Hello Everyone,

As I was designing the website, I found it hard to find the official first logo in a good format (.png, .psd, or .ai).

The FIRST logo standards PDF was useful, which we have in our website under links/documents. One can search for it too.

This is the quick start guide.

Here is the comprehensive guide.

However, I wanted to find the hex-codes to make sure the image I found online had the right colors for our footer on the site. After sampling the screenshot I took of the PDF, I found the following:

On a dark background: the blue is #007DC5 , the red is #EE1C25 , the white is the standard #FFFFFF , and the gray is # 9E9FA3

On the white or light background: the blue is #0067B3 ,  the red is #EE1C25 , and the black is #231F20.

One can put the FIRST logo on a variety of colour backgrounds as long as the follow the guidelines in the pdf. I do not know if my colors’ hex-codes are official, but I derived them from eye-dropping a screenshot of the PDF.

I hope this post was helpful and please keep true to the guidelines so that we can respect the program that has given so much!

Good Luck in the Competitions & Regards,

Team 1504’s Webmaster.

The controls group has made excellent progress, with everything currently in the plans wired up and on the robot. The electronics basket is working nicely and we’ve now put a hinge on the upper layer of electronics/pneumatics for easy access to all the wiring.

~ Kevin Anderson - Controls Team Leader

Look for more subtle changes to the font and background, and more complete changes to the site’s content.

*Thanks to Vladstudio for their elegant designs which inspired our background! Please download their fun apps or ever-changing live desktop-wallpapers.

We are going to have meetings on more days this week so that we can finish building our robot on time! Meetings will be Monday – Thursday 5:30 pm – 9:00 pm & Saturday 10:00 am – 4:00 pm.

The public is welcome to come see what we are doing!

A tip to all web-designers whether you are on a FIRST team or not: Organise your files in folders and always link properly.

It is professional to link to your content via the server, not via an Internet URL.

Dont do: <img src="http://www.team1504.com/media/team/img/penguin.png" />

Do: <img src="media/img/penguin.png" />

Why?

1. Because sometimes the web browser the user is using may be filtered so they cannot view the content that is linked because the browser searched for that content as if it were on the Internet, not on the server.
2. The majority of a server is private. Unless you put specific permissions on a file, the user usually cannot see it alone. When one accesses content on the web via the Internet, the server that hosts the site detects the user as foreign and displays what is public. Whereas if the src of the content is /media/img/penguin.png, it sees that the site is accessing the content.
3. Having http://…. is just not clean and is therefore inefficient web design.

Of course, no one wants you to download the entire FIRST site, upload it to your server, and link to it, because that would be impossible (unless you had permission and access to the root of their server) and a waste of server space. For external content that is not downloadable, you can link to it via its Internet URL.

For anyone who understands linking to files here is a quick summary of whappened (what + happened).

When the website was handed over to me, the server was organised into folders. These folders were the names of the programs in Adobe CS4 because that is what opened them. So the homepage was in team1504.com/Dreamweaver/html/index.php

I extracted all the contents out of the ‘adobe-name’ folders and moved all our pages out into the root dir (team1504.com/) so that it could function as a website.

All was well until I started changing the the content and realized that all our pages were not linking to the content I extracted, but to those in the Adobe folders.

index.php was looking for the team-logo in Dreamweaver/media/img/team/penguin.png

Not media/img/team/penguin.png

All of the content had was doing this and when I erased the ‘adobe folders’ on my test server, the website died. It could not find the content, template, css, or php.

I had changed all the links so that it searched for the content in the proper location, but Dreamweaver did not like that and kept the old links.

I uploaded an old backup to the real server, but if you see any problems this is why.

Now I have to change the links manually because Dreamweaver doesnt want to. There aren’t only a few links, by the way. I’m making an educated guess when I’m saying that there are 100+ links I have to retype.

Well, I’d better get to work!

There was some confusion & questions on whether or not we were still having a meeting today.

Why? Because this week is finals at Okemos High School. However, build season has its own schedule and we have to work; therefore, we will still be having a meeting. However, if you feel you need to study because a tougher class’s mid-term exam is tomorrow, then we understand. Please contact Mr. Buggia, Mr. Murphy, or me to let us know. You could even comment on this blog. If you come a little early (4:30 - ish), some of the older students, including myself, can help you study.

Good luck on midterms and we hope to see you at 5:30!

This is Team 1504 and Welcome to the first post of the official Team 1504 Blog!