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Just had to do this on another site, so thought I may as well post on how I did it! Neat

I haven’t posted anything on this blog in a very long time with anything regarding my Mini, but I think that should change - after all this blog is a blog about things I like!

So, for those of you who don’t know, I own a 1983 Mini City E,  I’ve owned her for about 3 years and her name is… “The Mig”. However, almost 2 of those years has been spent in my garage in a state of re-build. She was a 998cc rally replica before I stripped her to bare shell and began the rebuild process. I’m converting her into a screaming race replica, Mini Miglia look-a-like which should be pretty nippy!

Here’s what she looks like at the moment…

For now though, I’m concentrating on getting her back on the road with a standard-ish 1275cc 8 valve A+ Mini engine, but with the brakes, suspension & general rest-of-car to near race-spec.

Over this weekend I’ve just done the job of removing my rear valance. I’ve been to a lot of Mini Miglia race meetings and I have a lot of photos of Mini Mig’s, and I notice almost all of them have their rear valance removed - perhaps for even less weight, or perhaps because the rear valance acts as a giant air-scoop which would slow down the car. Regardless of the reasons, mine is now gone! … But I did find a pretty large hole of rust after removing it. Bad times!

Not to worry too much - I have my own Mig welder and I’ve been saying to myself for months now that I will learn how to weld. I have metal, gas and a mask. And I have a hole to weld… watch this space!

Over the past month or so my girlfriend has been talking to me and asking advice about website design, since she’s after progressing her career in the future to become some sort of digital designer or web designer. Pretty neat, eh

Anyway, after talking to one of the designers at my job (I’m not officially a designer, but rather a web developer you see. Oo-er), he asked would she be learning HTML and/or CSS as well. I asked her and she wasn’t too keen on it, but then after looking through numerous job adverts it become apparent that most, if not all, require a website designer to have such skills.

So, then become the task of teaching her the basis of HTML & CSS, which was actually quite fun. She’s picking it up really well, I think, and I’m supprised how quickly she’s picking it up.

I realised, however, there is just so many things to teach when starting out from fresh. One of the things was to use ASCII characters in replacement to just hitting [shift] and a special-character on the keyboard. I explained that using ASCII characters is a safer bet, but most importantly, helps in making the site valid.

Then I thought I would blog about it, posting up here the most common ASCII characters I use, and their code…

«  =  «  =  left double angle quotes
»  =  »  =  right double angle quotes
©  =  ©  =  copyright sign
£  =  £  =  pound sign
&  =  &  =  ampersand

Can’t really think of any others I use regularly…? Thought it might help someone anyway, maybe - at least instead of looking through those giant-sized horrible ASCII tables!