#table layout

Budget Friendly Halloween Table!

There are so many ways you can get into the Halloween spirit without breaking the bank! Which I'm definitelyy all for.

FOOD:

'Blood bath' - @heinz_uk Tomato soup but you can buy any brand. I bought 3 tins Heinz for a £1.

'Witches Brew' - Watermelon flavoured @drinktango although there are so many spooky mocktails you can make with juices!

Coffin cake - Home made vanilla sponge (recipe below) and I used a Mr Kipling Orange Vanilla Cream Icing which was £2 for a tub. Any generic sponge is fine, just cut into a Coffin shape and decorate as you like.

White chocolate fingers, chocolate balls, Halloween sprinkles, Strawberries, bake your own bread, mozzarella and tomatoes - @aldiuk

Pumpkins - home grown in my Nanas garden.

TABLE DECOR:

Table Cloth, Bird Cage, glass stickers, mini light-up Pumpkin, Bonez man, Spiders Web - @poundstretcher gifted.

Large black Pumpkin - bought previously from @aldispecialbuysuk

Napkins - @coopuk

Chair covers - a local shop called Bargain Buys for a £1 each.

Ghost garland - £1 Bargain Buys.

Spooky straws - previously bought from somewhere, under £2.

Mary Berry's Victoria Cake

INGREDIENTS -

•4 free-range eggs

•225g/8oz caster sugar, plus a little extra for dusting the finished cake

•225g/8oz self-raising flour

•2 tsp baking powder

•225g/8oz butter at room temperature, plus a little extra to grease the tins.

METHOD -

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/160C Fan/Gas 4. Grease and line two 20cm/8in sandwich tins. Use a piece of baking paper to rub a little butter around the inside of the tins until the sides and base are lightly coated, then line the bottom with a circle of baking paper.

2. Break the eggs into a large mixing bowl, then add the sugar, flour, baking powder and butter. Mix together until well combined.

3. Divide the mixture evenly between the tins: this doesn’t need to be exact, but you can weigh the filled tins if you want to check.

4. Bake the cakes on the middle shelf of the oven for 25 minutes.

5. The cakes are done when they’re golden-brown and coming away from the edge of the tins. Press them gently to check.

6. Cut into a Coffin shape and you can decorate accordingly! 🕸

Used to be Friday, 24th August but currently Saturday, 25th August 12:44 am :

Kiriska: Eh. Honestly I don’t think attendees are likely to notice that “better” artists are stacked towards the front of a room. Juries are subjective, and not everyone is going to agree with them. Maybe there are “better” artists closer to the front, but not everyone is going to think they’re “better.” Don’t be so hard on yourself.

Plenty of attendees are careful and determined to see the whole alley before making decisions, and regardless of layout, they will still do that. Those that have certain artists they specifically want to see will still make a beeline for them.

Sometimes AA room layouts have noticeable bad traffic areas, but this is a separate issue from “everyone I think is better than me is in the front.” Here are some previous thoughts on what to do if you’re just in a bad location.

Though if you’re talking about the con I think you’re talking about (because there aren’t many with a public, ranked, jury list), I don’t think the tables are arranged in jury order at all? Especially since neighbour requests and inline/corner preferences are taken into consideration. 

The word of the day is verticality. AKA, that thing where you figure out how to make everything tall so people see it from across a con floor. 

RESPONSIVE EMAILS (part 2 of 2) - Robust and responsive

Following on from previous post:

THE PROBLEM: The browser bundled with Android 4.4 doesn't allow a responsive technique that has worked on other versions of Android. The TDs won't stack because the doctype declaration is being stripped out, which effectively invalidates media queries in this case.

THINKING IT THROUGH: In the spirit of object oriented thinking, we may want to treat any HTML element like an object, but considering some elements are specialised to behave differently by default, we can encounter issues trying to reliably override properties with CSS.

These tds need to be wrapped in a div (a more generic HTML element) with the display property set to display:inline-block. This will allow them to occupy the next available space. But let's not forget we're dealing with table elements (specialised HTML elements). The table cells will want to behave as such, adhering to columns and rows. This is great for an immutable layout, but we're trying to make it responsive. SO we need to treat each column's content like a tile.

SOLUTION? Nested tables. With each one wrapped in a div with display set to inline-block. Now width should be 100% to fill available space on small screens, and a max-width set to allow side by side on wide screens. Table elements can be set to width of 100% so that they respond to the width of their parent element, and contentment can be centred using inline attributes. So this is responsive design without media queries (you can still include them); makes use of tables for robust layout; but compensates for their immutability with a fully stylable parent DIV.

RESPONSIVE EMAILS (part 1 of 2) - TD stacking Emails are a valuable component of a good communications or engagement strategy. Tables and their associated elements have long been required in eDMs to ensure a robust layout, but the tradeoff is the flexibility of a liquid layout, particularly useful in a world of mobile devices.

Responsive design techniques have been a boon for anyone serving up screen-based layouts and, in the context of emails, the use of media queries to adjust layout for small screens has allowed for the TD stacking technique to handle multiple columns.

Put simply, several table cells (denoted TD for table data) are displayed side by side (in columns), but if the screen (or viewport) is small (like on a mobile phone), the table cells stack (in one column). The best of both worlds, right?

So, you check it in testing platform previews (Litmus, et al) and all views are good - except one! The layout breaks on Android 4.4 (aka KitKat)!! Previous versions of Android are not affected by this, so what gives?!