea is to treat this navigation bar like a telivision remote control, and restrict all navigation commands to this bar, so as to keep each page of the songbook as simple and uncluttered as possible.
Last week I tried making a mock-up of this idea using Macromedia Flash. I started building an online version of the Freeskool Songbook I am building for my friend Jamie Lynn, and I tried building a navigation bar for the songbook using Macromedia Flash.
This week, I am abandoning the idea Macromedia Flash and trying to accomplish the same goal in a much simpler fashion using a mixture of PHP and Cascading Style Sheets to build a persistent navigation bar that sits in a frame at the top of the screen.
Today I managed to create a simple PHP script that seems like it will accomplish my goals. But the results are extremely ugly. PHP is designed to deal with data management, and not with interface design. And so now I am desperatley looking for advice on how to use Cascading Style Sheets in conjunction with PHP in order to build a functional, user-friendly interface for the songbook.
Also, once I get a PHP version working, I want to go back to the original plan of making a navigation bar in Macromedia Flash. My eventual goal is to build a version of the songbook website that can be burned to a data CD and mailed to people and copied onto people's hard drives so that they can view all the pages for the website locally. And so since I cannot do this with PHP, I need to figure out how to do it using Macromedia Flash. It seems to be a straightforward task. But once I tried doing it, I discovered that the actionscript command getURL(url,target) works fine when run on a web server, but doesn't work so well when trying to load local files.
And so these are the little annoying problems that I need to solve before I can really continue work building the online freeskool songbooks. Most of the tech problems I am struggling with could be solved in five minutes by someone who really knew what they were doing. And so I appreciate everyone who's shared their expertise with me. I am especially grateful to Stan and Jay at spaz.org for all of the help they have given me in building a new website for this project.
I really am pretty incompetent as a web developer. But I am a persistent student, and my hope is to be able to at least get good enough at web programming to be able to make functional mock-ups of my ideas so that I can have better luck recruiting the help I need.
My main project right now is to come up with a simple graphical user interface that will allow people to cycle through each songbook page by page, print out the sheet music and download the MP3's, so that they can build their own customized songbooks and play-along CD's.
My vision for the user interface is simple - to build a navigation bar that will sit in a frame at the top of the screen which will provide a constistent set of navigation buttons that will allow the user to flip through each page of the songbook, and which would allow quick access to a table of contents and to other important pages. The idea is to treat this navigation bar like a telivision remote control, and restrict all navigation commands to this bar, so as to keep each page of the songbook as simple and uncluttered as possible.
Last week I tried making a mock-up of this idea using Macromedia Flash. I started building an online version of the Freeskool Songbook I am building for my friend Jamie Lynn, and I tried building a navigation bar for the songbook using Macromedia Flash.
This week, I am abandoning the idea Macromedia Flash and trying to accomplish the same goal in a much simpler fashion using a mixture of PHP and Cascading Style Sheets to build a persistent navigation bar that sits in a frame at the top of the screen.
Today I managed to create a simple PHP script that seems like it will accomplish my goals. But the results are extremely ugly. PHP is designed to deal with data management, and not with interface design. And so now I am desperatley looking for advice on how to use Cascading Style Sheets in conjunction with PHP in order to build a functional, user-friendly interface for the songbook.
Also, once I get a PHP version working, I want to go back to the original plan of making a navigation bar in Macromedia Flash. My eventual goal is to build a version of the songbook website that can be burned to a data CD and mailed to people and copied onto people's hard drives so that they can view all the pages for the website locally. And so since I cannot do this with PHP, I need to figure out how to do it using Macromedia Flash. It seems to be a straightforward task. But once I tried doing it, I discovered that the actionscript command getURL(url,target) works fine when run on a web server, but doesn't work so well when trying to load local files.
And so these are the little annoying problems that I need to solve before I can really continue work building the online freeskool songbooks. Most of the tech problems I am struggling with could be solved in five minutes by someone who really knew what they were doing. And so I appreciate everyone who's shared their expertise with me. I am especially grateful to Stan and Jay at spaz.org for all of the help they have given me in building a new website for this project.
I really am pretty incompetent as a web developer. But I am a persistent student, and my hope is to be able to at least get good enough at web programming to be able to make functional mock-ups of my ideas so that I can have better luck recruiting the help I need.
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